Neil Black - Institute Director
Transcript of Speech
We’ve themed the night to fit in with TAFE NSW Business Forum Week. The themes are all about being business-like, getting down to business, meaning business and being busy with excellent achievement. The students here tonight have displayed a common ‘let’s get on with it’ focus, and this is the feeling and energy that we at the North Coast Institute are building on.
We’re particularly looking to engage even more with business and industry, and it is with that spirit that I’m happy to see a wide range of industry representation here tonight.
We are entering an interesting era in post-secondary education and training. There is clear evidence that people from wide-spread walks of life are now realising something we’ve known for a while.
That is, that it’s not a matter of TAFE or Uni or a job for the school leaver. There are multiple pathways open, with greater flexibility and achievability than ever before.
From feedback received from the very recent round of Careers Days, Expos and so on held from one end of our 800 kilometre Institute to the other, people are looking at their future with career goals in mind, rather than specific educational institutions.
This, I think, is an enormously healthy mindset.
Let me quote the University of Tasmania vice-chancellor Daryl Le Grew, who observed earlier in the year that school leavers should be encouraged to keep their options open and not consider education as a matter of "TAFE v uni". Professor Le Grew said that we need a matrix of opportunities for kids coming out of school.
"We should want to keep the opportunity for people to cross between sectors in their training and education. It doesn't matter whether they start at university and then move to develop their hands-on skills or start in a trade and discover later that they want to hone their business skills.
He said tradespeople, too, were competing in an international market and that it was in the interests of the nation to have workers multi-skilled: "We want workers who can not only build that car but also redesign it."
I can only agree.
I believe that the fact that school leavers, university vice-chancellors (both in Tasmania and here in this room), Institute Directors…even, I’m told, parents in China…are articulating the need to approach higher and vocational education with this new paradigm of thinking shows that we here on the North Coast are on the right track.
Here we have in this room people from the school sector, from the university sector, from industry, local government and business, who are actively working together to enable this paradigm to become a reality.
And we have students who are already living in that paradigm.
We have students who have come from the workforce to begin, or re-start their academic journey. We have students with both TAFE Diplomas and University degrees studying for a qualification in a totally different discipline. We have a student, a year out of school, who has excelled in a TVET course at school and has gone on to university…in a totally different career path. We have single mothers who have never studied past school. We have a recent immigrant who has not been part of our education system at all, and has already picked up a state training award.
These extraordinary stories - and more - will be unfolded further tonight and in the weeks to come as our high-achieving students receive the attention and publicity they richly deserve.
But it’s extremely important to realise that for every story we hear about tonight, there are scores of other stories, equally extraordinary, of students who have made a substantial difference to their lives by grasping the opportunities that flexible and adaptable post-secondary education offers.
All are achievements that are equally worthy of honouring.
I’d just like to finish with a request to you and your fellow students, if you are continuing your study with the North Coast Institute.
Tell us what we’re doing well and what we can do to improve.
Equally, if you’re now working, tell any of your friends and family who are at TAFE to do the same – and let us know from the point-of-view of your workplace how we’re doing.
And please let us know what these awards mean to you as a student. We see them as vital recognition of excellence throughout our Institute.
Anecdotally, we’ve heard that it’s ‘great for the resume’ but we’d like to learn more. And if any of the employers here tonight would like to tell us what these awards mean to them, I’d love to hear it!
So to our high-achieving students, well done!
You’ve set a new benchmark in academic excellence, in campus and class participation, in community involvement and in pure, good old “let’s get down to business.”
As always, it inspires me to do my job better, and to motivate us all at the North Coast Institute to identify similar benchmarks, meet them…then exceed them.
