Vocational training faces fleecing and cuts


Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Broadcast: 07/08/2012

Reporter: Caro Meldrum-Hanna

Trade schools around Australia are having the prospect of funding cuts exacerbated by claims that unscrupulous companies are misusing training incentives.


LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: If you were shocked by stories of private colleges offering cut-price diplomas to international students, wait for this. Tonight we reveal allegations that young Australians are being exploited by a new wave of training companies. 7.30 has been investigating the booming industry of private apprenticeship training. Companies offer cheap and speedy qualifications to young trainees for a price. There are now more than 5,000 of these providers across Australia funded by both Federal and state governments. It's a multimillion dollar market, but is the system being scammed? Caro Meldrum-Hanna reports.

CARO MELDRUM-HANNA, REPORTER: There's a crisis in Australia's vocational education system. Traditional trade schools, TAFEs are being forced to close their doors.

MICHAEL CALLAHAN, NORTHERN MELBOURNE TAFE: Millions, absolutely millions and millions of dollars will have been wasted on no training effectively. A lot of people just fleecing the system.

CARO MELDRUM-HANNA: In Victoria, TAFE administrators are protesting against crippling government funding cuts and a new wave of unbeatable competition. The drama began four years ago, when in 2008 the Victorian Government decided to deregulate vocational training.

DAVE NOONAN, CFMEU: You can't simply put these things out in the marketplace and expect unscrupulous operators not to take advantage of them.

MICHAEL CALLAHAN: The problem is that it's a free-for-all. Anybody can open up a private RTO. The Government is not adjudicating appropriately over the system, and the auditing system is simply a paper trail, and it's really easy to fabricate a paper trail.

CARO MELDRUM-HANNA: Alright, so what have we got here?

MARK SOUTHALL, BUILDER: This is just what they present to you.

CARO MELDRUM-HANNA (to Mark Southall): It looks good from the cover, it look like there's going to be things happening. Bricklaying, painting, decorating, roof-tiling...

In August 2011, employer Mark Southall signed up his apprentice, Jay Lamnek, with Bendigo-based private training company Skill Training Victoria.

JAY LAMNEK, APPRENTICE: Mark sort of thought with this on-site thing sounds if I don't need to be at TAFE so much, and he can get me here a bit more, and I can get my work done at work, it sounded good, it sounded really quite good.

CARO MELDRUM-HANNA: Like all apprentices signed up with Skill Training Victoria, Lamnek was supposed to be assigned a trainer who was meant to regularly visit him on-site, supervise his progress and train him as required. Lamnek says no training was provided by Skill Training Victoria on-site. Instead he says the visits consisted of a series of staged photo shoots which would give the appearance of on-site training.

JAY LAMNEK: After he got in the shot of E-sheet and me nailing it in, it was kind of like, "OK, what else can I get here?" So I jumped down, he said, "You want to jump down from there and can you just try and move some of these blocks from that pile to that pile". And it would be like, we didn't need to move those blocks or anything like that, we didn't need to, it was just for the shot.

CARO MELDRUM-HANNA: After the photo shoot, Lamnek and his employer were asked to sign forms saying that modules of training had been completed on-site. Southall says he was shocked by what he was being asked to do for his apprentice.

MARK SOUTHALL: It was going to teach him how to be deceitful and lie and not be honest to us, and I think that was a big part when I put Jay on - I said, "You be straight with me I'll be straight with you". But having people coming around and stage things I don't think that's being direct or honest.

CARO MELDRUM-HANNA: In 2011, Skill Training Victoria had more than 2,000 apprentices enrolled on its books, representing hundreds of thousands of dollars, making it the top non-TAFE training provider in Victoria.

Angela Youens said her first apprenticeship year with Skilled Training Victoria was a disaster.

ANGELA YOUENS, APPRENTICE: They'd rock up and they'd give us a call and say, "Look, we're in the car park", and you'd go down and they'd have their paperwork with the stack of Xs next to it and you'd sign. They'd say, "Sign here, sign here, sign here, sign here."

CARO MELDRUM-HANNA: Glenn Clarke was one of more than 20 trainers employed by Skill Training Victoria. Clarke says he was uncomfortable with practices he says he was asked to use in order to secure government funding.

GLENN CLARKE, FORMER TRAINER: The concreting module, simple forms of concrete, we had to use sand instead of actually using concrete - and with the photos being black and white you couldn't actually tell whether they were sand or concrete. So the kids were supposed to be using concrete but they weren't.

CARO MELDRUM-HANNA: Why were you using sand?

GLENN CLARKE: It was readily available, it was cheaper and easier.

CARO MELDRUM-HANNA: Is sand the same as concrete?

GLENN CLARKE: No, you wouldn't build a house on sand.

CARO MELDRUM-HANNA: So for an auditor coming in and seeing the photos?

GLENN CLARKE: He would think it's concrete, yeah.

CARO MELDRUM-HANNA: And who directed you to use sand?

GLENN CLARKE: The company, yeah.

CAMERON DALGLEISH, FORMER APPRENTICE: Very disappointed, yeah. Very disheartened by the whole thing, definitely.

CARO MELDRUM-HANNA: Apprentice Cameron Dalgleish says he was also asked to pose for a series of staged photos.

CAMERON DALGLEISH: I was maybe once or twice I had all the photos which was probably - could have been 30, 40 of them in the end - that I was probably actually doing the actual job.

CARO MELDRUM-HANNA: Dalgleish said while there being no practical training on-site by the company, the theory side was also lacking.

CAMERON DALGLEISH: There would be a question, you'd pretty much have to go through the book to find the answer, and you pretty much word for word it. If you had a problem, you've pretty much got the team, they'd show you half the answers half the time anyway. It's not really training. It's just more like a scam.

CARO MELDRUM-HANNA: These photos show a group of apprentices posing with premade scaffolding and wooden structures that are taken apart and put back together over and over again. All for Skill Training Victoria's cameras.

STUART CAMERON, FORMER TRAINER: We would get up to four or five apprentices at one time who needed the same module, the same assessment done, and we'd bring them into the training shed and run that particular module in the training shed, and obviously take the photo evidence as we were doing it.

CARO MELDRUM-HANNA: How long would that take?

STUART CAMERON: Depending on the module, I can only... one particular one would be conventional roofing. Here at TAFE it's a five day process. The private RTO I was at, that would be done in four hours. So the hours that are on the paperwork, they were not correct hours.

CARO MELDRUM-HANNA: But they were passed off as being correct?

STUART CAMERON: They were signed off, yes.

CARO MELDRUM-HANNA: Skill Training Victoria has 12 training premises. 7.30 visited this one in Dandenong. The office was empty; there were no trainers or students to be found. When we arrived at this practical training shed in North Geelong looking for someone from the company to interview, we were asked to leave.

The state regulator, the Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority provided 7.30 with this written response.

STATEMENT FROM VIC. REGISTRATION & QUALIFICATIONS AUTHORITY (voiceover): VRQA will not tolerate a training organisation risking lives and cheating students who are paying for quality training. Fraud is insidious and deceptive and will not be detected through routine audit activity. Unless a student or their parents comes forward to complain, this activity will not be exposed.

DAVE NOONAN: Everybody ought to be outraged about a situation which sells our young Australians short, which puts people in a situation where they've got hopes and dreams and expectations of the future in the industry, which are shattered.

LEIGH SALES: And we invited Skill Training Victoria on to the program to answer those allegations. The invitation remains open.