Candy Broad, Member for Northern Victoria Region has called on the Baillieu-Ryan Government on behalf of the school communities in Northern Victoria, to do the right thing and reinstate funding of the VCAL program.
Ms Broad told Parliament this week that she had recently visited a number of providers of the Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL), including the Mildura Senior College and the Echuca Campus of the Bendigo Regional Institute of TAFE.
“It is fair to say that the concerns of communities, schools and TAFE’s in my electorate of Northern Victoria Region are undiminished following the Baillieu-Ryan cuts of $12 million per year from the budget for co- ordinators of the VCAL program”.
“It is equally fair to say that support for VCAL is undiminished in the face of Government cuts because communities see the real value of VCAL where the Government does not”, Ms Broad said.
Ms Broad said that in Echuca there is concern that students who have become disengaged from classroom-based learning and who have chosen to do VCAL at TAFE because it is a hands-on approach to learning are likely to find themselves spending more time in classrooms because of the Government's cuts.
“These same students are likely to find themselves in larger classes because of the cuts”.
“In short these students are likely to find themselves trying to learn in an environment that looks more and more like the school classroom that did not work for them in the first place”, she said.
Ms Broad said that in rural and regional Victoria these cuts are particularly unfair because students already face greater hurdles to complete school, to find jobs and to further education and training opportunities.