I remember a time, over 20 years ago, when the TAFE aviation students were allowed, in fact encouraged, to shop around for their flying school and TAFE were not allowed to influence their decision.
This then stopped when the loans came in and the students were
forced to use the TAFE/UNIs chosen provider, opening up opportunities for corruption. Despite taxpayers money raining down, two of ECUs chosen providers at Jandakot went broke one after the other, leaving students and instructors high and dry while the directors just drove away in their expensive cars and were never made to account for the chaos they had caused.
I also think the issue of "Cancellation fees" needs to be addressed...I recall this in one of NK press releases being mentioned, that he generously wouldn't charge cancellation fees when the school was temporarily grounded. Years ago an instructor at one of the schools who did ECU students told me the VET students were billed the same amount for lessons whether they turned up or not, and the percentage of the no-shows was very high. Yet still the school went to the wall.
Most of the smaller schools dodn't want to get involved with mass production or deal with that level of bureaucracy, so there becomes a very uneven playing field with the taxpayer funded superschools, that can't/won't stay in business for whatever reason, (perhaps they never intended to) and the rest of us who are still here plodding away providing quality training.
So perhaps it could work if the whole RTO side of things were dropped and students could chose their provider and let market forces sort it out.
Meanwhile I believe that this corruption must go to ministerial level to have gone as far as it has for as long as it has. The video with Mike McCormack is sickening. Unfortunately I can't copy the link but if you go to their faceache page and look among the videos for "
Deputy Prime Minister, Michael McCormack visit to Soar Aviation"
https://www. facebook.com/soaraviationvideos/281021165857351/