Carpentry, plumbing and painting teachers at NSW TAFE are being made redundant at one of the state's largest institutes despite a nationwide shortage of apprentices, internal documents obtained by Fairfax Media reveal.
The move comes as the state government's vocational education restructure pushes the training of apprentices on site while core trades move towards the scandal-plagued private sector.
According to the "change management" documents drafted in April, five carpentry teachers will lose their role at the South Western Sydney Institute. They will follow three glaziers, four painters and six plumbers, who were notified of their redundancies last year.
"There is a need to operate in a business model where there is a focus on generating revenue through commercial opportunities, using resources efficiently, identifying innovative responses to customers and reducing reliability on government funding," the documents state.
The changes come as the NSW government spruiks a "building boom", in housing, infrastructure and transport in south-western Sydney as part of its South West Growth Centre initiative. Last year, the Baird government announced that 30,000 homes would be built in Leppington alone, while more than 300,000 new residents are expected to move into the region.
NSW Skills Minister John Barilaro directed questions to TAFE NSW.
A TAFE spokesman said the education provider would continue to meet the current and future industry training requirements in building and construction trades.
The NSW opposition's skills spokeswoman, Prue Car, described the redundancies as "sheer madness".
"My fear is that children won't have opportunities in these areas if TAFE is continued to be cut to the bone," she said.
"I thinks it's sheer madness that the government would be cutting teachers that are teaching core trades in the middle of a skills shortage in areas where they are actually needed."
The redundancies come as federal Labor leader Bill Shorten pushes vocational education as an election issue. On Tuesday he pledged to fund 2600 new apprenticeship places on federally funded projects.
"In the last three years under the Liberal Party, Australia has lost 120,000 apprenticeships," said Mr Shorten. "We've seen major cuts to training budgets and we have seen a blow-out in vocational education, private sector rorts and scams."
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is currently pursuing more than $460 million in taxpayer funding from five private colleges following allegations of "unconscionable conduct", in their recruitment and treatment of students.
One of TAFE's competitors in on-site training, Careers Australia, agreed to pay the regulator back $44 million after a court enforced order in May found it had acted unconscionably. The education provider trains more than 3500 apprentices a year.
In February, a leaked paper from the Turnbull government revealed a plan for a federal TAFE takeover.
Under the proposal, which has been resisted by the states, TAFE fees would be deregulated and TAFEs would receive the same levels of funding as private colleges in a bid to increase competition in the sector.
