Our Institute has raised our class numbers to 15 from 12 per group this year. Apart from the inability to give each student teacher/learning time, we are working with portable power tools, electric machinery and sharp and hazardous hand tools. It is only a matter of time before someone gets injured severely because there are too many students to look after in each group and teachers are having to spread themselves too thin.

The other concern is the amount of students who would normally have been able to enrol in our Certificate II programs who may have completed a Cert II in Food Handling at McDonalds, or completed VCE, and are now ineligible for government funding. They now have to pay in excess of $3600 to do a Cert II Pre-Apprenticeship with no guarantees of a job outcome, and obviously no one is going to pay this much to do a Cert II.

We are being asked to bring our apprentices in for six weeks per year instead of eight weeks to overcome the problems associated with administration and ongoing teacher shortage. We are operating at a level of nearly 55% ongoing at present, and our sessionals do not do any of the admin or student maintenance. All they do is teach and go home and we (ongoing teachers) are left to complete everything else.

We are ready to implode here. If it gets any worse I can see teachers either leaving or ending up so stressed that they won't be able to cope.

— Posted by Steve Lee, Program Coordinator, NMIT