Seizing that opportunity could help secure their financial future as well as meeting an unmet need in the knowledge economy, he told last week’s TAFE NSW seminar on higher education.

To do this, TAFEs would have to boost the professional qualifications of their staff and offer a much more comprehensive range of higher education than the current grab bag of cherry-picked degrees.

And they would have to bankroll this transformation from their own resources, with governments unlikely to pick up the tab. “Politicians are not going to be creative, so we might as well do it ourselves,” Professor Goedegebuure told the HES.

TAFE’s need to step up and be proactive on research