Celia Moon

This presentation will firstly situate the training reform agenda within the community cultural development context. It will then analyse the results of the CCD Training Audit conducted by CREATE on behalf of the Australia Council over the past six months and draw out some of the implications for future training directions for the sector.

The CCD sector has experienced a rapid growth over the past twenty years in terms of the number of organisations and diversity of organisations engaging in CCD work covering a multiplicity of working contexts. It is a mark of the development of the sector that we are having this discussion here today. Training is an effective means for achieving industry development. The current reality of industry direction for training across the board, is that vocational education and training and all it encompasses, is here to stay. Issues such as industry professionalism and the push to national recognition of qualifications and skills are having a big impact on the Community Cultural Development sector. The development of vocational education and training for the CCD sector brings us in line with other industries.

The main advantages of the training reform agenda is that it provides national recognition for existing skills, qualifications and experience and facilitates the portability of skills into other areas of work . Accredited training allows the practitioner to map potential career and education pathways and provides assurance of quality training consistent with national standards. This is a marked departure for the sector from it's traditional means of acquiring training.

The CCD sector is relatively small in terms of paid CCD workers, although the inadequacies of the census data make it impossible to accurately map the size of the sector. However, as we all know, there is limited full-time employment and the sector is vulnerable to changes in funding and government policy. Most CCD practitioners are employed on contract or casual project basis and experience difficulty building a career path in the sector. Training is ad hoc, on the run, integrated into projects or conducted on a one to one informal basis. Where training is provided by an organisation, it is rarely documented in a way that it can be used by others and is therefore lost when that trainer moves on. With most learning being on the job, there is no time for reflection or evaluation of skills, let alone skills development. There is also no documentation or recognition of the skills acquired. This then disadvantages the practitioner in the employment market.

Predominantly training provision and funding, has been for short courses. There has been not a great deal of accredited training developed by the sector. This has changed over the past few years with the development of the NSW Community Arts Association's Certificate in Community Cultural Development and the Community Arts Network SA's Graduate Diploma in CCD. Most CCD practitioners lack the capacity to pay for training, due to the sporadic and low-income nature of CCD work, and project timelines don't often include a training allocation which creates difficulties in accessing existing CCD training on offer. The most common reasons given for not allocating training time from project funds, is that funding is tied to project outcomes or not perceived as a priority by either the organisation or the funding body.

In CCD there are a number of levels of involvement: artists, artsworkers and communities. The sector is complex in the skills it encompasses, with significant links to related sectors, such as community development, youthwork, community management, local government, volunteer management, recreation, Aboriginal cultural development and frontline management. It is through these sectors as well as their mainstream artform, that most CCD practitioners gain their formal training qualifications. Despite this, there is limited familiarity with the term community cultural development beyond the sector, which highlights the need for promoting CCD work and training to these sectors, as these are our market for training and employment.

CCD is a sector characterised by it's vulnerability both in terms of it's size, it's sporadic employment patterns and it's reliance on government funding. The sector is therefore susceptible to changes in federal, state and local government policies and vulnerable to changing organisational priorities. We have recently witnessed for example, the closure of the Community Arts Network, in Tasmania, through funding cuts. Related sectors are similarly vulnerable as evidenced by the recent defunding of the Family Resource Centres nationally, organisations who were providing training programs and resources relevant to CCD work in communities. These shifting sands provide an ongoing challenge for the sector. For the individual practitioner, such a scenario necessitates the portability of skills across industries, that accredited training and assessment provides.

Another virtue of vocational education and training for the sector is that it ensures accessibility of existing training nationally, consistency and assurance of training quality and standards, which will provide the sector with benchmarks for assessment and overcome the current variation in training quality delivered the sector.

Accreditation has the added capacity for flexible modes of training delivery including access to distance education provision. What is important is not how you acquire the skills, or how long it takes you, but that you are competent ie that you can get the job done. Training can be acquired on the job, via self-paced learning packages, part-time, full-time, online, via mentorship and traineeship arrangements, industry placements and secondments. This flexibility is especially advantageous for people in regional areas as most training courses are currently only accessible in metropolitan areas. It also offers more potential to CCD to customise training delivery to suit the work arrangements of practitioners in the sector. In this way we, the practitioners, become the driving force in what training actually gets developed which ensures the specific training needs of those working in CCD contexts are more likely to be met.

The limited pool of training providers in the CCD sector will necessitate developing better links and partnerships with education and training providers and industry training bodies in related sectors, to share resources and expertise and ensure the development and delivery of training that is responsive to the practical needs of those working in the field. Currently the major provider of training is TAFE and difficulties arise when their training priorities change, when CCD related courses are not offered or when they don't get the numbers to run the courses. This means for the sector, an emphasis on marketing CCD and courses available, and ongoing advocacy to ensure the profile for the sector and CCD training is maintained. The importance of the CCD sector being involved in the development and monitoring of accredited training is that we are the ones likely to know the sector's needs and to stay committed to these being met.

There is a need within the CCD sector as well to promote awareness and understanding of the value and benefits of accredited training and to enable the sector to access information about appropriate training courses, traineeships and resources and other relevant training information.

The CCD Training Directory, database and brochure developed by CREATE Australia as a result of the CCD Training Audit, will go some way to providing this information to the sector. These resources, provide for the first time a tangible and comprehensive overview of training courses and resources available to the CCD sector on a national basis.

Results of the CCD Training Audit - The absence of a national overview of training has limited the potential for the CCD sector to share information on and to access relevant training programs, resources and expertise more widely. Since June this year, CREATE Australia has been undertaking a national audit of training courses and resources in Community Cultural Development as a joint project with the Community Cultural Development Fund of Australia Council.

Broadly, this project aimed to identify existing training programs and resources in Community Cultural Development both accredited and non-accredited produced either by the CCD sector or available through related sectors and excluding higher education courses; to identify gaps in training; to maximise the use of existing resources and training programs; to identify key agents to act as points of contact for information, advice and referral in relation to training for the Community Cultural Development sector; and to produce a brochure promoting CCD training pathways, a training directory publication and an online database directory of training information for the Community Cultural Development sector.

Information included in the audit was gathered from a diverse range of sources. These include cultural industries training advisory bodies and key arts organisations in each state and territory; the Community Cultural Development Fund and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board of the Australia Council, their organisational clients and arts officers; community arts networks and community based arts organisations providing formal and informal training programs; organisations who had received Australia Council funding through targeted multicultural arts training programs; organisations who had responded to the 1996 Support for Training survey; organisations listed in national state and territory arts training directories and on the national vocational education and training register; organisations listed in the CCD in the Tertiary Sector report to the Australia Council and the Training Need Analysis: Community Cultural Development and Cultural Planning report to the Australia Council and the Australian Local Government Association. Additional information was accessed from arts and education online sites, in particular, the Artsinfo, EdNa and Ozjac sites; from TAFE, community and private registered training providers including state-based youth sector training councils and local government associations; Community Services and Health and Local Government industry training advisory bodies; training providers in areas of volunteer management; Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community development; frontline management; cultural diversity; community radio training providers; and adult and continuing education networks nationally.

A major strategy to achieve the outcomes of this project was a series of forums held during July and August 1997 in each state and territory to bring together people who are involved in training and community cultural development. The forums provided an immediate connection with the field and meant that the project research was based on local knowledge. The forums provided an update on the current training environment and its impact on community cultural development. At the forums, organisations interested in acting as key agents or initial points of contact for those seeking information and advice in relation to community cultural development training and relevant training in related industries were identified and information was gathered which greatly assisted CREATE to map each state and territory in relation to community cultural development training provision.

In addition, from July to November approximately 500 organisations nationally were surveyed via written questionnaires detailing any training courses and resources they provided relevant to the Community Cultural Development sector.

This audit includes training courses and resources which primarily have community cultural development outcomes. Courses essentially related to specific artform skills and tertiary sector provision are not included in this audit. Training courses, resources and distance education programs have been included on the basis that they have the capacity to be used by others and have relevance beyond the local area in which they were developed. In addition, all training courses listed have been conducted or trialed in some way, have a clear structure and course outline and stated learning outcomes.

As community cultural development spans a range of industry sectors, the audit also identifies relevant courses in community development, local government, volunteer management, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community management, cultural diversity and youthwork with applicability to skills and knowledge required for working in the community cultural development sector.

The resources generated by this project to assist in disseminating the information gathered include a brochure promoting CCD training pathways, a training directory publication and an online database directory of training information for the Community Cultural Development sector. Identified key agents act as additional organisational resources to provide ongoing support, information and advice.

Gaps in training - A lot of valuable training was identified by the audit process, that is being run by practitioners in the sector that was however not able to be included for access by others because it is not documented or is too locally specific in its application. The expertise and knowledge acquired in developing training is often lost when training funding runs out or when the trainer leaves an organisation or because of funding arrangements, where the training is on-off or funded as a pilot, with no followup. The time and resources that have gone into this initial development phase are then wasted. The lack of consistent methods of documentation, of clearly stated learning outcomes and assessment criteria means it has been difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of this training, where the attempt has been made. Most organisations cite the fact that it is easier to get project funding than training funding from arts funding bodies as a reason for not pursuing a training agenda more directly. Most expressed a desire for more training, for more access to existing training and for assistance to make their training accessible to others.

Currently available accredited CCD training is predominantly, with the exception of the NSW Community Arts Association and Community Arts Network SA courses, single modules offered by TAFE, embedded in larger certificate or diploma courses relating to a mainstream artform or in community development or youthwork courses. The courses most extensively picked up and used nationally, particularly in regional areas are the various certificates in Community Radio developed by the Australian Ethnic Radio Training Project, by TAFE NSW and by Batchelor College in the Northern Territory for Aboriginal communities. These could provide useful models for the sector in modifying existing courses to local needs and to access for regional areas.

The NSW Community Arts Association certificate course and the Graduate Diploma course developed by the Community Arts Network in South Australia are the only two substantial courses in community cultural development that address the complexity and diversity of CCD skills and application of practice.

Given the increasing emphasis on regional development, cultural tourism and local distinctiveness at the local government level, there is a surprising lack of appropriate training for those working in local government contexts, especially in relation to cultural planning. The Queensland Community Arts Network runs a highly successful Regional Arts Development training program in association with the Regional Arts Development Fund initiative. Whilst this is not an accredited training, it is a useful model that could be adapted and applied in regional areas elsewhere in the country. The inclusion of a unit in Cultural Planning in the local government national competency standards provides an opportunity for the sector to provide training for this area, especially as local government associations are requesting training in CCD.

Despite this emphasis on regional development, the decentralised nature of CCD work and the potential for and rhetoric about flexible delivery modes, most training is still located in metropolitan areas and delivered face to face. There is virtually no appropriate training at this stage that is available online. Whilst not all CCD workers have access to the hardware, developments in computer technology mean that in the near future online delivery will provide one option for overcoming the tyranny of distance, especially in larger states. More flexible delivery modes would certainly be more compatible to the employment patterns of the sector.

The whole area of information technology both in terms of training programs and as a delivery tool need further exploration by the sector, along with the capabilities of multimedia technology for working with communities. Despite this being a growth area, the CCD sector has barely begun to tap into it's potential. This audit does not include any relevant training in these areas. Nor is there any training identified that addresses the potential for working in the international context. This is a huge oversight given the requests that come particularly from the Asia-Pacific region for suitable artsworkers with knowledge and skills of working cross-culturally in a CCD context.

Another area of surprise was in relation to training in cultural diversity. Community Cultural Development practitioners work with a diverse range of communities, however there is very little training that directly addresses this in a CCD context. There are numerous cultural awareness training courses of a generic nature. These relate predominantly to enhancing awareness of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. Similarly there was very little provision identified specifically for CCD workers from non English speaking backgrounds or those working in the disabilities area. Typically Training for NESB artists is developed by multicultural arts alliances and for those in the disabilities field, by the DADAA network and don't appear to be picked up or developed by other providers. Community Arts modules in TAFE courses are general and introductory in nature and while some address management of projects, the WA TAFE Visual Arts Management diploma and TAFE Victoria's Associate Diploma in Small Companies and Community Theatre are two examples, most don't address the skills needs for working with the diversity of CCD communities.

Another major area of need is in relation to volunteer management training. Volunteer management training is available through TAFE and Schools of Volunteer Management, however despite the number of volunteers involved in CCD work and on management committees, no-one is addressing this training needs specifically within the CCD context, for example in relation to festivals and events co-ordination which often involve large pools of volunteers.

The need for upskilling and skills recognition for the existing workforce was identified in forums as much more important than entry level training for the sector particularly in relation to business management skills, accounting, project management, strategic planning, train the trainer and assessor training, computer technology. Often practitioners have to access this training elsewhere and attempt to recontextualise it to apply to their work situation. A similar scenario is faced by practitiioners when they undertake training offered within welfare and community development courses which are client-focussed in a way no appropriate to the CCD context.

Training is integral to and dependent on strategic development of the sector. To move forward the sector needs to be more informed on the national training agenda and on the value of and access to accredited training. There is a huge role for the sector in advocacy to increase the profile and understanding of training and employment opportunities in CCD, in related sectors. The CCD training brochure and directory will provide useful tools to assist this process. It is very exciting to have these resources available.

With an emphasis on workplace based assessment, there will also be an increased demand in future for workplace based trainers and assessors. We need already to be skilling people from the sector to fulfil these roles, in order to maximise the potential of existing training and traineeships and to gain skills recognition for the sector. However, given limited human resources, we also need to be realistic about what most effective role the sector can play in relation to training and to increasing industry involvement via the community arts networks and other providers.

In addition, there is a need to develop relationships in the sector between multicultural arts organisations, community arts networks, DADAA networks and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural development workers to galvanise responses to training needs and develop a co-ordinated and strategic approach rather than developing separate training programs in isolation or with a lack of awareness of what else is out there. The CCD Training database provides the sector with the necessary overview to set the ball rolling on developing a co-ordinated approach.

With the enthusiasm, interest and support of practitioners and CCD organisations nationally and already a number of community arts networks registered as training providers offering and promoting accredited training, we are well down the road of playing a more proactive role in setting the training agenda for the sector.

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