Andrew Thomson

Review of TAFE Queensland

It is quite obvious that no one of account reads t...

It is quite obvious that no one of account reads these reviews or if they do then they do not care what people are saying.
I have been studying through TAFE Southbank for a number of years and have to say the teaching staff and customer support staff (if you are lucky enough to actually get to talk to someone) overall have been great as are the facilities.
I suspect that my complaints are not directly the issue of the particular campus at all but a systemic problem with TAFE at a state level.
Firstly the customer service contact system to be brutally honest is a joke.
The options given when ringing the 1300 number might make up 20% of the potential reasons someone is trying to contact TAFE for and there is no option to speak to a customer service officer.
When you are on hold there is a repeating message about a TAFE open day in August (it is now the end of November) so they are either very late or extremely early in their advertising.
Many things that existing students are trying to resolve could be done through the student self service portal but TAFE in their wisdom, I am told took that system down over a year ago to replace it but the new system is still not functional.
Timetabling for classes also gets a fail from me. TAFE no longer caters for part time students as it once did. During my studies part time students were being put in classes during the day while in a number of cases full time students got the evening classes. People study part time to fit in with their full time work. I even had the experience on more than one subject where there were not enough computers for the enrolled students in higher level computer based classes where sharing was not an option.
As I said at the beginning of this rant, I have always found the staff (teaching and support) to be great. The background systems however are a failure.
And none of this review is going to matter because the people who can drive the change to fix the systems either don't read the negative reviews, or just don't care enough to do something about it.