Enrolments and Completions Research

This project explores the complex reasons behind and responses to the relatively low number of qualification completions.

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Overview

A sustainable pipeline of new, skilled professionals is critical to address the skills gaps and workforce shortages in the care and support sectors. The Enrolments and Completions Research project will explore the complex reasons behind the relatively low number of care and support qualification completions in comparison to enrolments and completions across all other vocational education and training qualifications. We will engage with a range of stakeholders including current and former learners, training providers and industry to identify factors that influence whether a student completes their training. These insights will inform practical recommendations to support learner progression and qualification completion.

Final Report

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Findings and Recommendations

A report presenting findings from our consultations with over 200 stakeholders (including students, training providers, industry and unions) is now available. Thank you to those who participated in our workshops and interviews.

The consultations surfaced seven key challenges to keeping students engaged through to completion:

students’ complex needs and capacity levels
misalignment between expectation and reality of care and support work
content and difficulty of training material
motivation to enrol may impact likelihood of completion
challenges with mandatory work placements
acute challenges faced by remote and regional stakeholders
wider systemic barriers.

To respond to these challenges and help drive improvements in completion rates, stakeholders shared many ideas for change, as well as actions they have already taken. These include:

actively identifying and responding to potential student disengagement
intentional pre-enrolment screening and information-sharing
increasing awareness of career pathways arising from qualifications
enhancing engagement of remote/online students
thinking creatively about training package delivery
strengthening and improving the mandatory work placement experience.

We invite you to provide feedback on the report as we move to developing recommendations. These recommendations will be presented in a final report to be released by end-June 2026.

Consultation

We welcomed interested stakeholders, including training providers, peak bodies, employers and unions to share their views, experiences and strategies at our consultation workshops. In person workshops were held in Sydney (03/11), Brisbane (04/11), Melbourne (06/11), Perth (10/11) and Darwin (17/11) 2025, and online workshops were held on 26 and 27 November 2025.

Project Overview

Enrolments in vocational education and training (VET) care and support qualifications continue to grow however the number of students successfully completing these qualifications varies. Given that care and support workforces are already facing employment shortages, increasing the number of learners who complete qualifications is a key priority.

Against a backdrop of broader research into VET completions, this project will specifically explore the reasons why care and support learners may not be completing qualifications. It could be due to a number of reasons such as life circumstances, relevance or suitability of course components, requiring a set of skills the qualification offers that cannot be gained elsewhere, finding employment and more. We hope to gain insight into the reasons and seek to make recommendations on how these can be addressed.

Issues Paper

During our project set up, we analysed existing literature, previous HumanAbility consultations outcomes and VET data on care and support qualification enrolments and completions to develop an issues paper which identifies some of the areas of concern, emerging themes and potential gaps and areas that we can examine during the next phases of the project. We will use learnings from the issues paper to guide our consultation and whether we focus on one or more care and support sectors. Subsequent findings and recommendations may inform future research into other sectors.

VET data dashboard, 2019-2024

This dashboard contains enrolments and completions data for the CHC, HLT and SIS training packages between 2019 and 2024. Users can explore the data at various levels and can analyse and filter data by qualification, student gender, age, state/territory of residence and remoteness, and training provider type.

When changing to a different Provider Type it is best practice to first deselect any Program Name so the Provider Type filter resets. Each visualisation also acts as a filter. For example, if you select 25 to 29 years on the Age visualisation, the other visualisations will only show data for 25 to 29 years.

All data has been sourced directly from the National Centre for Vocational Education and Research and is accessible through the NCVER DataBuilder.