Supporting student transitions to TAFE

A Safe Landing Pad: The Role of Disability Transition Officers in Victoria’s TAFEs

The move from school to TAFE can be a significant transition for a person with disability, and one where the right support at the right time can make a real difference. Following a 2021 Victorian parliamentary inquiry, every TAFE college in Victoria now employs a Disability Transition Officer (DTO). These officers walk alongside senior secondary students with disability as they consider TAFE, apply, enrol and settle into their first 90 days of study.

This case study looks at what the role of a DTO involves, what makes it effective and where the opportunities lie to strengthen it further. For registered training organisations (RTOs) in any jurisdiction thinking about how to better support students with disability into and through training, the Victorian experience offers a set of practical lessons worth attending to.

TAFE represents a significantly different learning environment from school. As an adult learning setting, it requires a level of self-advocacy and independence that is often underdeveloped in many students. While efforts are made to prepare students for this transition, the differences between school and TAFE are substantial, and many school leavers with disability may not yet have had sufficient opportunities to build the skills required to navigate this environment confidently.

This gap was the subject of a detailed 2021 parliamentary inquiry in Victoria. The Legislative Assembly Economy and Infrastructure Committee Inquiry into access to TAFE for learners with disability found that students with disability were arriving at TAFE unprepared, that information about their support needs was rarely passed on from schools, and that transition support was patchy at best. One of its key recommendations (Recommendation 3) was that the Department of Education and Training fund the appointment of transition officers – who could be based at either secondary schools or at TAFEs – to help learners navigate the move to a new level of study.

The Victorian Government accepted this recommendation, and the TAFE Disability Transition Support program was established. Every TAFE in Victoria now employs a DTO. These officers provide free support to senior secondary students with disability.

The following insights on the role DTOs play draws on a conversation with the program coordinator, who works closely with the DTOs across Victoria and is well placed to describe what the role looks like in practice and what makes it effective.

What Disability Transition Officers do

At its heart, the DTO role is about three things: clarity, confidence and connection. Those working in the role describe their purpose in those terms, and it is a good lens through which to understand the value of the program.

• Clarity means helping students with disability, their families and support networks understand TAFE pathways, available supports, and what to expect when transitioning into vocational education and training (VET). DTOs help make the process easier to navigate.
• Confidence involves supporting students to develop self-advocacy skills and independence as they move from school into an adult learning environment where they are expected to take a more active role in managing their support needs.
• Connection is about providing a trusted point of contact who can link students with the right people, services and supports within TAFE, creating a safe and supportive starting point for their learning journey.

They see it as providing clarity, confidence, connection – the three Cs. It’s really about letting students know what options are available to them, building confidence in taking this next step, and having a connection with this new environment that they can lean on and who can advocate for you. They talked about it being a safe landing pad, almost.

– Stephanie Grace, who works closely with DTOs across Victoria

The DTOs also work closely with families: reassuring them that TAFE is a different kind of environment, and that their child will have someone there who knows them and is looking out for them, is one of the most important things these officers do. Building trust is central to the role, not a side effect of it.

Early in the student’s journey, at the point of inquiry or initial interest, before enrolment and well before a course begins, DTOs also help with very practical matters: touring the campus, explaining enrolment steps, clarifying course requirements, making the connection between the student and the TAFE’s disability support services, and accessing reasonable adjustments.

What makes it work: enablers

Key enablers of good practice

• Dedicated, protected roles with a clear focus that are not diverted to competing priorities
• Early engagement with students at the point of inquiry or application, not after enrolment
• Embedding referral pathways into admissions and enrolment processes
• Opportunities for DTOs to connect with one another as peers and share what works
• Whole-of-organisation commitment to the program at a senior leadership level
• Treating transition as a continuum, from initial inquiry through to employment outcomes
• Working alongside, not in place of, existing disability support services

TAFE colleges where the program has had the most impact all share a common characteristic: they have found ways to embed the DTO’s work into existing organisational processes, rather than leaving it to operate as a stand-alone function. This means connecting the DTO to teams across the organisation, including admissions, marketing, customer service, school outreach and the staff who organise open days. When someone with disability flags their interest in a course, a referral pathway to the DTO is triggered. The program works best when these teams act cohesively rather than duplicating effort, building the DTO into the student support workflow instead of leaving the officer to spend considerable time promoting the role.

The timing of engagement matters a great deal. DTOs consistently point to early engagement as one of the strongest indicators of a smooth transition. The earlier a student, their family and their school know that this support exists and they can access it, the more time there is to put things in place. Students who only contact a DTO shortly before their course starts have a much shorter runway than those who connect months earlier.

Connecting with other DTOs has been described as invaluable. Having a network of peers doing the same work across different TAFE colleges reduces the sense of operating in isolation and allows innovative ideas to travel from one officer to another. These connections have also begun to surface broader questions about how TAFE colleges can reduce the need for individual reasonable adjustments through better course design, with some DTOs exploring Universal Design for Learning principles as a complement to their individual casework.

Challenges and opportunities

Understanding where a program like this can evolve is just as important as recognising what it already does well. For those delivering the program and for other VET providers or jurisdictions considering a similar model, these insights highlight opportunities to strengthen and extend an already successful approach. Rather than identifying shortcomings, they point to the elements that help well-designed transition programs become more effective, sustainable and impactful over time.

Connecting with secondary schools

One of the areas that takes time to develop is the relationship between secondary schools and TAFE colleges. The program is funded through the Department of Jobs, Skills, Industry and Regions, while schools sit under a different department, and there is not yet a formal mechanism that brings the two together around individual students. Where engagement with schools has been slower to build, this can reflect a range of factors, including schools already undertaking their own transition planning, or simply the absence of an established pathway for the relationship. This points to an opportunity to strengthen the connections between the two sectors over time.

Information sharing between schools and TAFE colleges is another area with room to grow. Where schools shared learning plans and other documentation about students’ support needs, this was most useful when it arrived early and with enough detail to inform planning at the TAFE end. The inquiry’s suggestion of a “student passport” that could travel with a learner between settings, with their consent, offers one viable option for making this more consistent in future.

Embedding versus promoting

Where the DTO role had not yet been embedded into a TAFE college’s systems, officers tended to spend more of their time promoting the role itself: visiting schools, building awareness and working to generate referrals. This is a natural feature of the initial stages of any new program, and where it persists it may indicate an opportunity to consider structural and design enhancements that connect the role more directly to admissions and enrolment. The more a DTO’s referrals are generated automatically through existing processes, the more time they have for the casework and student support the role was designed for.

Embedding the role in this way involves change across a TAFE’s processes, such as adjusting how admissions teams identify and refer students, and this kind of change benefits from organisational will and senior leadership support. Where that support is in place, the role operates closer to its full potential.

The DTO and DLO relationship

Most TAFE colleges have existing Disability Liaison Officers (DLOs) whose role is to support enrolled students with disability. The DTO program introduced a complementary role focused specifically on the transition period. In practice, the relationship between the two roles is still settling. Thoughtful management is required to support a positive handover to a DLO.

This has prompted a useful conversation within the network about the best long-term model: whether a separate DTO role is the right vehicle, or whether there is value in resourcing DLOs to begin their work earlier, before students are enrolled. The program has been valuable in demonstrating that early engagement is effective. How that early engagement is best delivered is a design question worth exploring as the program matures.

Practical lessons for the VET sector

For any registered training organisation (RTO) or jurisdiction considering a similar approach, the Victorian experience offers practical lessons.

1. Start with the system, not just the role

Employing a transition officer is valuable, but the role will only reach its potential when organisations ensure that it is a priority and the organisational systems around it are set up to generate referrals, share information and connect the transition work to the wider student journey. Before appointing a DTO, it is worth mapping the student pathway from initial inquiry to enrolment and identifying where a transition-focused practitioner can be embedded.

2. Reach students as early as possible

A consistent theme from the Victorian experience highlights that smooth transitions result from early engagement. Transition support that begins when a student is first exploring TAFE as an option, rather than after enrolment, provides everyone involved more time to plan, gather information and put the right supports in place.

The core of the DTO role is case management with the individual student, and that needs to remain the priority. Outreach to specialist schools, mainstream schools, disability service providers and community settings is part of what generates referrals into that case management work, but it should not sit solely with the DTO. For mainstream schools in particular, outreach works best when aligned with, and complementing, existing TAFE engagement strategies rather than as a separate effort by one person.

The role requires experienced case management and the ability to be an agent of change who builds sustainable partnerships outside of TAFE. Asking one person to do both consistently is a tall order, and it can make the role harder to recruit for and harder to sustain. Rather than operating independently, the DTO should be part of a collaborative group that determines how outreach to schools and other stakeholders can be planned and delivered most effectively.

3. Invest in cross-sector relationships

The school-to-TAFE transition involves two systems that do not always communicate well. A program aimed at bridging that gap needs formal collaboration at a policy and governance level, not just by individual practitioners building relationships through sheer effort and goodwill. Where possible, seek to establish memoranda of understanding or shared protocols between school networks and TAFE colleges.

4. Build a community of practice

DTOs, or any specialists working in similar roles, benefit enormously from a peer network. Shared problem-solving, regular connection, and the ability to learn from each other’s experience reduces professional isolation and accelerates the spread of good practice. Building and resourcing a community of practice from the outset, rather than adding it later, is worth the investment.

5. Think about what “transition” really means

Transition is not a single moment but a continuum that begins well before enrolment and extends into the early months of study. RTOs that treat it as a one-off event, such as an orientation day, risk missing much of what matters. Effective transition support keeps the student with disability at the centre, treats the student journey as continuous, and works to ensure there are no sudden drops in support along the way.

6. Do not let perfect be the enemy of good

The Victorian program is still evolving, and it has navigated real questions along the way about resourcing, cross-sector coordination and the best delivery model. Even so, the DTOs have made a genuine difference to the lives of people with disability moving into TAFE. The clearest lessons from the experience are these.

• Be specific about the scope and aims of the role from the start. Ambiguity about what the role is and is not makes life harder for the person in it, harder for the people they work with, and harder to evaluate whether it is achieving what it set out to do. A well-defined role is one that can be properly resourced, supported and built on.
• Make sure the role has visible and active support within the provider. A transition role that sits on the margins of an organisation will struggle, no matter how skilled the person in it. Senior leadership backing, alongside practical support from teams the role intersects with, gives the work the standing it needs to be effective.
• Treat disability inclusion as a whole-of-organisation matter, not the responsibility of one role. Sustainable change happens when admissions, teaching staff, student support teams and senior leadership all see themselves as part of the work. The DTO role is most effective when it operates within that broader commitment, not in place of it.

The lesson is not that you need the perfect system before you start. It is that you need enough structure to sustain the work, enough flexibility to learn and adapt, and enough honest reflection to understand what is working and where to focus next.

If you want to show that investing in early intervention support for people with disability leads to better outcomes, you need to make sure the system is set up so that students know about that support at the right moment and can access it at the right moment. The earlier you can provide that, the better the outcomes.

 – Stephanie Grace, who works closely with the DTOs across Victoria

Mapping: National Vocational Education and Training Regulator (Outcome Standards for Registered Training Organisations) Instrument 2025

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