Reporting this month on what it called the impossible choices of a deadly wildfire season for 2026/2027, The Guardian set out just how quickly the ground can shift: an emerging El Niño that could be the strongest on record, joined by a positive Indian Ocean dipole, with areas of south-east Asia and Oceania at catastrophic risk.
In a few months, young people in fire-prone rural Australia may face another season of catastrophic fire danger (see: the Australian Fire Danger Rating System). And some of them are choosing to learn how to prepare for, respond to, and recover from such disasters. One example: through Certificate II in Public Safety (Fire Operations, PUA20719), a qualification that in some communities is among one of the most meaningful and applied programs a school could offer.
We know something about these choices because of the work of others. The federally funded Future Proof program, run through Victoria University’s Centre of Excellence for Young People and Disasters, worked across regional Victoria after the Black Summer bushfires (MacDonald, Woods & Corney, 2025). Of 109 youth qualification completions through the program, 84 were in Certificate II Public Safety. The single most-completed credential, by a wide margin, in a major disaster-recovery investment in young people, was the one that teaches them to prepare for and respond to bushfire disaster. These are young people signalling through their VET subject choices, what learning matters to them in the places where bushfire, drought and heat are not exceptional events but recurring conditions.
What MacDonald, Woods and Corney’s work also makes visible is that these choices are not made in isolation. Young people’s knowledge of place, their embodied skills, their community capabilities are already enabling them to respond to and shape their region’s recovery when the surrounding conditions allow. And crucially, the findings foreground the role of Young Youth Workers and teachers as brokers who can sustain the relational, networked labour that makes these qualifications possible. Where the qualification worked, it worked because someone – usually a youth worker, a teacher, a brigade captain, or a school-based VET coordinator – held the relationships between school, community, RTO, funder, family, and young person together. That relational infrastructure is not a nice-to-have – it is the condition under which this becomes possible.
In the aftermath of the Black Summer bushfires, and drawing directly on Future Proof funding, Wodonga Senior Secondary College’s VET team and partners began working out how a school in a fire-prone region could offer young people a serious route into emergency services learning. That work has resulted in one of the school-based Cert II Public Safety (Firefighting Operations) programs currently running (in 2026) – delivered in partnership with Thurgoona Training Academy just across the state border in NSW, and with Junction Support Services, held together by the relational labour of VET coordinators who have made a program work that the credentialling and funding architecture does not currently make easy. This is applied learning for a particular moment: a Victorian school, a NSW RTO, a regional youth support service, and the young people the system is often least equipped to support, brought together around a qualification that engages them in how to prepare for and respond to some of the disasters their region faces.
The value beyond employment
There is an argument commonly made about VET qualifications that they only make sense if they lead directly to employment in the field. That is not only what school-based delivery of Cert II Public Safety produces. The true value of the program extends beyond conventional economic and vocational benchmarks. Most participants are not oriented toward a firefighting career as the primary objective. Rather, as Xavier Walker at Wodonga Secondary College describes it:
…even if graduates do not go on to a career in emergency services or volunteer organisations such as the Country Fire Authority (CFA), the competencies acquired – including interpersonal communication, leadership, first responder protocols, and basic emergency care – are highly transferable across diverse sectors. Cultivating these capabilities within regional communities generates localised resilience: local tradespeople, professionals, and service workers possess essential crisis-response skills regardless of their active volunteer status.
This is the argument the credentialling architecture does not currently register. What is being learned is not being learned narrowly for a labour market destination or within the competency based credential in isolation. It is being learned with/through community capability held across a region – in tradespeople and professionals, in service workers, in young people and their local knowledge, stories and experience. The value of the credential is that it seeds crisis-response capacity across the population of a fire-affected place. This is exactly the kind of value the Victorian VDSS architecture, geared as it is to labour market alignment, must move to recognise and support.
What about the VET system?
There is a tension here that we have described in Argent, Goring and Kelly (2026): local actors made responsible for systemic policy dilemmas. Where the qualification runs at all, it runs through individual, youth, brigade or community-led brokerage – dependent on the person in the role – rather than through the ‘place-based’ policy mechanism itself.
The scale of the mismatch is visible in the policy documents themselves. Public Safety, at any certificate level, does not appear on the Victorian Department of Education’s Training Needs List for 2026. The Victorian Skills Plan for 2025 into 2026, which shapes what flows down into that list, focuses squarely on Construction, Digital technologies, Health technologies and medical research, Advanced manufacturing and Defence Investment, Agribusiness and Clean Energy. So the system does not just quietly under-resource disaster-preparedness learning; it does not name it as a training need. The single most-completed qualification for young people through Future Proof – the qualification young people are actively choosing in fire-affected regions – is absent from the list.
This structural absence is being reinforced by material funding decisions. In 2026, band funding allocations for a number of certificates were adjusted, and the certificates most directly relevant to disaster-preparedness learning were among those cut most sharply. Certificate II in Public Safety (Firefighting Operations) was moved from Band D to Band B, cutting per-student allocation from $1,027 to $417. Certificate II in Active Volunteering moved from Band C to Band B, from $697 to $417. Certificate III in Public Safety (Community Safety) was also adjusted downward. So even where a school has the will, the community appetite, and the delivery partnerships to run these qualifications, the per-student funding to cover RTO delivery cost has been more than halved in a single year.
The conditions under which a young person in one place can access this qualification, and in another cannot, are also shaped by the network of providers, intermediaries and stakeholders that are engaged with the school. Clusters of schools in different regions, with different LLENs, RTOs and TAFEs, and different histories of partnership, set the conditions in which particular VET programs become possible or fall away (we describe in more detail in Argent, Goring and Kelly, 2026). The credential is not the whole of the learning. It is one element in an ecology that already includes the CFA’s junior, cadet and volunteer programs, the intergenerational, historical and local knowledge of communities and brigades, and the places young people are already learning to understand, prepare and respond.
A live policy moment
Several policy windows are open now: the Victorian Legislative Assembly’s Inquiry into Student Pathways to In-Demand Industries is asking exactly the questions this piece raises; the 2026 Summer Fires Inquiry sits alongside it; and the CFA’s Contemporary Volunteer Membership Model (CVMM) consultation is thinking through the volunteering pathways – the structural conditions of time, capacity and recognition that shape whether people, and particularly young people, can meaningfully take part in the work. Victoria’s volunteer firefighting workforce is contracting against rising fire risk, whilst there is a massive surge in VET enrolments as young people take on the VCE Vocational Major in pursuit of an applied learning pathway. The CVMM has the potential to engage with school-based curriculum through VET in schools and the VCE Vocational Major – the very places where many young people first encounter these ways of learning. (For a searching new account of how Australian fire management came to be organised around the logic of control, and what might lie beyond it, see Timothy Neale’s How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent (Duke University Press, 2026)). Alongside Neale’s important work, scholarship is emerging – and urgently needed – that examines how colonial logics, military histories and standardised training regimes interact and shape contemporary fire management practices, but tracing those tensions currently sits beyond the scope of this discussion.
Young people in communities do not move along tidy pipelines or pathways from school to brigade to career – as tertiary harmonisation and its metaphors might suggest at times. Following Wood (2022), it is more honest to say they navigate constellations: a Certificate II here, informal experience on farm, volunteering with brigade there, casual work, family histories with the fire service.
That learning is real, and is already underway – in the brigade, in the qualification, in a community’s living relationship with fire, with Country, with seasons, and in the embodied, intergenerational knowledge of place. Ana Sofia Ribeiro’s work with rural youth and wildfire in Portugal describes this (Ribeiro, 2026). In earlier work with Silva (Ribeiro & Silva, 2020) after the 2017 wildfires in central Portugal, Ribeiro and Silva (2020) asked children in affected communities what could be done to reduce future wildfire risk. Amongst the children who did share their views, one 8-year-old, Miguel, said:
To prepare for the next fires, we have to clean the land, not pour chemicals or inflammable residues into the forest, not plant trees that hurt the planet and uproot the eucalyptus, mimosa and pine trees. (Miguel, 8 years old, 3rd year)
A child of eight naming vegetation management, the ecological politics of eucalyptus plantations, chemical pollution, and the difference between trees that hurt and trees that don’t. This is knowledge held in a particular place and community and is the kind of learning young people are doing in fire-prone rural communities across the world, and it is the kind of applied learning the Australian credentialling architecture and tertiary harmonisation event must grapple with.
The argument extends across the wider spectrum of disaster-preparedness learning – flood, heat, drought, storms – and the ecologies of place-based, intergenerational knowledge they require.
References
Argent, N., Goring, J., & Kelly, P. (2026). ‘Clusters’ and ‘place-based approaches’: on the problem of Vocational Education and Training (VET) in senior secondary schooling. Journal of Education Policy.
Farrugia, D., Coffey, J., Threadgold, S., Sharp, M., & Molnar, L. (2026). Vibes as value: Young workers and affective labour in the service economy. Manchester University Press.
MacDonald, F., Woods, B., & Corney, T. (2025). Future Proof: Young people, disaster recovery and (re)building communities. Victoria University. https://vuir.vu.edu.au/49588/
Neale, T. (2026). How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent. Duke University Press.
Ribeiro, A. S. (2026). Preparing, responding and recovering: Wildfire disaster and rural youth in Portugal. Open Research Europe, 6, 91. https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.23111.1
Ribeiro, A. S., & Silva, I. (2020). Drawing on fire: children’s knowledge and needs after a wildfire disaster in Portugal. Children’s Geographies, 18(6), 726–738. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2019.1699646
The Guardian. (2026, July 18). The impossible choices of a deadly wildfire season. https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/jul/18/the-impossible-choices-of-a-deadly-wildfire-season
Wood, B. E. (2022). Youth citizenship: Expanding conceptions of the young citizen. Geography Compass, 16(12), e12669.
Victorian Government. (2026). Training Needs List. https://www.vic.gov.au/training-needs-list
Victorian Government. (2025). Victorian Skills Plan 2025 into 2026. https://www.vic.gov.au/victorian-skills-plan-2025-publication
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