Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Port Adelaide for his question. I did have the opportunity with him to visit Seaton High School in his electorate. We were there for the purpose of talking about trades training and talking about upgrading the facilities that those students were learning on. Of course, trades training is important to have as a pathway in secondary schools. It is important because many students want to learn through vocational education and training pathways. It is also vital if this nation is going to lift the percentage of students it retains to year 12 or equivalent.

One of the most shameful legacies of the Liberal Party, after its 12 long years in government, was to leave this nation with retention rates that are low by the standards of our competitors across the world and to leave us with a situation where too many young Australians leave school, not to go into work, not to go into further training, but unfortunately to go nowhere—to go nowhere to secure a long-term future. We are determined to change that, and one of the government’s programs to change it is our major investment in trades training centres in schools—a program every secondary school in the country will be able to benefit from across the program’s 10 years. It is a program which will enable schools to get a grant of between $500,000 and $1½ million to engage in upgrading or building trades training facilities.

Now, of course this program has already gone through its first round, and in that first round some $90 million was delivered to schools. A feature of that applications process was that many schools in local areas, in regional centres and in suburban areas across the country determined to come together in clusters and make joint applications, either to get a bigger facility or to get compatible facilities so that one school could specialise in one sort of trades training and a different school could specialise in a different sort of trades training, and the students from both schools could have the opportunity to move between the two schools and learn in either stream—a very practical arrangement which gives students more pathways.

I am pleased to say that the second phase of our trades training program is working well. Applications closed on Friday, 17 October. This is a big round, with $310 million available for schools through this applications process. When applications closed on 17 October, we had 115 schools submit applications but, as I said, because many schools have chosen to cluster, those applications actually represent benefits to 355 schools in total. The amount that has been bid for through that application process slightly exceeds the amount available—it is $320 million in total. We have indicated to some schools that we will extend the time period for their application to allow them to confirm their bids. That small extension of time has been to 30 October.

We think that this is an exciting process for the schools involved. It means that students around the country will go from learning on facilities which would have been best forgotten about in the 1950s, so old are they, and will give students the ability to learn trades skills on the equipment and in facilities which are appropriate for the 21st century. Of course, this was an area that the previous government neglected. It is part of its record of educational failure. Nothing got done to stop students around the country learning on the—

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