Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I thank the chamber for granting me leave to make additional comments on this report by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Training, Adolescent overload? Report of the inquiry into combining school and work: supporting successful youth transitions. I had a short opportunity to address the report when it was presented in parliament last week but, given that that was only five minutes, I want to take the opportunity in this chamber to add some more to those comments. I thank the member for Swan for his contribution to the debate and his enthusiastic and reliable participation in the committee. Often these committees survive on a couple of members who take the role seriously and engage, and he most certainly did that, as did other members who have addressed this report. I appreciated that.

I took the opportunity in the five minutes I had in the main chamber to thank the committee members and to thank the secretariat—and I acknowledge Dr Glenn Worthington is with us today in another capacity—whose work was fantastically important. That was particularly so in this case because, when we took on the reference from the minister to look at this transition from when young people are able to take on paid employment, generally from around the age of 15, to when they progress out of school into work or further study, and to look at the impact on that transition—particularly given that we have got a huge focus on increasing retention rates in schools—we knew we had a large roundtable at the beginning of the year with, I think, over 50 peak organisations from the education sector, the community sector, the trade union sector, all the academics, to talk about this issue, but we felt very strongly that we wanted to hear from young people. With all due respect, we did not want to hear just from people who sit on youth bodies; we wanted to dig down to the young people who were actually out in these workplaces doing this work and hear about their experiences. If members have a close look at the report, they will see it is full of the voices of young people, and I think that that was a particularly important aspect of the report.

We sought to do that by, firstly, the usual process of public hearings. We had 13 public hearings around the country and, as the member for Swan indicated, we had large forums at a number of secondary schools to which we invited all the neighbouring schools. We tried to cover all the states. We did Para Hills High School in South Australia, Leeming Senior High School in Western Australia, the Tasmanian Academy Hellyer campus in Tasmania, the Holmesglen Vocational College in Victoria, Craigslea State High School in Queensland and Illawarra Senior College in New South Wales. So we heard from a lot of students, their parents and their teachers at those forums.

But, in addition, I think the most important and significant innovation was that we established an online student survey. We wrote to all high schools inviting them to let young people know that the survey was available and that we were interested in hearing about their experiences and views. The response was that 2,765 young people actually took the opportunity to complete the survey and provide us with their views. That was particularly important, I believe, because when we came to the point of making recommendations in the report we did not want to take a paternalistic, adult view of what was best for these young people. We wanted to make sure that the actions of government supported and reflected the views of those young people, and I think that is what we have achieved.

It is important to note—and other speakers, including the member for Swan, have identified—that young people are much more involved in part-time work than when many of us were that age. I will not cast aspersions on the room by trying to calculate how long ago that may have been! Certainly, I know from my own personal experience that at the age of 15, like many, I was desperate to get out and get a casual job and have some money that I could decide how to spend. But in those days there was only ever probably one late-night shopping night in most states and on Saturdays shops stayed open till about two o’clock at the latest. So, on average, students who had a casual job could not work more than eight to 10 hours, because they were the only hours outside normal operational hours that were available to students.

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