Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to support the Student Identifiers Amendment (Enhanced Student Permissions) Bill 2019, because I absolutely support a unique identifier for students across our education system. I do so with direct experience of how valuable that data can be to inform practice across the education sector and also how valuable the aggregated and de-identified data can be in informing this place and those who make policies about what is happening on the ground in the sector.

This bill goes to using that unique identifier and allowing VET student transcripts to be released to potential employers. In essence, I support that that is an efficiency and that it probably would work, and I note, as did the member for Sydney, the importance of ensuring that students and former students have control of that. I want to couch those concerns in a particular way, as someone who worked in secondary education and then primary education for a period of 27 years. There is a mythology amongst our Australian children that things go on the permanent record. They pick this up from American television, of course. Some children believe that every detention they've ever been given in a school is somehow going to be on their permanent record. I think this goes to the heart of the member for Sydney's comments. We don't want to go down that American path, because we are the country of the second chance. We're the country of the third chance. We're the country of the fourth chance. We're the country that says to every young person: 'You can always come back from that. You can have a bad experience. You can drop out of school.'

I stand here in this parliament as someone who dropped out of school—someone who left in year 11 to join my friends on the train to the city and paid employment, much to the chagrin of my family and with many tears from my mother. It was two years before I came back and walked into a family barbecue and said, 'I think I want to go back to school.' I got that second chance. The fact that I had dropped out of school—became a 'dropout', to use the American term—is not on my permanent record. My employers don't know that that's part of my history. Thank the Lord, or the people of Lalor might not vote for me. Hi, guys. Yes, I dropped out of school. We're the country that gives every young person the opportunity to change direction, to re-engage in education, and we don't want anything to get in the way of that. For me, the safety net that needs to go around this legislation is really, really important.

We always need to remember the value of the disaggregated, de-identified data to us and what it would mean in terms of our planning. It would inform us that more children or young people from a particular area—if I can give you this example—might have one qualification and then change tack. It might inform us about what was wrong with their first experience. We might know that there are this many thousands of kids in Victoria who have a particular certification in this and that they haven't been able to find employment or find permanent employment and that now they want to return and do a different certification. The unique identifier can give us very rich data to inform the decisions that we make in this place. I absolutely support that. I support its extension into higher education. I note, too, the member for Sydney's words that this system would be coming into the VET and skills area but not the higher education one, and I wonder about the reasons for that. I wonder why we keep segregating our education system in this way, even though those opposite tell us that going to university shouldn't be everybody's aim and that this is a sector that should serve the public well. For me, the treatment of the two sectors should be the same.

I support this piece of legislation and I support the efficiencies around employers being able to access people's training. But I am wary of the capacity for people to freely access that data, and I want to ensure that people, 20 years down the track, still have control about who sees this data, the level of data they see and, in fact, which transcripts they can download and see in that process. I welcome the measures in the legislation that will ensure that people aren't creating problems in the system by seeking to have a second 'unique' identifier and for any misuse of this program. People's privacy in this matter is, of course, a priority. Whenever we move to a technologically driven system and we say it's going to be about efficiency, we have to be absolutely sure that we have public confidence in these processes, because, as we learned with the e-health record, without public confidence we lose the opportunity to have the data and a good idea won't be fully implemented. I welcome the government's assurances here, but I'd like to see them firmly fixed and absolutely locked in to ensure that we're going to get the best out of this program. Of course, I appreciate being here today speaking in support of a government bill. It happens so rarely for someone who represents the seat of Lalor.

I cannot finish without saying that I welcome this government's attention to the detail in this space but I would like to see much more attention to detail across the TAFE sector. I would like to see this government commit to a public TAFE sector and to restore the public TAFE sector to the one that people trusted. In my electorate, I have many young people talking to me about their TAFE experiences—rather, let's call it their VET experiences that may not have occurred in a public TAFE—and there is definitely a lack of confidence in our VET sector at the moment, in terms of the value of the certification that young people are receiving and the value of certification that older people are receiving. It is an area of concern. This government's cuts in the TAFE and training budget since we were last in government go to the core of undermining the public's confidence in public TAFE and undermining the public's confidence that this government is across the detail, is across this skills portfolio, understands what is needed on the ground and is prepared to back our young people and to back people who are going to be retraining in this sector. The public will believe this government cares about this sector when this government puts its money where its mouth is, to put it bluntly, and supports the re-formation of public TAFE.

We know that that cuts across both state and federal governments. We know that it varies from state to state. As a proud Victorian, I can say that a state Labor government has done much work to reinstate public TAFE and to rebuild public confidence in TAFE. We're seeing that on the ground in Victoria with the large number of people taking up the free TAFE offers in Victoria. There's a lot of energy from young students that I talk to about a future that includes certification through the TAFE sector. So, with the government paying this much attention to this end of it, I want to see more attention to the front end of these questions around the funding for TAFE and around the fine-grained thinking in terms of which skills areas we want to encourage young people to go into. I want to see much clearer, disaggregated data in this space, particularly around gender and the availability.

If I give you this example, I think you'll understand what I mean about attention to detail. I asked the library to do some research for me on the trade training centres—whatever iteration they were in and whatever other names they went under. They began under Howard and they continued and went through renaming. I asked the library to pull together for me some information about where those trade training centres were built, whether they were still operating and what courses they were offering. Let's face it: it is some time since that investment was made, and I know that in my area there is no college. That money went into schools, and those areas will be desperately needing an upgrade to keep up with modern technology and modern training methods. So there's going to be a big demand for those facilities to be upgraded; yet, as a parliamentarian, I can ask our library to do that research and all they can do is go to Senate estimates questions to try and answer my questions. So we need a lot more attention to this sector from government. Employers say it's really difficult to chase down transcripts. They're not quite sure what they're looking at. They say, 'Let's have an efficient, clean system.' Fine, but what about the front end of skills and training which is just so important?

I'd have to say that the rebuilt TAFE sector in Victoria is a sector that requires highly skilled teachers. It is imperative that these teachers are up to the minute in their training. Technology moves at a great rate. I don't think I have to bore you with the number of trade classrooms I've been in where I'm walking in to have a look at a lathe and it's a lathe that you won't find in industry and it won't teach a young person much about their next job. And in my conversations with potential employers or people who are looking to take on apprentices, when they make assumptions about what skills kids are going to come out of school with, they all go back to their time in tech schools in the fifties where they had the latest and best equipment. That is not the case in our schools. It varies from school to school, depending on when the equipment was last purchased. A lot of it is now dating, severely. I use the lathe because it's what people talk to me about most, about kids coming out of school. They assume they're ready to do this apprenticeship, but they've been trained on a lathe that they won't find anywhere in industry. So I think it's a good example.

I take the opportunity to say this to the government: there are almost two million Australians who are unemployed or underemployed, and the TAFE skills sector is the key to them getting the skills they need to find permanent employment. I speak to young people in my electorate all of the time. As everyone in this place knows, I'm the mother of three sons and I've been on that journey with my three sons. There is a lack of understanding from our young people about what their certifications are valued at. You have a lot of young people who go out with one—they've got a certificate III in something—and they're looking for work. They can't find work. They think, therefore, that a certificate III is not of value.

I've worked with a few people coming into their 30s now who say to me, 'I did a cert III way back,' and they're dropping it off their resume because they think it doesn't have any value. So we've got a lot of work to do in this space. We might need to do an educational campaign for the people who are going to use the system, both the potential employers and the people who are giving them access to their qualifications. We might need to do a bit more education in this space. Dare I say it—perhaps it's the job of jobactive to do some of this education, to look at an unemployed person's history and their qualifications, rather than saying, 'There is a skills shortage in this; you should do this,' without knowing that the young person sitting in front of them already has two cert III qualifications and they're just looking for an opportunity to put their skills to work.

We've got a lot of work to do in this space. The government knows we've got a lot of work to do in this space. I am pleased to be supporting the government in this small area. The broader picture around the unique identifiers is something I fully support, as long as we have all of the checks and balances in place to ensure people's privacy and to build confidence among the public and those who are going to be students in our system. They need to have confidence that we're going to use that data to improve their experience. We're not going to use that data to undermine skills and training; we're going to use it to improve student experience, improve the information and improve our decision-making about what courses are offered where and what's required on our job sites around the country and to ensure that we've got young people trained and ready to go, ready to join the workforce.

See this speech in context