Katie Allen (Higgins, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the Student Identifiers Amendment (Higher Education) Bill 2019. The unique student identifier is a number given to a student upon enrolment in any tertiary institution. This bill amends the Student Identifiers Act 2014 to enable extension of the USI from VET to higher education. For the first time, a student identifier will follow a student throughout their education and be extended from vocational education to universities.

Imagine a student finishing school after completing the VCE. She enrols in a VET course in aged care and gains work as a care assistant. She realises she really enjoys looking after and supporting people and their families when someone is unwell. As a result, she enrols in a Bachelor of Nursing. During her degree she is able to support herself by working in an aged-care facility. She completes her degree and starts work at a hospital. After a few years, she decides that she enjoys the energy and fast paced environment of the emergency room, so she enrols in a master's degree specialising in emergency care. She sees how practice could be improved and wants to enact change in her workplace to ensure the hospital is giving the best level of care to patients, so she enrols in a doctorate and completes a thesis on clinical practices. Despite moving from TAFE to university to another university, her student identifier will be able to follow her right through her professional and educational career. This will alleviate the administrative load of the institutions, and the student will be supported and encouraged throughout their lifelong learning.

We all know that lifelong learning is now a fact of life. We know, with the future of work, that we have to prepare our students for ongoing learning now and into the future. With the 21st century knowledge economy coming online and the ability for people to access education becoming faster and easier, this unique student identifier is going to make sure that we can map the progress of people as they move through our educational system and that we are able to track them on an ongoing basis. By having one unique student identifier throughout a person's educational journey, it will help inform government policy and help both federal and state governments understand the pathways tertiary students take after leaving high school, a journey which is often complex and varied but doesn't just stop at the age of 25. It continues on for many people throughout their life.

In the last decade there's been a focus on encouraging students to undertake higher education in Australia. However, ensuring students stay enrolled and complete their studies has proved more challenging, particularly amongst rural, regional and remote students. Research from the Australian Council for Educational Research indicates that after nine years of commencing a degree only 59.5 per cent of remote students and 69.8 per cent of regional students graduate. This is in stark contrast to the 75 per cent of their metropolitan counterparts. We need to do better to understand the gaps, to ensure that once students gain access into an educational system they can be supported to be retained and maintained in that system. These students face certain financial pressures and emotional, social and cultural pressures from relocation to new environments, which their metropolitan counterparts are less likely to experience. Having one unique student identifier will allow policymakers to track the educational journey of rural, regional and remote students, and that can be used to inform policies to help ensure that students are maintained within the system and supported throughout their journey.

Furthermore, at the STEM Partnerships Forum, led by the Chief Scientist, Dr Alan Finkel, there was a recommendation for a lifelong unique student identifier to be established and implemented by this year. It was found that a key barrier to understanding the impact of policy efforts to improve engagement in STEM education was a lack of a consistent national identifier. I'm pleased that we are now debating this bill and I expect the support across the division on this.

As a professor at not one but two universities, I understand the unique situation that students face when they're making life decisions about where they would like to develop their education and where they would like to be in the future. We know that tracking student progress is very important when we are looking at strengthening the integrity and richness of the data that is provided so that we can see where we can better use our resources and where we can better support our students.

This bill will amend current requirements under the act to include the higher education sector. Specifically, the bill will enable the assignment, collection, use, disclosure and verification of student identifiers for higher education students. The register, appointed under subdivision B of the act, has powers that will expand to include the operation of the student identifier in the higher education sector. From 1 January 2021, once this bill is passed, new domestic and onshore overseas students studying at registered higher education providers will be required to apply for a USI. From 1 January 2023, registered higher education providers must not confer a regulated higher education award on an individual unless that individual has been assigned a USI or an exemption applies.

This is a simple, practical, sensible measure which points to the fact that our government understands that higher education needs to be flexible, it needs to be open and it needs to allow students to traverse the different sorts of educational outcomes they wish to achieve. It puts the student in the driver's seat with regard to their career development. I'd like to congratulate the minister on bringing this bill forward and I support it fully.

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