Dan Tehan (Wannon, Liberal Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

I'd like to thank the member for her question. The government is already providing additional places for regional and rural universities through our performance based funding. It's providing 1.3 per cent additional places across the board. We are also providing additional places through our short courses which have been taken up by regional and rural universities. As a matter of fact, I want to commend all regional and rural universities that have taken up the government's challenge to adopt the short courses. At the moment, we have 49 providers that are offering 321 courses in those priority areas that the member was talking about. Those priority areas are where we have skills shortages. So, when it comes to IT, when it comes to nursing, when it comes to counselling—something which has been incredibly important when it comes to the bushfires and we saw that we had a shortage of counsellors—when it comes to teachers, in all these areas we have been offering these short courses. The universities have offered them and students have taken them up.

Our hope, when they were announced on Easter Sunday, was that we would see 20,000 additional students take up these short courses, and we think we're on track to reach that number. So it shows that the demand is there. We want to keep working with the sector to make sure, especially in those areas where we know there are skills shortages, we will be able to provide those additional—

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