Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

I thank members for their contribution to this debate. The Better and Fairer Schools (Information Management) Bill 2024 will amend the Student Identifiers Act 2014 to extend the system of national unique student identifiers to the school sector. A unique student identifier in the schooling context will be called a schools identifier, and it will allow school students across the country to have a single identifier which will travel with them throughout their education—from school to higher education and vocational education and training.

The bill meets the Commonwealth's obligations under the current National School Reform Agreement to get schools identifiers underway, and it's an initiative which has long enjoyed bipartisan support and has been a long time coming. It was first agreed at COAG under the Rudd government in 2009 and then included a decade later in the National School Reform Agreement struck by the former coalition government. It has now, finally, been delivered by this government in this bill.

The bill sets up the architecture for school identifiers to be issued to school students through the existing Office of the Student Identifiers Registrar, but the practical use cases for the schools identifiers will be for agreement between me and my state and territory ministerial colleagues through the education ministers meetings. No use case will be implemented without the agreement of all education ministers. This is an important governance safeguard, and it is backed by robust privacy protections designed to ensure that any data collected is secure and used only for approved purposes. It's very important that we have privacy at the centre of this to ensure that we protect students whilst they benefit from the opportunities a streamlined and unified identifier system offers.

Once again, I thank members for their contributions, and I commend the bill to the House.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

Message from the Governor-General recommending appropriation announced.

Ordered that this bill be reported to the House without amendment.

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