Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last Friday, at Brothers Leagues Club in Ipswich, I had the pleasure of attending the St Edmund's College in Ipswich for their 'Learning from the Professionals' mentoring program launch. It is a program in its 13th year, and I am happy to say I have attended many of these events. St Edmund's—or 'Eddie's', as most people know it—is a Catholic boys' school in my electorate of Blair. The school is deeply respected by the Ipswich community and has been since the Christian Brothers arrived in Ipswich in February 1892. Home to about 1,000 students, it provides an outstanding education both inside the classroom and throughout the broader community. The mentoring program is just one example of this. The program sees participants assigned a mentor from their chosen field of work who they are able to shadow and learn from over the next three months. Many of the mentors are former Eddie's men giving back to their former school.

This year, 16 year 11 students signed up to take part, nominating a diverse range of professions, including architecture, surgery, the Defence Force and even palaeontology. With the help of those community members who have generously donated their time to help out with this program, they will gain experiences and insights into their future careers that they simply would not get otherwise. I want to congratulate principal Diarmuid O'Riordan and his staff on the mentoring program and to congratulate the school for the wonderful work they do, whether it is the East Timor classroom building project, Footprints in the Park or any of the other wonderful things they do in the Edmund Rice tradition.