South Australian Certificate of Education

The Hon. P. CAICA (Colton) (15:03): My question is to the Minister for Education and Child Development. Can the minister inform the house about the adoption of the South Australian Certificate of Education by schools internationally?

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Minister for Education and Child Development, Minister for Higher Education and Skills) (15:03): I am delighted to inform the chamber about how our SACE is going. Members will recall my enthusiasm for the SACE and the way in which it is working in South Australia in dramatically increasing the number of students who are completing high school with a qualification, while maintaining a very high standard and ensuring that in SACE stage 1 every student is required to pass literacy and numeracy, English and maths, which is not the case in all states of Australia.

But we are also doing extremely well in the offering of SACE International, as it is known, the international program, whereby we are offering a world-class qualification in partnership with five colleges in Malaysia, eight colleges in China and now one college in Vietnam. I am particularly pleased about the Vietnamese school because I was there only last year with the first exploratory efforts to see whether it would be possible to offer the SACE at a school based in Hanoi, and now we see that it is likely that that has commenced, which is delightful.

SACE International has been delivered in Malaysia since 1983 and in China since 2005, and Vietnam is of course from this year. SACE has also been taught, incidentally for members who may not be aware of it, in the Northern Territory since 1972, and that partnership has continued ever since and is a very strong one. The SACE Board is spreading its wings still further and is now working with the Port Vila International School to offer the SACE International for the first time in Vanuatu—potentially from 2018. The school, which provides Australian curriculum from R to 12 aims to offer the SACE International to its senior secondary students from next year.

Increasingly, we are seeing that the SACE is being viewed as one of the go-to qualifications in the South-East Asia region. The reason for that is twofold: one is that if you pass you get a mark that enables you to come to an Australian university, and that is highly valued; equally, SACE itself prepares students so well, not only in content but also in skill development, that that in itself it is being valued as a way of completing school.

More than 40,000 students have successfully completed the SACE International since 1983, which is an outstanding contribution from a relatively small state. This includes more than a thousand students who completed the SACE International in China since 2005—a thousand Chinese students completing our high school qualification. Sometimes we hear people having a cultural cringe about the quality of our education, but we should have every confidence that our education is of an outstanding level and, in particular, the completion of our high school. That qualification is one of the most significant in the country and is demonstrating its acceptability across the world.

The SACE Board will continue to promote the qualification internationally, of course, in schools in China but also into Indonesia and India. It is anticipated that the Department of State Development's trade and investment delegations to South-East Asia, and particularly to China, have participated in those opportunities and through those opportunities is continuing to strengthen ties with educational organisations to show interest in delivering the SACE International.

This has direct economic benefits of course for our state because schools pay a licence fee in order to deliver the SACE and also for each of the students who undertake it. But what is more important than the economic benefit is the international and cultural benefit. To have students overseas studying our SACE and to have students therefore considering coming to our universities deepens their understanding of and affection for this country and also enriches our understanding of the reach that we have as a state internationally.