TAFE SA

Ms BEDFORD (Florey) (15:03): Minister, what guarantees can you give that students actually complete courses and that lecturers are qualified and fully able to teach course content?

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER (Morialta—Minister for Education) (15:03): I thank the member for the question. Obviously the organisation undertook an enormous body of work throughout 2018, in particular, and in 2019 leading up to the audit. That was focused on ensuring that the package itself and the assessment, in particular, of all those courses because TAFE doesn't know which courses ASQA is going to order ahead of the audit. So TAFE's improvement package was right across the board and intended to hit every single offering that TAFE was doing, and it was ensuring that the assessments and the training offering were indeed up to scratch, and so ASQA found it to be.

Part of that clearly is ensuring that all the TAFE lecturers are appropriate in their field, up to the relevant training standard and, indeed, also compliant with the new TAE requirements to ensure that they are appropriate people to be offering that training. That is what we expect of TAFE, that is what the national regulator expects of TAFE and, in the courses that they assessed, found TAFE to be compliant with. I have great confidence in the TAFE board—the new TAFE board, I should be clear, that has been appointed since the election—in their oversight of the organisation. I have already taken the first question on notice and, when I bring back an answer to that question, if there are any particular comments to make in relation to the second question I will include them in that first answer.