Skills for All

The Hon. J.S. LEE (15:34): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking the Minister for Employment, Higher Education and Skills a question about the Skills for All program.

Leave granted.

The Hon. J.S. LEE: It was reported recently that the state government will scrap the problematic Skills for All and replace it with the WorkReady program, to be implemented in July. According to the report, the Skills for All program was not achieving strong employment outcomes and the new reforms were well overdue, as stated by the South Australian executive officer, Dr Joy de Leo, of the Australian Council for Private Education and Training.

In September last year, the Department of State Development admitted that it was not tracking employment outcomes, despite more than half a billion dollars being poured into the Skills for All subsidies in two years. Business SA stated that the Skills for All program was a flop, that employers and training providers need certainty and that constantly changing the goal post seriously undermines confidence in the programs. My questions are:

1. Can the minister explain why the government did not track the progress of the Skills for All governmental program?

2. With industry leaders concerned about the constant changing of programs, can the minister guarantee that the training programs are directly linked to job opportunities and not just qualifications?

The Hon. G.E. GAGO (Minister for Employment, Higher Education and Skills, Minister for Science and Information Economy, Minister for the Status of Women, Minister for Business Services and Consumers) (15:35): I feel that I have already answered this question; it is almost identical to that asked by the Hon. Stephen Wade. But I am happy to repeat the themes. The—

The Hon. I.K. Hunter interjecting:

The Hon. G.E. GAGO: Yes; I obviously didn't hear the first time, so I will go to great lengths—

Members interjecting:

The PRESIDENT: Order! The minister has the floor.

The Hon. G.E. GAGO: —to explain in detail. The premise of the honourable member's question is completely inaccurate, to start off with. The issue of Skills for All is that Skills for All was refashioned and replaced by WorkReady because we had reached the target; it did what we set out to achieve.

Members interjecting:

The PRESIDENT: Order!

The Hon. G.E. GAGO: Some once-off additional funds were made available over a period of around six years for us to achieve an increase in the number of people trained by 100,000. We exceeded that target within about three years, and we expended the additional money that was made available for that target. We achieved that target—in fact, we overachieved—and we achieved it within a shorter period of time than anticipated. So, the job was done.

As I said, the independent report on Skills for All that was done recently by ACIL Allen, which is a comprehensive report and which is publicly available, was done with a high level of diligence and thoroughness, and it identified a wide range of issues. Again, I see honourable members come into this place and all they want to do is dwell on the negatives. All they want to do is harp on the negatives, talk South Australia down, talk South Australians down and undermine the confidence of business, and we know that that is really all the opposition is good for: talking down South Australia.

As I said, the report is a comprehensive report and it identifies a number of strengths and weaknesses in relation to Skills for All. It identified that, indeed, Skills for All was highly successful in significantly increasing the participation rate; we were leading the nation. It also showed that we significantly increased completion rates as well. In fact, I think that we are second in leading the nation in terms of the best completion rates. So, it is absolute nonsense when they come into this place and say that Skills for All was somehow this abject failure. We achieved significant completion rates.

As the current minister for training, even though we are still leading the nation in terms of completion rates, I still don't believe that those completion rates are good enough. I have never believed they were good enough, and that is something I called very early on in the piece. I also believe we could do better in terms of much closer ties with industry.

The Skills for All model was a demand-driven model. Basically, people who wanted training could come in and subsidised training was made available for them. We have changed the premise of that model. We do not have a demand-driven budget, so therefore it is, I believe, responsible for us to set up a funding model that allows us to prioritise and target where public subsidisation of training should occur, and WorkReady does that successfully.

It much more closely aligns the areas of subsidisation with government key priorities and with industry need. WorkReady includes a much closer and tighter relationship with industry. We are out consulting with industry at the moment about the details of the subsidised training list. We have been overwhelmed with input by industry, and I am very grateful to industry for being as responsive as they have been.

I have also talked in this place about our highly successful component of Skills for All, which was Skills for Jobs in Regions. That was basically set up as an unemployment program initially to assist particularly chronically unemployed people to find employment pathways. It worked on the basis that local businesses would partner with an RTO and align individuals' learning pathways into real local jobs in local communities. It was highly successful. If you ask any of the RDAs or local regional councils that have been involved, they will say how successful Skills for Jobs in Regions was.

Under WorkReady, we have, if you like, built on that strength and expanded that component slightly, so that the eligibility criteria are now much broader than just chronically unemployed people. We have set up industry leaders' groups to help us, so there are now more of those with key industry people on them who help us align more directly with industry outcomes.

RTOs will be required to report more comprehensively on their track record. They will be required to report on their completion rates and they will be required to report on their employment outcomes as well. Those measures will be a very important component of the department's deliberations as to the best RTO when they next tender for public funds to do that job.

You can see that we have learned a great deal from Skills for All. We have built on its strengths and we have refined a number of areas to make it a very strong training model that is more closely linked with industry and more closely aligned to improved completion rates and so that there are much closer relationships between the students, training providers and industry needs.