Tafe SA Shearing and Wool Program

The Hon. T.J. STEPHENS (14:48): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking the Minister for Employment, Higher Education and Skills questions about the TAFE SA Shearing and Wool Program.

Leave granted.

The Hon. T.J. STEPHENS: The TAFE SA Shearing and Wool Program provides students with the necessary skills and hands-on experience to learn this trade. It has been bought to my attention by the very good member for Hammond—a legend himself in the shearing industry, as he tells me—that students are required to sit a literacy and numeracy test before commencing the program. Both lecturers have professed their unwillingness to impose this test on students. My questions to the minister are:

1. If students have chosen to undertake the program, which is presumably practical in nature, why must they sit a literacy and numeracy test prior to the commencement of the course?

2. What are the pass/fail rates and what are the consequences of failure?

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) (14:49): I thank the honourable member for his most important questions. I am sort of shocked to hear such questions coming from the honourable member in terms of a proposition or an underlying assertion that does not support encouraging people with their literacy and numeracy skills. I am shocked because the current statistics are appalling right throughout Australia and that there are so many adults who have extremely poor literacy and numeracy skills. Honourable members have raised issues of completion rates in this place before on a number of occasions and I have indicated my concern at the current completion rates. Although South Australia is one of the leading jurisdictions in terms of high completion rates, nevertheless, as I have said in this place before, it's not good enough.

One of the things we have done to try to improve those completion rates is to ensure that assessments are done at the beginning of courses to ensure that those students applying for a particular qualification have all of the right skills they need, or prerequisites needed for them to be able to successfully complete that qualification. That was not being done particularly well by some training providers in the past and they were enrolling students that didn't have the basic skills they needed to be able to successfully complete that qualification.

So, I am really proud to hear that TAFE, and I hope all other training providers, are providing assessments up front of students, identifying where there are deficits that could impede them being able to successfully complete whatever qualification they are enrolled in and I continue to support that.