Vocational Education and Training

The Hon. A.L. McLACHLAN (14:59): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking the Minister for Employment, Higher Education and Skills a question about vocational education and training.

Leave granted.

The Hon. A.L. McLACHLAN: It was reported on page 10 of the Australian Financial Review on Friday 20 June 2014 that Jennifer Westacott, the Chief Executive of the Business Council of Australia, stated that the vocational education and training system is failing students, leaving them ill-equipped to be productive in the workforce. In particular, she highlighted that there were fewer graduates than needed to fill a growing skills mismatch between employers and industry, with the bigger shortages now in traditional trades. She further commented that more students seemed to continue to enrol in subjects focused on hospitality, retail and tourism. Will the minister advise the chamber what measures the government is currently taking to ensure adequate enrolments, specifically in traditional trade courses?

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) (15:04): I thank the honourable member for his important question. I read with interest Jennifer Westacott's comments the other day. There are many challenges facing our VET sector at the moment, and one is the shifting needs of our industry and the changing of the balance of our economy and the different industry sectors' contributions to that economy.

We have seen, for instance, a move away from more traditional manufacturing sectors into more advanced manufacturing, food technologies, medical technologies, etc. So, it is quite critical that we are able to anticipate not only our current industry needs but also to be communicating with all industry sectors to understand what their future needs might be as well. We have worked very hard to do that on a number of fronts. For instance, in our regions we have our industry leaders groups. They are representatives from key industries from that region. Most are business people, but not necessarily so, and they have very good contacts and networks with that local region and various industries associated with it.

We have established these industry leaders groups that help us understand regional needs so that we can plan VET placements in accordance with that. We also obviously survey industries as well, and we are just about to release a new survey that we will pilot in a couple of regions, so we have worked with industry groups to streamline that survey. It is really tough. We see that industries are wanting less and less red tape; they don't want to be filling out forms. Many of our industry sectors are characterised by very small to medium-sized businesses, they are often family businesses, and they just do not have the capacity to spend lots of time filling out surveys and putting labour force modelling into their workplace so they understand what their current and future needs might be.

We are obviously working to assist particularly small and medium-sized businesses to do that. This is information we have to get firsthand from the industry. It is important that we can develop with them tools that enable them to communicate to us in a timely and accurate way so that we can reflect those needs within our training profiles.