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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 9 Hansard (28 August) . . Page.. 3350 ..

MS DUNDAS (12.02): I too add my voice to this report that the Standing Committee on Education is tabling today. It is a very comprehensive look at vocational education and training in the ACT. As you can see from the terms of reference and where the report goes, we did not set out to provide all of the magic solutions to make the vocational education system in the ACT better. What we did set out to do was actually find the problems, identify the areas of need and provide a bit of guidance to the government about how these problems can be addressed.

We consistently heard that vocational education is undervalued. I think this is the major concern. We all agree that education is an incredibly important part of everybody's life. People have different educational needs and wants, and how they are experienced needs to be reflected in our educational system. Vocational education was always seen as being undervalued, not as highly prized as a tertiary education degree. This then had flow-on effects to how the industry was perceived not only by students and parents but teachers and industry themselves, and that led to a spiralling circle of guess disenfranchisement of the whole vocational sector. This report clearly identifies that as an issue and provides some positive ways that this can be addressed.

I refer the Assembly to pages 72 and 73, recommendation 18, which Ms MacDonald has already spoken on. It is this committee's view that the value of VET is beyond question, and yet much could be done to improve the status of VET in the community. We see the worth and strengthening general public awareness, emphasising VET as a viable, valid, and valuable education pathway. It is a pathway to the future, as indicated by the title of the report, but it does need that focus on elevating the status of vocational education to make that a reality.

The concerns about the status of vocational education lead to a whole lot of other problems that we encountered, such as the problems with resourcing of vocational education. Without resources that would allow vocational education to grow, concerns are being raised about the ability of industry, which needs people with vocational skills, to actually help them with their training. There are too many forms to fill out, there are too many different hoops to jump through, that just continually put barriers in the way of expanding vocational education. So that is, again, another issue that was raised and that we addressed in our report, as well as the ability for vocational education to respond to industry needs.

A number of areas are currently expanding, currently growing new technologies, but would like to be part of the vocational education system. Having courses that are in line with current skills was again a problem that was raised. We need to resource vocational education so that the teachers and the people working in the industry can actually develop the courses to give people the knowledge to participate in those industries. We need teachers with up-to-date skills.

This was an issue raised by some of the students we spoke to. They really appreciate the effort and work that their teachers put in to provide them with vocational education, but they recognise that sometimes their teachers have been out of the industry they are training for a number of years, and hence their skills are perhaps a little bit out of date. They would appreciate their teachers having returned to industry pathways and work

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