THE IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION

The importance of this for each individual young person can’t be overstated.

As we all know, the days are long gone when a young person could leave school at 15 and get a job for life. Such a mistake now usually means drifting in and out of periods of unskilled, low-paid and insecure work. In today’s economy having a post-secondary qualification is now absolutely essential for gaining a good foothold in the workforce.

We know for instance, that having post-school VET qualifications reduces a person’s likelihood of being unemployed by 40 percent, and having a university degree reduces it by 60 percent.

And that, on average, people with post school qualifications earn more and are healthier than those who lack them.

But the importance for the economy of lifting school completion rates also can’t be overstated.

My Department for instance recently estimated that increasing the number of working age population with post-school qualifications by just 1 per cent would contribute around $8 billion dollars every year to GDP.

The Rudd Government was elected with a promise to begin an education revolution aimed at making us one of the most highly educated and skilled nations on earth. And we’re determined to achieve that goal.

We’re lucky to be starting with what is an excellent education and training system by world standards.

But the one thing holding us back more than any other is the long tail of educational under-achievement, often but not exclusively related to socio-economic disadvantage.

So if we’re going to succeed educationally we have to focus on the issue of educational equity.

With average school completion rates typically lower than other regions, the West will be one of the areas that stand to benefit.

SHORTENING THE ‘LONG TAIL’ OF UNDERACHIEVEMENT

Improving equity has to be done on a broad front.

We’re starting with the early years – because all the evidence suggests that the 0-to-8 years are crucial for developing the learning skills and capacities that can set people up for life.

By 2013, we want every four year old to be able to access 15 hours a week of quality early childhood education, delivered by a qualified early childhood teacher.

We’re also aiming to improve the capacity of our schools to prevent failure – by raising the quality of classroom teaching and by targeting additional resources to the most disadvantaged schools, public and private.

And to do this, the Commonwealth and the States and Territories are negotiating new National Partnership payments aimed specifically at raising teacher quality, improving literacy and numeracy achievement and reducing educational disadvantage.

As I remarked last week, we have to be open to new ways of improving school performance by learning from other school systems, like that of New York, which is using a rich mix of data from testing and enrolments to identify why it is that some schools succeed while others with similar socio-economic enrolments fail. I see this as an incredibly important tool for improving achievement rates in the West and other parts of Australia.

Also, the Bradley Review of Higher Education is currently considering the important question of how we get more people from disadvantaged backgrounds to university and TAFE and keep them there. There’s no point getting more young people through twelve years of schooling if we then erect barriers for them as adults.

All of these measures are part of a much wider project – which is to create individual pathways to the world of work for every young Australian in the contemporary economy.

The teenage years, as we know, are a crucial transition point in people’s lives and every young person needs to find the path that suits them.

And we’re developing a wide range of programs to keep young people interested in school and make the transition to a good job, including:

• keeping school relevant through the establishment of new Trade Training Centres teaching industry-relevant skills with the latest high-tech equipment;
• creating extra training places and apprenticeships;
• encouraging mentoring; and
• building the capacity in the careers advice sector.

A number of State and local government programs like these are already operating, involving many of the organizations and businesses that support Western Chances.
They’re getting results, and over time we expect them, along with our early learning, school and higher education programs to help lower drop-out rates and bring down the unacceptably high youth unemployment level.

Our social inclusion policies will also play a big part in this.

In the knowledge economy social inclusion and education participation are the same thing.

So our social inclusion policies, devised with the help of the members of our new Social Inclusion Board, will be examining ways to build the capacity of parents and communities to keep young people at school longer.