School To Work Transition Inquiry Transcript - 18 Sept 2017

COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA
Proof Committee Hansard
HOUSE OF
REPRESENTATIVES
STANDING COMMITTEE ON EMPLOYMENT, EDUCATION AND
TRAINING
Transition from school to work
(Public)
MONDAY, 18 SEPTEMBER 2017
MELBOURNE
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HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
STANDING COMMITTEE ON EMPLOYMENT, EDUCATION AND TRAINING
Monday, 18 September 2017
Members in attendance: Mr Giles, Ms Lamb, Mr Laming, Ms Sharkie.
Terms of Reference for the Inquiry:

To inquire into and report on:
How students are supported from school to work including the following matters:
1. Measurements of gain in school and how this contributes to supporting students to prepare for post-school education and
training;
2. Opportunities to better inform and support students in relation to post-school education and training, including use of
employment outcomes of students who undertake school-based vocational education or post-school tertiary pathways;
3. Other related matters that the Committee considers relevant.
WITNESSES
BEGLEY, Ms Kate, Policy and Government Relations Adviser, Vision Australia ......................................... 33
CAIN, Mr Paul, Inclusion Australia .................................................................................................................... 33
CLARKE, Mr Indi, Manager, Koorie Youth Council ........................................................................................ 33
COWARD, Mr James, Policy and Public Affairs Manager,
Restaurants & Catering Industry Association Australia ............................................................................... 18
GOTLIB, Ms Stephanie, Chief Executive Officer,
Children and Young People with Disability Australia ................................................................................... 33
HARRISON, Dr Colin, Policy and Communications Officer,
National Employment Services Association......................................................................................................... 18
JAMES, Professor Richard, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Undergraduate and Academic),
and Deputy Provost, University of Melbourne.................................................................................................. 1
KENNY, Miss Edmee, Policy Officer, Multicultural Youth Advocacy Network Australia ............................ 33
LAMBERT, Ms Jenny, Director, Employment, Education and Training,
Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry ........................................................................................... 18
LIDDY, Ms Nadine, National Coordinator, Multicultural Youth Advocacy Network Australia................... 33
LILLY, Ms Megan, Head, Workforce Development, The Australian Industry Group .................................. 18
NAZARI, Mr Ali, Business Trainee, Multicultural Youth Advocacy Network Australia .............................. 33
O'CONNELL, Ms Megan, Director, Mitchell Institute ........................................................................................ 1
POLESEL, Professor John, Director, Centre for Vocational and Educational Policy and Associate Dean
(International), Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne ................................. 1
SCHUBERT, Associate Professor Ruth Caroline, Associate Director, LH Martin Institute,
University of Melbourne ..................................................................................................................................... 1
SINCLAIR, Ms Sally, Chief Executive Officer, National Employment Services Association......................... 18
SONNEMANN, Ms Julie, Fellow, School Education, Grattan Institute ............................................................. 1
URE, Professor Christine, Alfred Deakin Professor and Head of School of Education,
Deakin University ................................................................................................................................................ 1
Monday, 18 September 2017 House of Representatives Page 1
JAMES, Professor Richard, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Undergraduate and Academic), and Deputy Provost,
University of Melbourne
O'CONNELL, Ms Megan, Director, Mitchell Institute
POLESEL, Professor John, Director, Centre for Vocational and Educational Policy and Associate Dean
(International), Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne
SCHUBERT, Associate Professor Ruth Caroline, Associate Director, LH Martin Institute, University of
Melbourne
SONNEMANN, Ms Julie, Fellow, School Education, Grattan Institute
URE, Professor Christine, Alfred Deakin Professor and Head of School of Education, Deakin University
Committee met at 09:58
CHAIR (Mr Laming): Thank you, everyone, for being here. I declare open the public hearing of the inquiry
of the Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training into school-to-work transition. Today we'll
take evidence from many of you. The idea of these roundtables is to foster open discussion and also allow you to
reflect on other evidence being provided. We really do encourage that interaction in these roundtables. As you
will already be aware, we will be starting with Deakin University, the Mitchell Institute and the Grattan Institute
at the University of Melbourne.
The committee doesn't require you to give evidence on oath, but we mind you the hearing is a legal proceeding
of parliament warranting the same respect as proceedings of the House. Thus, giving false or misleading evidence
is a serious matter and can be regarded as contempt of parliament. The evidence given today will be recorded by
Hansard and attracts parliamentary privilege.
What we traditionally do is start with introductory statements, but we encourage them not to be too long. If you
feel you don't want to give one, you will get plenty of time anyway. But it's often very goo context setting, and it's
our first inquiry outside of Canberra, where we've listened to the federal department, so we would very much
welcome some introductory remarks. Then we will get into some questions.
Professor James: I might ask Professor John Polesel to make a statement on behalf of the university, and
then, if I have anything to add, I will.
Professor Polesel: I suppose the first thing is to actually look at what the reality is for school completers in
Australia in 2017. What we know is that about 80 per cent of kids across Australia complete year 12. Of those, we
know that about half go to university and about one-quarter go into some form of vocational education and
training. That includes some small numbers going into apprenticeships, traineeships and that sort of work based
training. The remaining one-quarter or so end up making a direct transition into the labour market, and I think
that's the group that we're probably the most worried about, because that transition tends to be a transition into
largely part-time work. If they're working, they're twice as likely to be working part time as full time. I don't think
that's a matter of choice; I think that probably just reflects the availability of work for them.
About five or six per cent end up unemployed. The ones who are working, whether they are working full time
or part time, tend to be working in two main occupational areas, and they are hospitality/food preparation and
retail. They are the two really big areas. The jobs that they're doing are mainly part-time, casual, low-paid and
low-skilled. In general they don't have any formal training attached to them, so what we're getting is a picture of a
fairly hostile labour market if you're a young person. If you're a woman, it's actually quite a bit worse because the
girls are concentrated even more in those two occupational categories. We see about 70 per cent of the girls who
are working working in just the retail and hospitality areas. These are not jobs that have a lot of long-term future
or promotion prospects.
The other thing to note is that that particular labour market that they're entering has them competing for jobs
against kids who are still at school and doing the same sorts of jobs. They are competing for those same jobs
against university students who are also doing those same sorts of jobs.
Basically, it's a situation which is a fairly difficult labour market situation, and I think it tells us that young
people really need further education and training. They need to go on and do something more if they're going to
get a better job than just flipping hamburgers in McDonald's or pushing buttons on a cash register.
I will finish with the group I haven't mentioned: the ones who don't complete year 12. That's the early leavers
and is about 20 per cent or so. Their situation is probably just as bad because basically most of those went to the
labour market. There's a group of boys who manage to get apprenticeshipsand that's a good outcome for that

Page 2 House of Representatives Monday, 18 September 2017
group. When you look at the chart, there's a spike of young men who manage to leave school because they've got
an apprenticeship. But, the remainder, and almost all of the girls, are basically entering an unskilled, low-paid
labour market, which basically doesn't have a lot of future.
Ms Sonneman: Thank you for the opportunity to comment. I will talk to the first point in the terms of
reference for the inquiry, which is about measuring gain in school, given that's where Grattan Institute's research
has mainly focused. We believe student progress is a really important issue, but at the moment we're barely
scratching the surface in how to define and measure it in schools. We think that a greater focus on student
progress would help improve the school-to-work transition in two key ways. First, focusing on progress in school,
as opposed to just achievement at a point in time, can help students develop a broader growth mindset and re-
enforces the value of effort and persistence, which are shown to be related to later success in life and work.
Second, a focus on progress measures in school can help improve teaching through the fact that it can help
teachers assess the impact of their learning strategies and which are working best.
We believe that, in Australia, there's been a large focus on big dataso the use of NAPLAN and standardised
testsas opposed to small data, data in the hands of teachers, to actually assess where students are at in their
progress and how to improve their teaching. We've also focused a lot on the traditional academic domains, rather
than the 21st century skills, such as creativity and resilience and communications skills. This is not necessarily
because we haven't articulated or clear goals for achieving those skills but is mainly because trying to measure
progress in those skills is still in its infancy, although things are moving.
That is a key area for future research. We know that to move forward there are a number of things that need to
be in place. We need to understand what developmental progression looks like for developing those skills in
schools, what the classroom practices are to then teach those skills students and, finally, how to measure and track
their growth. That's no easy task but that's an area where we would like more research and more policy to focus
on in the future.
Ms O'Connell: Thank you for the opportunity to make a short statement. The Mitchell Institute is definitely
keen on a further focus on the capabilities in the curriculum. That's an area where we've been working for a
number of years now with schools, particularly in Victoria. When we chat to employers and other groups, we see
that one of the reasons that young people aren't transitioning very well either into further education or into
employment isn't that they don't necessarily have the core skills; it's that they don't have the other skills to
compete in lifeso they can't get along with the colleagues, they may not have the resilience they needeven
down to levels of physical fitness. We hear that a lot from the apprentices and trainees that we talk to. So, like
Julie said, we're definitely keen to have a discussion about these broader capabilities and how we can start to
cultivate and assess them in children and young people and how we can start to value them. They are there in the
curriculum but, because we're not assessing them at a national level or reporting on them in a consistent way, they
are being taught very inconsistently across the country, with different levels of rigour and different levels of
priority being attached to them, because schools aren't measured on how well they develop those capabilities in
their young people.
The other area where we're keen to have a focus is on the parity of post-school pathways. We know that more
and more young people are going into higher education and to universities, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but
we do know that lots of jobs in the future will also require vocational education and training. We're quite
concerned that the funding mechanisms that we have at the moment are driving children towards university,
combined with some quality issues around VET. So we're very keen for there to be a discussion about how we
can actually make sure all young people can make a valid choice of pathways.
Prof. Ure: Thank you for the opportunity to make an opening statement. Deakin University's statement is
really about the importance of recognising that student engagement is no just what students bring but is also about
the responses of the institutionswhether they are preschool, school or higher education providers. So the focus
of our work is, firstly, improving the conditions in our community for learning, and that includes building
aspirations amongst communityparticularly those groups that are from first-in-family, non-traditional higher
education groupsparticularly, also, in terms of digital connectivity in the rural and remote areas. But then, the
opportunity to get them inso the pathwaysstressing the importance of pathways, particularly for those groups
that leave school early, so that we do engage them in ongoing learning. And then once they're in, supporting them
and acknowledging that students come into higher education from many different backgroundsas I said, first in
family, low socioeconomic status, the geographical disadvantage through rural and remote, lack of digital
connectivity, languages other than English, Indigenous, and a whole range of other disabilities. So within the
institutions, all these needs need to be targetedso targeted support for engagement, and learning. And then,
thinking about the learning program, building learner capacity and capabilities for employmentacknowledging

the importance of the knowledge base within what they're learning, but also acknowledging that direct action has
to be taken with students to help them understand the kinds of capabilities they need for employment, and helping
them to articulate that through their own authentic assessment processes.
CHAIR: Thank you, Professor Ure. Colleagues, it seems to me that there are three areas that have emerged.
The first one is, John, your 20 per cent of those who don't transition directly into either vocational or tertiary
education. You said this should be a key focus, so let's make that our first one. Then we might move to the quality
piece around vocational education, and some of the committee's concern that we have a competency-based
approachwhich makes it very hard to then assess quality within it, if it's simply a binary, yes or no, you're
competent. And then we might finish with the tertiary piece, which is what we are doing at tertiary level to finesse
our tertiary graduates to be ready for the needs of the 21st century. That is some sort of structure for the next hour.
Mr GILES: Perhaps we could also spend a bit of time, particularly with the Mitchell Institute and the Grattan
Institute, on capabilities and measuringon the first term of referenceif that's okay.
CHAIR: Yes, of course, that would be good. We might do that firstit's always good to keep my colleagues
happy!
Mr GILES: Thanks everyone for really helpful openings, as well as for terrific submissions. I'm particularly
interested in discharging our first term of reference to see where we might go with supporting the development of
21st century skills, and particularly the equitable development of those skills. Both of your submissions touch on
the challenge of measuring progress. I note in your submission, Megan, you touch upon the most recent piece
looking at problem solving. Are there other international examples that we might have regard to?
Ms O'Connell: There are small international examples; I'd have to sort of go back and have a look at the
research that we've done around that. But, most definitely, no country has actually got it pegged. No country has
figured out how we can assess these capabilities in a uniform way. I think some of the work that is happening in
Victoria, particularly around critical and creative thinking and then assessing that via a test, is probably round
about the best that you get in the world, where we are at, at the moment. Because it is very hard to figure out how
you assess these things when they can't be assessed on a normal classroom-based testclearly, literacy and
numeracy, we can debate whether those tests are all that great, but they're there and we can actually use them. So
yes: no country has actually got it right at this point in time. But I think Victoria is probably the best place to look
how to do that.
Prof. Schubert: I think the UK has done a lot of work about what is called the T-shirt student. This is a really
good concept because it actually looks at the broad capabilitiesif you think of a T, it's broadcreativity,
problem solving, entrepreneurial skills, as well as the technical skills. This is a concept that's really well
established in the UK. So I think that model is really useful to look at, and the Gazelle Colleges, which are
basically higher vocational colleges, have used that extensively. That's driven quite a lot of successful outcomes
for studentsand because they've had a really strong focus on entrepreneurial skills. I'll give you an example.
Barking & Dagenham College, in the UK, in a very poor area of Londonin one of the low socioeconomic
areashas one of the highest start-ups of microbusinesses in that region. There's a black population. The focus
there has been very successful, in terms of real outcomes for students. If we were looking at the capability model,
that would be a really good place to start.
CHAIR: Is there any other international experience we can draw on?
Mr GILES: The evidence we received in Canberra was the same as yours, Megan, to the effect that the
Victorian system is probably where we should be directing our focus in looking at the capability measurement. I
don't know whether we have evidence directly from the Victorian department. Perhaps that's a matter we might
have regard to.
CHAIR: We can put that to our own department; good idea.
Ms O'Connell: We've got the likes of Rooty Hill. There are individual schools that are very much focusing on
this and focusing on how they can measure capabilities and get their students to reflect on what their capabilities
are, and collect an e-portfolio of what they are so they can represent them to their future employers, knowing that
in those sorts of schools the kids are more likely to go on and have a direct transition to employment. So there are
little localised examples but nothing widespread.
Mr GILES: Today we're having another big debate about national testing and we're kicking off a review of
teaching. Do you think there is space in the current national debate and very crowded curriculum to do justice to
better embeddingobviously, the capabilities are in the curriculumor managing our pathway through
delivering effective learning capabilities and understanding where it's being done well, where progress is being
made?

Ms O'Connell: I think we have to. How we make the space for that is probably another debate about whether
you do have to start to carve out a space in the curriculum to do thiswhat's core and what's not core. It's
something we absolutely have to do, because literacy and numeracy get kids so far but they're not going to get
kids far enough to get them into a sustainable pathway. They do need the capabilities as well.
Mr GILES: Probably a question that needs to be asked is: is there any evidence that there's massive
divergence between the results of conventional testing of literacy and numeracy and people's 21st century skills?
First of all, I need to know there actually is a differenceotherwise, we're just dreaming up a domain to testand
does it vary greatly? If someone has done pretty well in literacy and numeracy, can I be reasonably confident
they're going to have poor 21st century skills, the same decile or could they be better? What's the variance?
Ms O'Connell: They're teaching completely different things. You can find people with great literacy and
numeracy and great 21st century skills, and you can find them with horrid 21st century skills. That's why if you
look at university entrance for something like medicine they don't only look at the academic results, they look at
another test to test: 'Are you actually going to become a good doctor at the same time?' So, yes, some will be good
and some will be bad; they're testing completely different domains, I would suggest. One isn't to the exclusion of
the other.
CHAIR: Do we absolutely know that there are plenty of people with good numeracy who have poor literacy?
It's not a massive national concern, is it? You simply do what you're good at and you drift away from what you're
not.
Prof. Schubert: The main problem is, if you don't recognise that this is of value you don't test for it and you
don't measure it. You only do things that are valued. This is what any system is currently
CHAIR: Moving on from that, does this simply reflect that in the end there hasn't been any real reason to
chase measurement of this, because it actually isn't that important?
Prof. Schubert: No. In the vocational system its listed in all the supporting documents. It's not even in the
main curriculum. So if you don't say this is important enough to be in the main curriculum, then, people aren't
going to be measured against it.
CHAIR: I suppose being compassionate, considerate, a good citizenI'm just trying to make sure that if I'm
going to invest money and effort in this it actually is going to make a difference to people who go into courses
and people go
Prof. Schubert: If you look at the examples in the UK, clearly, it has made a difference, in terms of the
outcomes for young people getting work. Instead of having a job we're making a job. This concept is quite a
different way of thinking. If you test even our young people in Australia mostly, a third of them will think: 'I'm
going to make my own business; I'm going to be entrepreneurial.' But you need to practise being an
entrepreneurial person in order to be good at it, and that's what this system has been doing.
CHAIR: So there's just a slight difference between saying we're going to take this cohort and teach them
entrepreneurialismof course, that's a public good; of course, they're going to be better at entrepreneurship than
they would have been before they started it. This is a different question. The different question is: do we need to
be measuring different domains with our current cohort and expect a different outcome at the end? I'm not talking
about taking people and teaching them entrepreneurship or 21st century skills: 'Am I failing to measure something
that, if I started measuring it, would be completely different in outcomes?' I just want to get an answer to that
question. Can you see where I'm heading here?
Prof. Ure: Yes, but I don't think we can answer that. I don't think the clarity of measures is there.
CHAIR: And if we can't after decades, why can't we after decades do this? Is it because no-one could be
bothered?
Prof. Ure: No. I think it goes back to what Ruth said. You assess what is valued, so that's where the energy
has gone. But I just want to make a comment. In a sense, then we start to think about 21st century skills, and
Victoria has a program around the tech skills. We start to modify our curriculum but we don't really have good
measures about what the outcomes from that should be. So we've now got quite an investment in tech schools.
There is an underlying principle for the development of the curriculumit's about problem-solving skills and
critical-thinking skillsbut there's still a lot of discussion amongst those different tech schools about how you
best do it. One of them is devolving to, like, tourism, a day in a tech school. Another one is developing a deep
program with the schools that are using the tech school so that there are five weeks of work before the students
come, and then there's reflection when they go back.

The teachers in those schools report that their practice is changing, but none of that is measured. We don't have
measures. So what does the minister want to hear? That one is putting 27,000 kids through and another one is
putting 9,000 through? It's program difference, so what is the measure? That one needs to be addressed. We are
responding to the needs but not with sound information.
Prof. James: We need to think about the measurement or assessment challenges here. Broadly speaking, the
more we move into the higher order skills, the things we talk about when we talk about entrepreneurialism and so
on, the less easy it is to pin these things down with traditional assessment methods. You then move to more forms
of assessment, different forms of assessors, more assessment over time, and the assessment regime starts to look
hugely complex in order to get a handle on whether or not young people are learning these higher order skills.
TypicallyI'm not a psychometrician and some of my colleagues will be more expert on thiswe can more
deftly assess some of the more obvious skills, the more easily measureable skills, in which I'd include literacy and
numeracy. That doesn't make those skills any less important, it just speaks to the science of measurement. So
we're not quite there yet when it comes to a measurement or assessment science around the higher order very
valuable skills that go into one's resilience in the workplace and one's flexibility and all of the skills we value. We
can't ignore that pedagogical challenge of assessment.
Prof. Polesel: I think also that the two are not so easily separable. You were asking about international
examples before. I think of somewhere like Denmark, where vocational competencies are assessed with this very
broad view of what the broader capabilities of that young person might be. If you're going to be a plumber, you
certainly need to have the technological knowledge required for your trade but you're also given the theoretical
knowledge, which is going to require literacy and numeracy and quite developed skills. You also require these
other things: How do you deal with customers? What do you do if you turn up to somebody's place and there's a
woman at home on her own? How do you deal with her as a client? What's respectful?do you take your shoes
off and all this sort of thing. That is actually built into their competency assessment. They have made that effort to
do it. The difference with somewhere like Denmark is that competency assessment is usually part of a work based
training program. So that young person is not just a vocational student, they're actually employed by someone.
They're an apprentice.
Ms LAMB: Just to stay on the measurement of gain, particularly the 21st century skills, my experience has
been we do this really well in developing those 21st century skills in early childhood, when we are spending a lot
of time in developing those. There seems to be, then, this shift somewhere along the line where we just start to
take our eye off the ball and start looking at an academic outcome that we can measure. I'd like to know whether
there is some research or some data that can show us something about the children who were demonstrating really
high levels of competency in 21st century skills in early childhood. Are those the students who are moving from
school to higher education to work more successfully than other students? Why did we stop measuring that if we
know it's so important?
Prof. Schubert: One of the problems that we're struggling with is that our system is so focused on higher
education. You mentioned junior primary, and that would certainly be true, but, from there on, the rewards and
the focus are on higher education. We've put so much effort in Australia into increasing the numbers in higher
education that we're getting what we've tried to achieve and we haven't focused on higher vocational education.
The emerging jobs around the world are in higher technical vocational education, not necessarily in degree based
education. We shouldn't beat ourselves up. We've actually achieved what we set out to do. We've focused on
economic skillsliteracy and numerously, the traditional skills. We haven't focused on the other skills. We are
paying the price in that sense because we don't have a tertiary system that gives equal weight to the higher
technical vocational skills, where other systems around the world have put their effort. We've got too many
people going into decree based qualifications when they perhaps don't necessarily need to be yet. We've created
many problems here with our system. We're not very efficient or effective.
Prof. James: I'd like to reiterate that. Unfortunately, the demand-driven higher education system has opened
up a chasm between vocational education and training and higher education. It's an unfortunate consequence of an
otherwise desirable demand-driven system for universities. That chasm in status means that most young people
will aspire to going to university, and maybe that's not a bad thing for some; it's possibly a bad thing for others.
The chasm has also become, rather awkwardly, a kind of pedagogical chasm as well or a difference in
pedagogical beliefs and cultureone that's primarily typically academic and holistic in focus, as the university
would argue, in a largely competency based vocational education and training system. We could argue that there
are flaws, if you like, on both sides of this pedagogical culture, with universities not yet paying enough attention
to broader skill sets, working to graded learning and those sorts of things. Of course, universities have moved a
long way in that direction.

On the other side of it, vocational education and training is a pedagogy that I believe is a very narrow
competency based pedagogy in most cases which doesn't reflect the way in which people learn, doesn't reward
high achievement and probably isn't the way to prepare people for the changing character of work, evolving
careers and so on. There is a huge policy challenge here to narrow the gap that's emerged between higher
education and vocational education and training, and to give more parity to those two outcomes so that vocational
education and training is a respected pathway for young people. Unfortunately, it's not getting the respect it
deserves at the moment.
CHAIR: Could we stick with that topic? That was the second of my three. Do we think employers of
vocationally trained Australians are looking for excellence? What are they looking for in a workplace? I suspect
some employers would say, 'I can tell if someone's got 21st century skills after they've been on the job for a day. I
can tell if they're a team worker and I can tell if they can anticipate problems. I can get a feel for that.'
Traditionally, like doctors going to a hospital, let them learn the bedside manner once they've graduated. Again, is
that a problem? If so, what do we need to do in vocational education to produce the best possible graduates and
have them work-ready under the current system?
Prof. Schubert: I must make a comment about employers. There are some enlightened employers who will
take someone with those kinds of skills and will say, 'I'll train them,' and there are plenty, unfortunately, who will
say, 'I want someone ready-madesomeone I don't have to do anything with.' So there's a problem there. But,
going back to the thrust of your question, one of the main issues that the higher vocational system faces is this
straitjacket of training packages. It's really a system that does not create holistic learning opportunities. Some
successful TAFEs and private providers can do that, but it's really a straitjacket and does not allow the kinds of
integration of learning that you actually need. We've created this, so our system has become very difficult for
providers to provide the kind of learning that other systems can have. A very comprehensive successful provider
should be given self-accrediting status so they can create the kinds of courses that are actually needed. At the
moment we have got this incredible bureaucracy, and it takes years for changes to be made in the kinds of
curricula that we actually need. So it's so slow and micromanaged that it doesn't allow good providers to do that
so there's one major problemand it is too focused on competency based and not capabilities. That's where other
systemsother jurisdictions around the world and in Europehave moved to. It's become a bit of a black-and-
white argument. People are so rusted onto training packages now that it's really hard to move them off, but that's
actually where it needs to go.
CHAIR: Are they constantly updating those packages, thoughthey can make small changes to curricula and
get it run through ASQA?
Prof. Schubert: Yes, but it takes years.
CHAIR: They would say nothing less than 12 months24 months, two years.
Prof. Schubert: Yes, it takes a long time. There are key people who always turn up. It's not a very effective
process. So it really is a curriculum model that is not designed for the kinds of skills we need and the rapid change
we need.
CHAIR: It's that old chestnut. Do we need a highly technical vocational element that overlaps tertiary and
allows a certain cohort to be able to do two or three subjects at uni as part of their vocational program?
Prof. Schubert: Yes.
CHAIR: Is there a need for that plan?
Prof. James: Very ambitiously, from a policy point of view, we need, in a sense, a single tertiary sector that's
got more diversity right across the boarda seamless relationship, if you like, between higher education and
vocational education and training. This would represent a massive overhaul in how we think about tertiary
education in Australia, so it's a formidable prospect. If I can just add one thing to Ruth's observations, with which
I agree: I also fear that training packages, inadvertently, deprofessionalise teaching in vocational education and
training. That's been one of the unforeseen consequences.
CHAIR: Can you give a practical example of how those packages do that.
Prof. James: They are so tightly defined in what teachers are expected to do. The others would be more
expert on this than I am. Ruth, you might
Prof. Schubert: One of the fundamental problems is the expectation that you only need a certificate IV to
teach vocational education. You need to be a degree-qualified person to teach junior primary or child care, so why
shouldn't our young people who are going through this systemand they're not all young, because the average

age is 35; let's be real about thishave appropriate teaching skills? If they only have a cert IV, it does not give
you anywhere near the kind of competency you need as a teaching professional to develop curriculum. It is
completely inappropriate. Why do we settle for that in this sector and we expect teaching expertise in other
sectors?
CHAIR: They say they don't want to close out people coming back from the workforce who have long
occupational heritage and they don't want them to still be part of that sector.
Prof. James: My understanding is that, in some ways, the funding packages are an admirable response that
recognise that, by and large, people are going to enter this form of teaching from different backgrounds with
different teaching expertise. The problem is, though, that a part admirable response then locks in a certain way of
thinking around the relationship between teacher and what is taught.
Prof. Schubert: There are two bits of research that I am sure you can access. One is work we did for the
Victorian government about VET teaching quality. The teachers themselves said that the cert IV wasn't good
enough or sufficient for them to be competent teachersthe Victorian minister will no doubt give it to you.
The second thing is that there is major research underway at the moment with ARC Linkage which says
basically the same thingthat degree qualified VET teachers are more effective whether they have an industry
degree or a teaching degree; both of them actually make a difference. There is ample research about this.
Ms LAMB: Page 3 of the University of Melbourne submission goes to the suggestion that school completers
are increasingly abandoning vocational education and training for university. That is a very stark difference to
what is happening in Queensland. It is opposite there; they are completing and staying in there. I'm quite
interested in the industry in Queensland and in the industry in Victoria and the suggestion that we are seeing
students move to university rather than completing their VET in Victoria but we are not seeing that in
Queensland. What is happening there? Students in Queensland are completing and staying and it is the preferred
choice. In electorates like mine, actually only 25 per cent of students are choosing university, which is nearly
directly opposite to what the experience your submission goes to. Looking through a national lens, what is going
on?
Prof. Polesel: Unfortunately we do not have school completer data from most states. We do have it for
Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. What we have seen in all three states is an increase in the proportion
of school leavers going directly to university so that has been growing in all three states. But in Victoria, we do
not have longitudinal data. We do not have long-term data for the New South Wales so I do not know about there.
For Victoria, what we've seen is the proportion who would go directly to TAFE as it was then, because it was
mainly TAFE, has actually dropped by about 10 per cent in that 15 years and going to university has risen by
about 10 per cent. I think partly that reflects what Richard was talking about earlier, which was the availability of
places. I think it partly also reflects problems with the VET sector in Victoria, and that may be the difference
between Victoria and Queensland, where we have seen contestability of funding and a lot of people really worried
about the quality of the vocational programs that are offered, especially by some of the private providers.
Prof. Schubert: Students are not dopey. They want to make a choice that will get them a job so they are
choosing something that will get them a job. All of the study that they are doing is all vocationally based. It is all
about getting a job for them whether they go to university, to TAFE or to a private provider. But there has been a
problem with low trust, and we've created a low-trust environment. Students will ring up even TAFE now and go,
'Are you a TAFE? Are you sure you are a TAFE? It is so bad that I'm not sure I'm going to be ripped off or get
somebody that I can't trust anymore.' That has not had the same impact on Queensland. I know they've had
contestability but the system has not been destroyed in a sense in the way that it has been in Victoria and where
they are now rebuilding. When they are in a low-trust environment, people start thinking, 'Maybe I will go
somewhere that has better status and is more secure,' even though the employment outcomes are not necessarily
better. I think that is one of the explanations for the difference.
Ms LAMB: I'm trying to think through is this a symptom of a change or a decline of an industry that we are
experiencing rather than what we are experiencing in Queensland. There is a suggestion for having our TAFEs
and our unis on one campus. Is there evidence of people shifting to university when there is the one campus as
opposed to if you have to pack up and go to university like you would have to in my electorate? It is more of a
deterrent to head to uni if you have to pack up and travel 30 kilometres.
Prof. Schubert: Absolutely it is. People want to study locally.
CHAIR: To add to your situation, our Queensland pictureyou may have some reflection on thisis that
over 10 years the proportion getting an OP entry score has fallen from 62 to about 46 per cent but the proportion
actually going to university is climbing. So my concern is that in Queenslandwhich obviously has this unique

OP system where everyone else basically just gets a QCEwhat's happening is that, once you decide that you're
not going to go to university now for the first time, there is no interest in this OP score and no interest in pursuing
authority or board subjects. So my concern is that we're getting this lazy middle where people say: 'Look, I know
where I'm going. It's going to be a VET program. It's purely competency based. Honestly, as long as I do basic
maths, no-one really cares what score I get.' So we've now seen that it's just a matter of ticking off these
prerequisites but there's really no push for quality, necessarily. Some schools actually have half of their students
getting a vocational qualification in school, but none of them have done a board subject.
Prof. Polesel: And the problem is that those vocational qualifications are usually at cert II level, so they're
very basic and they're not going to provide a direct pathway into a particular occupation, which is why you have
much higher proportions in Queensland going directly into the labour market than you do in Victoria and New
South Wales, and a lot of those kids who go into the labour market are either part time or unemployed.
CHAIR: That may be a good segue. We have 20 minutes to look at this high-risk group that I thought you
touched on very well, John. Then we will leave some final tertiary education observations for the last 15 minutes.
Can we talk about this disadvantaged group, in which I think we all share an interest. We're talking about this 20
per cent that aren't going to be school completers. Describe what the world is like for them. What do we need to
be doing to see these guys get more secure pathways and be more active economic contributors?
Prof. Polesel: I would say that the kind of diversity that Richard was talking about at the higher ed level also
needs to be offered at school. I think what Ruth said about the focus on ATAR, OP and university entry in our
schools is quite extraordinary. If you look at 100 kids who start year 7, only about 40 of them are going to go to
university. Yet, if you go into any of our secondary schools, it's all about the university dream. So I think our
schools need to provide real choice and a greater variety of programs. They need to be more inclusive for those
young people who are not intending to go to university or just won't get there. I think in many cases providing a
more adult and welcoming environment at the upper secondary level is really important, particularly for kids who
are disengaged and who don't feel that they are welcome within the highly academic sort of program where
they're still being treated as children when they're in year 11 and year 12. So I think we need more diversity in our
upper secondary schools and less of an exclusive focus on university entry.
Ms O'Connell: Can we broaden it out from just the kids that don't finish school as well, because our report
has shown that at age 24 we have about one in eight young people that aren't fully engaged in either employment
or education and training, and they're essentially going to stay in that position for the rest of their lives. It's mainly
the kids that don't make it through school, but there's a core group that make it through school. If they have an
ATAR of 10, 20 or 30, they're doing no better than those that actually don't make through school.
I completely agree with John: the ATAR appears to be a thing that drives senior secondary education, so then it
goes through and starts to drive the whole of secondary education and really narrows down the experience for
young people in learning subject based information, which is of great detriment to those young peoplethe 60-
odd per cent that don't go on to university. We've created this entire system around a small portion that do go on.
CHAIR: I just have a tangential issue here: students taking a gap year after school. Have we followed that
cohort to see if their outcomes are any different to those that go straight into formal education post school?
Prof. Schubert: Often they do that mainly because it's the funding issue that drives their behaviour. They say,
'Well, I can't get money straightaway, so I'll take that gap year because then I can get paid after 18 months.' So
they're not all doing it because they're having some personal improvement experience. Most of them are not doing
it for that reason.
CHAIR: Do you follow them for a couple of years to see where they end up? No-one's specifically done that
yet?
Prof. Polesel: We know that if they're deferrersif they've actually had a university offerabout two-thirds
will come back. I think Ruth's right. A lot of them are country kids. Kids from regional and particularly remote
areas find it very difficult to have the resources to move to the city, to relocate and then to pay fees.
Prof. Schubert: I want to talk about the group that you talked aboutthat 20 per cent. One of the issues is
how they are taught in a school environment, and I do agree with that. Some of the most disadvantaged kids are
going through independent learning centres, and that's a completely different kind of environment for kids like
that. They can then be very successful, because it is out of that mini-academic school kind of environment.
Perhaps they need to go to a trusted environment like a TAFE, which does cater for those young people and gives
them another chance. A different kind of environment is really critical for them, and they can be very successful.
That's one of the things that I would argue with.

I would also argue that it is the parity of status that is a really critical thing for young people. I would point
people to the Netherlands system with its universities of applied sciencesbasically they made their TAFEs what
we would call HVOs, higher vocational education. They called them universities of applied sciences, but, to all
intents and purposes, they look like a TAFE and they feel like TAFE to me. This makes for a parity of status, and
that is a valuable pathway, as opposed to the research universities. Now they work much more in collaboration.
We are really a long way behind in Australia. We think we're quite good at stuff, but really we're not. The more I
look internationally, the more concerned I am about our system. From a policy point of view, we are really not
focusing on where the rest of the world is looking.
Prof. James: There is obviously a risk in thinking of these as linear transitions, though I know you are not
thinking of them in these terms. One of the emerging things we see in tertiary education is the emergence of
microcredentials and different forms of recognition. If you imagine an optimum tertiary system into the future,
and perhaps a senior secondary one as well, it's one in which there are lots more flexible options for people to dip
in or dip out, come back and gain recognition for smaller pieces of learning. I'm not suggesting for a moment that
micro credentials will overtake long-haul awardsthey won'tbut there needs to be a place in our thinking for
how we can give what I'll call smaller chunks of recognition for people who are dipping in and dipping out. Once
you start to create the right architecture for that, you create a framework that gives people, if you like, more
autonomy over what's possible for them and it lets them build useful skills and credentials in different ways to the
ones we offer at the moment.
CHAIR: Isn't the vocational system in schools meant to do all of this? Wasn't this their best shot at a realistic
occupation-based learning pathway?
Prof. Schubert: A lot of the capabilities we talked about earlier are great things to microbadge or to have
those lumps of credentials, for want of a better word, but we don't value them, and that's one of the problems in
our system
Mr GILES: The whole architecture of our training systems is antithetical to that.
Prof. Schubert: Yes, it is, and school sets are seen to be somehow rorting the system, when that's what people
actually want. They want bits of knowledge that they can build up. In fact, the vocational system gets beat up all
the time because they don't complete a whole qualification, but they have to be enrolled in one. It's just a crazy
thingthey have to enrolled in a whole qualification but they only ever wanted three units. They never planned to
complete it, but then they get beat up because they didn't complete it. That's just craziness. That's the kind of thing
that people wantthey want it when they need it.
Ms LAMB: Let's go back to where we started with our disadvantaged students for a moment. I note that for
the University of Melbourne 93 per cent of students graduate. What percentage of those have come through the
complementary support program? Is there a greater success rate of students who have gone through that program
and who graduate?
Prof. James: Speaking about the University of Melbourne in particular, we see little difference in student
academic performance in terms of student background. Broadly speaking, we're of course taking a slice of high
achievers full stop. Regardless of pathway, socioeconomic status or gender, we see the same levels of academic
success and retention.
The one group for which we can't claim such high retention would be Indigenous students. Our Indigenous
student retention and completion rates are high compared with the sector overall, but they're not comparable to
our student body overall. But the University of Melbourne in most ways is not a useful example of the broader
challenges we face in the sector.
Ms LAMB: Support programs are a pathway to ensure that kids from a disadvantagebut what you're saying
is that they have just as successful outcomes as a student coming through who's not coming through a
supplementary program.
Prof. James: Yes.
Mr GILES: Going to the Deakin submission, Professor Ure, there are a couple of things I want to touch on on
a related issue. You end by referencing the Centre for Policy Development's research on increasing concentrations
of advantage and disadvantage in schooling, which is something that I'm very concerned about, particularly in big
cities where property prices are accelerating incredibly rapidly. You've got a kind of optimistic tone in terms of
the efficacy of Deakin's program, but I'm just wondering if there's a broader comment you could make about how
concerned you are about the impact of increasing concentrations of disadvantage in school communities on post-
school transition opportunities.

Prof. Ure: I think we are very concerned about that, which is why we have such a strong commitment to
impacting back on our communities and improving community response to disadvantage. Perhaps if I point to
Warrnambool: it's a particularly problematic area for us. If you look at the school-leaving community, it's
particularly low-scoring with low completions. You have a university and a TAFE in that environment. The
university is clearly struggling to survive in that position. More broadly, moving to the Waurn Ponds campus, our
engineering school has really strong connections to the Gordon Institute and has two-way programs for students.
We have students who can pathway in through Deakin College to engineering and can take engineering at the
university and at the Gordon Institute. We have multifaceted responses, which I've tried to put into that
submission, to address needs and disadvantage in many different ways.
Mr GILES: I have two questions arising from thatone is an open one. I was really interested to read the
comments about disability, and I'm just wondering if I could draw you out a bit more about the intake of students
with disability as well as how you support them. At a wider level, it seems that these programs are important and,
to the extent they're funded, they're doubly important. You end your submission by referencing a challenging
entry environment, and I'm interested in your comments on the extent to whether, if this concentration of
disadvantage continues in schools, these programs are going to matter at all.
Prof. Ure: I think they always matter and I think
Mr GILES: Or whether they're going to have the sort of impact that is consistent with the aspirations.
Prof. Ure: The point is that there's huge disparity in the populations of students who come in to university,
and they're coming from a whole range of backgrounds that I've previously mentioned. If that gets more so
more disconnected or disparatethen, clearly, there will be more students who fit into the sorts of situations that
John has outlined. But there's still always a group that need support serviced through the university. I think the
submission points to the importance of the HEPPP funding and making sure that universities are able to provide
those support activities for students. But they're across-the-board activities. It's not just that you have a disability
support centre. It's that you have peer mentoring, inclusive pedagogies within the framework of teaching and
targeted responses to students who are at risk early. There has to be a full range of support for these students. But,
picking up on Richard's comment, they can be successfuland are successfuland it's not just linked to the
ATAR score that they came in with.
CHAIR: We did have this last section, which was this freeway cohort of people just going straight through the
course that they know and, typically, having a reasonable prospect of employment and high earnings. Have we
seen any changes in the major degree programs like medicine, engineering and lawthose licensure
professionsthat recognise the importance of these euphemistically termed 21st century skills. For instance, how
has the medical degree changed in the last 10 years with regard to that? I note that the University of Queensland
moved from a purely score-based entry into their medicine program to a complex interview system, which they've
since dropped. There's some evidence that they moved away from that and back to a more conventional intake
methodology.
Prof. James: Broadly speaking, we see a number of trends. For some of the professional areas, we're seeing
graduate entry becoming more significant. Once you move to graduate entry, then one's ATAR becomes less
significant. It'll be one's performance at university and on some very legitimate standardised tests around personal
capabilities to be a doctor or whatever it happens to be. Christine might want to comment on the way in which
education's moving in that area. But medicine, in many ways, has been the exemplar of the professional field that
has accommodated academic background and personal qualities and capabilities.
Prof. Ure: Education certainly is moving to require assessments around personal as well as academic
capability, and there is also the opportunity for students to come into teacher education at undergraduate or at
postgraduate level. All I can say at this point is that these things have been driven largely at a policy level, and the
jury is still out in terms of their impact. Postgraduate teacher education has always been available, particularly
through the grad dip, but now they've gone to a two-year Master of Teaching program. There has been some
pressure to think about that being the pathway into teaching, but in current research there isn't evidence that they
are actually better teachers than undergraduate teachers who come through a four-year program.
CHAIR: Has anyone done that work in medicine? Has anyone looked at graduate doctors versus
undergraduate programs five years down the track?
Prof. James: I imagine there has been some work done, but I'm not familiar with it.
CHAIR: This goes back to that first slightly irreverent question that I asked, which is: does it really matter? I
know we keep using this euphemistic term '21st century skills'. I need to know that, if we embark on this process,
I'm trying to more aggressively, formally recognise something that everyone seems to talk about but no-one's

developed for a generation. I just keep asking the question: do you just get this en passant in your life journey?
There are some people who'll never be great communicators. They find a job where that is not so important and
they surrender that field to people who are good communicators. But I absolutely need to not take this for
grantedit's incredibly important, it hasn't yet been formally measured, it's just around the corner and it's the
Holy Grail.
Ms O'Connell: I think it all comes back to the changes in the labour market. It was fine to prepare kids, in our
the way we're preparing them now, so they could go off and do very routine jobsflip burgers at McDonald's and
the like. But those jobs are disappearing, so we need students and young people to be great at things. So, yes, you
may not be a great communicator, but you may be a great problem solver or you may be great at doing something
else within your capabilities. But we can't just have everybody becoming the same at everything, which we could
in the past. It was okay because we had those core groups of jobs that were routine. With the demise of routine
labour, we actually do need people to be able to recognise their capabilities. If you recognise you're not a great
communicator and you go down another path instead, that's fine, but you need to have that option.
Mr GILES: Can't the question be equally validly put in the alternative? Megan, I think you almost said this
so if I get you wrong, correct mesenior high school is entirely focused on ATAR, which is irrelevant to the life
prospects of 60 per cent of high school students. If that isn't working, what is the alternative? I'm unaware that
anyone's articulated a different approach to seeking to measure capabilities.
Prof. Ure: You can't have one without the other. You've got to have a sound knowledge base as well as
personal capabilities. In my opening statement, I commented on student engagement. 'Student engagement', when
it was first used as a term, was seen to be something that the learner brought into the environment. Then, it was
understood that what the teacher does does matter. Then, it was understood even further that what the whole
school does does matter. You need environments that allow students to articulate not only their academic learning
but also their capabilities. There was a mapping study that I led in 2011-12 on low-ICSEA schools that were
making a difference. The characteristics of those schools were that they used data to map not only learning but
also behaviour, and they typically shared it with the students, so the students got to understand themselves as a
learner and as a contributor or not.
CHAIR: Formative assessment.
Prof. Ure: Exactly. In the submission from Deakin University, we talk about the importance of the
capabilitiesso the learning outcomes for students and their capacity to articulate. Every course is designed not
only with content knowledge but also with learning capabilities as part of the course design. Students can develop
portfolios of their capabilities, and they can microcredential them. They can take something from it and say, 'I've
got a degree, and I've got capabilities.' We're doing that in ourI'm the Head of the School of Educationteacher
education course. One of the most problematic areas for beginner teachers is classroom management, so we have
a focused capability around classroom management. We're developing that with industry. The Institute of
Teaching and the Department of Education and Training are helping us develop what the measures are that people
can produce evidence against to gain a hallmark for that capability as a teacher.
Prof. Schubert: Mr Giles, you asked, 'Why does it matter?' That was basically your opening question. It is all
about employment opportunities and the kind of work that, increasingly, people are doing, which involves
technical teams and complex problems. I'll give you an example of this. The youngest top 10 company in
Australia was started in about 1920. If you look at America, out of the youngest companies in the top 10 there,
half of them have been started since 2000. The kinds of technical innovations that are happening require people to
work increasingly in teams to solve problems. If we don't teach this, then our young people and we won't be
employable, basically. It's as simple as that. This rapid change in the economy is happening right across the
world. We are not immune to it. Even in our specialisations, if you want to think about that, these same things still
apply, so it is fundamental that young people increasingly have these skills, because otherwise they won't get
work.
Mr GILES: Your first comment was really about the number of students who are undertaking university
coursesI don't wish to have any editorials attached to thiswho perhaps ought not have undertaken those
courses. Basically, your submission says, in a nutshell, that the institutional arrangements governing postschool
education in Australia don't meet the future labour market needs of Australia. That's it, isn't it?
Prof. Schubert: That's exactly what I would say.
Mr GILES: There are two bits to it, aren't there? There's our sense of how the market operates and the
consumer's sense of how the market operates and the shape that the current institutional framework applies to

those choices. Just on that, there seems to be a couple of things worth touching on. You say that we need to
basically wrap everything up into one system to offer appropriate quality assuranceis that right?
Mr GILES: The other thing that I'm a bit interested in and we've touched on in our other inquiry is the degree
to which secondary students are equipped to make these choices. I'm just wondering if I can get anyone to
comment on careers counselling and other support. I get that there are particular issues. Victorian TAFE is
completely collapsing.
Prof. Schubert: I should say that it is being rebuilt.
Mr GILES: Yes, it is. The Andrews government is doing amazing work rebuilding itMr Laming was just
about to say that. I just wonder if I could draw out some commentary on this issue.
Prof. Schubert: I'll let someone else go first.
Ms O'Connell: We've been doing a bit of work with the Victorian government on careers counselling, having
a look at how it's working at the moment. Most definitely careers counselling in Victoriaand I presume the
situation is probably quite similar throughout Australiais really variable. The amount of advice a young person
receives definitely varies by SES. Some schools in low-SES backgrounds barely have a careers counsellor or they
have a teacher who doesn't want to be a teacher anymore who gets put into that position. And careers counselling
still seems to centre around: 'What is the course that you want to go on to straight after school?' Generally, career
counsellors are from a university background and have usually gone through the teaching pathway. They
sometimes have some careers expertise, but university is a system that they know. So it's all about the young
person, generally, by about year 10, selecting the course that is their one course for their one job for the rest of
their life and tailoring their subject choice accordingly.
The interesting thing we know about careersand this comes back to your point, Susan, at the very startis
that aspirations for all young people are very similar. Between the ages of three and six, children pretty much
want to be the same thing, and that starts to change when they enter school, realise where their position in society
is and get exposed to different types of careersor don't get exposed to different types of role models. So the
opportunity is there, but we'd have to start very early on to show all young children: here are the various things
you could be regardless of what your family background is. It definitely needs to start a lot earlier than year 10 in
schools.
Ms LAMB: I agree with Megan and I think it's not just about what a child's experience has been. Some
children have never actually experienced anyone going to work, so their idea of what is work might come from
their teacher or from a friend playing in the sandpit talking about what mum or dad do, but for some children the
notion of work is meaningless. That probably goes to point 2 of our inquiry, which is about better informing and
supporting students. To go to Andrew's point about career counselling, I'm the mother of four boys, and the last
one's finishing year 12 this year, and I've been through career counselling
CHAIR: You should be on the other side of the table!
Ms LAMB: Yes. Well, my experience has been that career counselling is incredibly important, but what we
haven't explored and the questions for each of the four boys that haven't been asked are: what's your 10-year plan?
What's your 20-year plan? If we're talking about transition from school to work, we're just talking about getting
you there. None of those conversations have been about what is beyond that for each of the boys. That
conversation's had at home, but not every child has the opportunity to have that conversation at home. So I'm very
keen to hear a bit of an expansion on point 2, which was about informing and supporting students. What do we
need to do better in that space?
Prof. Ure: Career advice is a very, very small component really, because the bigger impact on students and
where they go is their experience, which comes from family, first and foremost, from community and then from
school. Schools need to be connecting students to ideas about work through the curriculum, and that does need
curriculum change. The tech schools initiative is part of that. In Geelong, we are currently running with the
STEM successful students under the Skilling the Bay project, and that is about university and TAFE working with
teachers in schools to build teacher-STEM capability but also to build that link to industry in the region. So it is
building the curriculum around solving real-world problems that are linked to that community. It's growing the
knowledge that there is a work world out there, that there's an industry world out there and that the way industry
works is through problem solving. So that needs to come right back into the school curriculum.
Prof. James: I would just add that there is plenty of evidence that something is not working here, whether it's
rational career advice or whole community consciousness around the rush to higher education. The evidence is in
attrition rates in first year. Attrition rates are contested, and people dispute what they mean and so on but, at the

same time, think of the great expectation that young people should try to get into university, if they can, and then
marry that with the dropout rates that can be between 10, 15, 20 and 25 per centand, in one case a couple of
years ago, 30 per centin first year.
There are lots of reasons that young people drop out. I'm not suggesting for a moment that that's all due to
inadequate career counselling or whatever, but we have to face up to the fact that something is not working in
terms of the guidance that young people are given. I absolutely agree with Megan that career counselling is not
really a fully-fledged profession within schooling; it's something that someone does often on a one- or two-day-a
week-basis. I'm not saying that they are not well-meaning individuals. They barely have enough time to put
pamphlets in the hands of kids, let alone have a proper conversation about the next five or 10 years.
I would also throw one other thing into the mix here. We haven't talked about it, but it's part of the systemic
structures that are holding us back here, and that is the Australian Qualifications Framework. The AQF is a good
framework as far as qualifications frameworks goand I hope my colleagues would agree with that. It would be
one of the better frameworks that you would see internationally. But it's a framework for a previous time. It itself
is a linear, hierarchical framework with a whole set of assumptions about, if you like, climbing some notional
ladder. If we're going to get serious about the big challenge of a system overhaul, we have to think about the
burden that the present AQF brings to us in terms of our thinking about hierarchy, status and microcredentials and
things of that kind. I would be interested in the views of my colleagues if I've got that wrong.
Prof. Polesel: I agree. Can I just go back, just for one minute, to careers education. I think the group that we
forget about are the ones who've already left school. We need to remember those kids who've either dropped out
of school or who've completed and they've gone into that part-time type of casual workplace. Who gives them
careers advice? There is no independent careers service in Australia which can fill that gap at the momentand
that is a big, big gap. They end up getting advice from shonky private providers who are offering them $20,000 a
year courses that they're not going to complete. If that's the only advice they're getting, we're really serving them
very poorly.
Mr GILES: Without taking up too much time on this, I just wonder if it is possible, particularly on
microcredentialling and where these things seem to work wellwhether it's in the training approach in Denmark,
which seems to be the exemplarfor us to ask you to provide some further written advice on how this can be
done better?
Prof. Polesel: Sure.
CHAIR: All of the witnesses can write to us with further information.
Mr GILES: It's a discrete area but I think it is important in terms of the charter that we have.
Prof. Polesel: What Richard was saying about microcredentialling is really important, because what you need
is people who understand that and understand the complexities. The data that we gave in our submission is from
one point in time. That's when kids have completed school and the department rings them up in April and asks
them what they're doing. But, in fact, there are lots of movementspeople drop out of courses, they go into part-
time work and one week later they're unemployed. There's an awful lot of flux in young people's lives,
particularly for those who don't make the direct pathway into higher education.
CHAIR: I have two unrelated questions. Since the demand-driven tertiary reforms were brought in, have we
had a look to see whether that additional cohort of those entering degree programs that otherwise wouldn't have
are experiencing a similar trajectory, however you care to measure it? If you've an extra 200 that you have taken
that you otherwise wouldn't have if the demand reforms had not occurred under our previous government's
reforms, how is that group tracking, as far as we been able to trackfor example, as far as dropping out? Some
with the shorter programs would already be through and out the other side.
Prof. James: That's a difficult question to answer. I will attempt a partial answer, and if colleagues have any
other advice we can hear that too. It is difficult to answer the question because, once you've moved to the
demand-driven system, in many ways you're not comparing like with like anymore. Some broad data that I'm
reasonably familiar with would suggest that, for example, attrition overall has not changed much since we moved
to the demand-driven system across the sector as a whole but attrition rates within individual institutions have
certainly changed during that period. That suggests that the recruitment, support and teaching of students in some
institutions has clearly changed during that period.
The other piece of evidence that I think is very important is that there is no evidence that I am aware of that we
have been admitting to universities a group of students from, say, lower SES backgrounds who are going to be
less successful at university. In fact, the evidence points to very even outcomes for people according to their
social-class background once you control for the institution they are in and the field they are studying. So an

overly simple answer to your question is that I think we can say that, broadly speaking, the demand-driven system
does work in terms of overall outcomes for people but there are some areas that we need to examine more closely,
particularly with regard to first-year attrition.
CHAIR: You said attrition is higher in some institutions. Are you talking about individual faculties or entire
universities?
Prof. James: It will be both, but I was referring to whole universities. The national aggregate has barely
shifted, as far as I am aware, but in some institutions attrition has got higher and in others it has actually dropped.
So in some ways we've created a more polarised sector, and that is partly due to the recruitment patterns of
different institutions during that period.
Mr GILES: Obviously there are some proposed reforms around enabling courses and sub-bachelor degrees.
Do you think that would add to the polarisation of the sector?
Prof. James: This is a very interesting policy issue. On the one hand it seems obvious to endorse enabling
courses, and I should say that the evidence we have in Australia is that students from the very good enabling
courses, such as the foundation program at the University of Newcastle, do remarkably well once they come
through to higher education. But the irony here is that in some ways the creation of the demand-driven system has
moved us to a point where we have more open entry into first year in so many universities that some universities
perhaps wouldn't necessarily see the need for an enabling program because first-year programs have been
adjusted or tailored to a different entry point.
Prof. Schubert: What we basically want is for people to have high-wage incomes; we want them to have
good jobs. If you look at Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and China, it is those young people who have
higher vocational qualifications who have ended up with good jobs and are actually earning more money than
some people with degrees. It obviously depends on the economic mix as well in terms of the country. If you look
at the endpoint, what do we want? We want people to have high-wage jobs and we want them to have good jobs.
Therefore, we need to think about what sorts of skills they actually need to get those and drive the economy. The
two are obviously closely linked.
Other countries, even China, have moved away from a whole academic system. They made half of their
universities higher vocational colleges because those graduates are getting jobs and being paid more than people
with degrees. We may have people going through the system, but are they actually in higher wage jobs? It does
not necessarily tell a good story, so we need to think about the endpoint in terms of the kinds of outcomes we
want for our young people.
CHAIR: I think there is an important point to make then extending from that. Is the argument as simple as
allowing educational institutions to constantly be fine-tuning and tailoring their offering in communication with
the workforce? Ultimately this is a game about keeping people in education for as long as possible.
One of my concerns is that at grade 9, if high schools have this focus on 'at least they get this certificate' or 'at
least they get some form of qualification', then we have grade 9s being offered retail subjects, subjects in
hospitality, subjects in being a chef and it's simply because someone had a conversation and decided that was
what they appeared to be interested in. But you've actually jumped off at that point from higher levels of applied
literacy. You've actually taken them out of continuing to expand their numeracy and development because it's
almost impossible to continue those two outside of formal education. We're crowding that out in this demand to
get 98 per cent of people certified with something by the time they leave school. And if we go too far the other
way, of course, they just don't want to keep doing broader authority subjects in isolation either. But I am
concerned that, potentially, people in their early teens are being told, 'We've got a shortage of chefs and a shortage
of people to work in retail', so they start giving you that training now. At that point, doesnt their ability to do
anything else other than that become compromised? I'm just trying to put this counterfactual all the time, and
understand what we're doing.
Prof. Schubert: That's also assuming that your whole life is being formed at that particular point. People do
go back and re-study at graduate entry or adult entry. It's not one journey, it's not one linear journey for most
people.
CHAIR: I'll throwing something else in there. That is absolutely correct, but I'd like to actually know how
many people go back and expand their math. I'm not aware of many people who go back and say, 'Now's the time
to go and do physics.'
Prof. Schubert: I think lots of people go back and get better literacy and numeracy skills because they're not
successful. That's where the vocational system has
CHAIR: Where are they getting that?

Prof. Schubert: They get it at TAFEthat's what they specialise in, foundation coursesbecause they can't
progress through any other formal pathway. They go back and do that. The enabling courses do that as well; they
help people improve their literacy.
CHAIR: Do a huge portion of those going back just go and do the community services studies in order to do
NDIS? Are they really expanding their numeracy capabilities?
Prof. Schubert: Yes, they are.
CHAIR: I need to go and visit TAFE.
Prof. Schubert: Those courses are really critical for people who are adult who need those skills at that
particular point. They do make a difference, both higher education enabling courses and TAFE courses.
CHAIR: I accept that, so back to the question: what are we doing in that middle-school period for those that
we know are not going to go to university? Is this just a race to get some sort of certification, or are we passing up
an opportunity to give them broader employment opportunities?
Prof. Polesel: I think you're right. I think you've identified this problem of taking kids out of the foundation
skills that they really need. That is an issue, especially if you are putting them into a cert I or a cert II vocational
program that has no work based training associated with it. That's not going to impress employers at all.
Certainly, they're not going to say, 'I'll offer you a job as a chef because you've done a cert II at school.'
In a sense, you can't fix this problem without bringing industry and employers into the equation in the way that
they do in Germany and Denmark. Because then, in a sense, employers can't sit back and say, 'You're not giving
me what I want.' You're actually bringing them in and saying: 'What do you want, and help us actually give it to
these young people', so that they're actually involved. That's the only kind of training, that's the only kind of
vocational education, that's going to end up satisfying employers, but, ironically, they've got to be part of it.
CHAIR: But wouldn't most employers say they've got to be able to understand basic circuitry and they've got
to be able to do this absolutely elementary bit of math?
Prof. Polesel: And that should continue at school, through the theoretical foundations of what they're doing.
It's got to be a partnership. The theory is just as important, and that theory should continue and it should include
the foundation skills as well.
CHAIR: Okay.
Prof. Schubert: But they are high trust environments. That's what they're talking about in Germany. So
industry is closely involved in that developmental process. There is a high trust between the providers and
industry and the students, and it's really a virtual circle in terms of study, work, employment.
CHAIR: I get the feeling, and we're talking to employers and industry next, that we've got a lot ofI hear
from a lot of frustrated employers talking about the quality of graduates, and I'm not sure that those graduates are
saying, 'Math isn't really there yet for my future career.' I don't know what proportion would actually be thinking
at that time do they need to be doing further formal education. It's pretty hard to do once you've got your cert IV
and you're just desperate for work. How many people are going back and saying, 'I need to improve my
foundation skills?'
Prof. Schubert: They do.
CHAIR: A few hundred? A few dozen?
Prof. Schubert: No, it would be many more than that.
Mr GILES: What percentage of adult Australians aren't functionally literate in English? A very, very large
number. I don't know the innumerate number, but I suspect it's also pretty big.
CHAIR: I am trying to uncover this new potential challenge, which is: 'Look, I got my cert IV now. I've just
got to keep hunting until I get a job.' How many of those people say, 'I'm not going to get a job unless I go back
and do more foundation skills.' Is that a conversation amongst vocational ed graduates?
Prof. Schubert: I think it is, but often really good models actually provide that as part of the study; they
provide foundation skills or top-up skills in literacy and numeracy, because they're the two critical ones, as part of
their studies. That certainly happens across the system.
CHAIR: You talked about this dip-in dip-out credentialing, which would also be a potential solution to that?
CHAIR: Anything else?

Prof. James: These are very good questions. I don't think we've got great data or understanding on all of
them, but my intuition is that certain Australians get to a point of education where they fully understand its
benefits, both in life and career, and they are, by and large, the re-entrants into our formal education system. But
there is another group of Australians who don't quite get to that point, where there's the personal faith or
confidence in what education can bring into one's life. What I'm not sure about is this: at what point does that
tipping point occur, where people become re-entrants?
Ms Sonnemann: I would like to reiterate the point that I think Christine made earlier about the importance of
both foundational skills and capabilities. We haven't commented on these broader issues, but the way that we are
measuring progress at school at the moment, even in the foundational skillsthere is a lot that can still be done.
In terms of the political environment and the focus of achievement in NAPLAN, for example, that can really drive
poor messages for those students who are potentially not that academic. It might seem like a minor technical
issue, but actually it can be very symbolic. We know at the moment that we're not even tracking the progress of
students at school adequately. Some of the work that the Grattan Institute has done is around how you can better
interpret NAPLAN so that you can actually see the progress made by different students, and pick up earlier any
students who are disengaged and potentially are at risk. It is a different point to be made in this debate, that you
don't lose sight of students, but it is still an important one. We do know that this is still important, that all students
need those skills, and we need to have the best ways possible in tracking it.
Mr GILES: I am very much persuaded by that, if not by everything that Grattan have said in the last year.
CHAIR: Life membership!
Ms LAMB: Megan, the Mitchell Institute's submission speaks about 'many young people not finding
employment in the field they studied and trained for'. Just wrapping up what we are trying to get to: is this an
issue because we haven't consulted with industry enough about where we're placing students, whether that
conversation is had regularly at high schools? In Queensland we say, 'This is the OP score we think you'll
achieve, so these are your options,' so we're retrofitting a student into where they can go. Obviously there are
going to be a number of other reasons why there's this mismatch of students who don't end up working where
they're to go. Where is the most obvious area where the mismatch is occurring?
Ms O'Connell: It's a variety of the things you're saying. Definitely we say, 'You've got a 90, so you should be
a doctor or a lawyer'although not quite with that score these days. Absolutely, that is happening. It's the
privileging of university over vocational education. When I consult with teachers and students, I don't hear them
saying, 'There's going to be this great job in health and community services and these other areas, why don't you
go and train in that rather than this because there's all these students going through there already.' There's
definitely a mismatch in the messages that students are hearing as well. But, yes, a lot of it is that privileging of
university of over vocational, so then, within university, where's the best place you can go as a student to get a
job. I guess, yes: is it a problem that they're not getting a job in the area where they trained if they're still getting a
good job? Maybe not, although the amount of timesix months to two or three yearsthat it takes a graduate
now to land a permanent job is becoming quite concerning. If we could get that alignment going at least between
the first job, that would be great, but then figuring out when to have that conversation about the five- to 10-year
plan as well is important.
Ms LAMB: That takes us back to the importance of capabilities, doesn't it? If you come out the other end
with
Ms O'Connell: Capabilities match with workplace realities. I think it's both sides of things.
Ms LAMB: Yes, rather than a particular industry.
Ms O'Connell: If you are good at dealing with people, why would you not go down this path? And if you're
not, why would you not go down another path? That discussion's not really had. There is a discussion about what
number you get and then what pathways that allows.
Prof. Schubert: I think some research was done by Leesa Wheelahan, John Buchanan and Mary Leahy about
broad vocational streams. This work really highlights the kinds of broad skills that people need, and it has
documented some of those. Recent work by the Foundation for Young Australians talks about a similar number
I forget the numberof broad vocational streams. Effectively, that's what they're talking about. They're talking
about the same thing. The Sainsbury Review in the UK looked at similar things. This concept that you've got
capabilities that suit a whole range of occupations is actually an advantage then, so it doesn't really matter if
you've got this qualification, because there are probably a whole lot of jobs you could successfully be engaged in.
I think that's the more important thing to look at in terms of the kinds of outcomes for students. They can fit
maybe 20 jobs. That would be great and that's okay, because that's actually how they'll be working anyway. You

could look at that research. Some of it is on the LH Martin Institute website, the NCVER website and the
Foundation for Young Australians website. They are all good data sources to look at.
Prof. Ure: I think a fundamental problem is the narrowness of schools and what the KPIs are for schools.
Picking up on that last point in our submission around the shift towards the segregation of advantage and
disadvantage in our school system, schools just advertise their year-12 ATAR scores and that is really the social
measure of the quality of that school, whereas it is about how well they connect students to understanding what
work life is about. Again, going back to issues about measures, we don't have measures for that and we don't even
have expectations for schools to be delivering that to students. You mentioned the problems about your
Queensland OP score. I was on the standards council in Western Australia and they had exactly that problem in
2012. Students were not taking the board studies; they were opting for the soft options, and many of them left
themselves without clear directions towards higher education.
CHAIR: What was done to fix that?
Prof. Ure: Sorry, I've left Western Australia and I haven't actually followed that.
CHAIR: Are there any other states that have addressed that same question of foundations skills versus soft
options just to keep students getting through school? Nothing? Okay, that's fine. We've reached the end of our
appointed time, so thanks everyone.

COWARD, Mr James, Policy and Public Affairs Manager, Restaurants & Catering Industry Association
Australia
HARRISON, Dr Colin, Policy and Communications Officer, National Employment Services Association
LAMBERT, Ms Jenny, Director, Employment, Education and Training, Australian Chamber of
Commerce and Industry
LILLY, Ms Megan, Head, Workforce Development, The Australian Industry Group
SINCLAIR, Ms Sally, Chief Executive Officer, National Employment Services Association
[11:38]
CHAIR: We're on to session No. 2 for this public hearing of the Standing Committee on Employment,
Education and Training, and, as you would be well aware, we're holding an inquiry into school-to-work
transitions. It's good to have with us the National Employment Services Association, the Restaurant & Catering
Industry Association, Ai Group and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
The committee does not require you to give evidence under oath, but we remind you that this is a hearing and
therefore a legal proceeding of parliament. It warrants the same respect as proceedings of the House. The giving
of false or misleading evidence is a serious matter and can be regarded as a contempt of parliament. The evidence
today is recorded by Hansard and attracts parliamentary privilege. There's plenty of time to contribute, but
because of the roundtable arrangement what we typically do is to offer you, if you wish, the opportunity to make
very brief introductory remarks. Otherwise we'll go straight into discussion. If someone indicates enthusiastically
they'd like to do it, it's often a good opportunity for the other groups to hear what the focus of your submission
was, otherwise we can go straight into the discussion.
Ms Sinclair: You're looking at me, Mr Laming. I'll happily start with a brief statement, thank you.
The National Employment Services Association welcomes the opportunity to provide feedback on this very
important inquiry. Career planning and assistance services for school leavers are a crucial part of what we believe
to be an effective and adaptive employment services system, and so, as I said, we're pleased to see this important
topic as a focus of renewed inquiry.
NESA is the peak body for all of Australia's outsourced employment services, and that includes jobactive,
Disability Employment Services, the Community Development Program and other complementary programs,
such as Transition to Work and Youth Jobs PaTH. Some are very specific for young jobseekers who are making
the transition from school to work. Our network is one of some 3,300 sites and 30,000 staff delivering a range of
employment services and support, particularly to people who are disadvantaged in the labour market. We believe
that for school-to-work transitions to be effective requires strategies in a range of areas. Clearly, there should be
an early intervention educational philosophy which prioritises the important core skills for work/employability
skills. An emphasis on career development is also an important component.
We also see an importance for a bipartisan, sustainable national youth policy which is built upon consultation
and inclusion of a representative cross-section of Australian youth. We would note that there have been different
frameworks and different mechanisms over multiple decades relating to youth affairs, so a coherent and cohesive
approach would certainly be welcomed.
We also see that there are further opportunities to incentivise both employers and providers in the training area
to engage in investments in proactive vocational skills development for those individuals who are disadvantaged
in the labour marketin particular, young people who are not in education, employment or training. For us, we
think that if we can see more strategies and more investments at policy and programand also at practicelevels
that that will contribute significantly to more effective school-to-work transitions.
Mr Coward: Good morning. Restaurant and Catering Australia is the only national industry association
representing the interests of the hospitality industry across Australia. That's cafes, restaurants and catering
businesses, of which there are approximately 40,000. The hospitality industry in Australia is currently in the midst
of a chronic skills shortage. The Department of Employment has forecast that the cafe, restaurant and takeaway
food sector alone is expected to generate 84,100 jobs by May 2022. In percentage terms, that is 13.8 per cent.
At the moment, under the status quo, we are very concerned with the decline in the rate of apprenticeships
being not only completed but also commenced. We are committed to working alongside governments at both the
state and federal levels to implement solutions to address the problems with retention and recruitmentand also
with attractionand also in trying to address the issues that currently affect the hospitality sector in terms of
perceptions. We have seen 74 per cent of young high school leavers say they would not consider an

apprenticeship as a post high school option and that was from a report published based on a 2017 survey by Year
13. The perceptions are also at a parental level: 79 per cent of parents would not want their children to complete
an apprenticeship over a university degree; and 33 per cent of students do not see university degrees and
apprenticeships as being of equal value. We are very concerned with those statistics and are looking at involving
industry in high schools, in careers advice and in education, and we are trying to address the skills shortages
which are only forecast to get worse.
Ms Lilly: I'll make a brief statement on behalf of the Australian Industry Group. We have been very active
around the whole transition from school to employment or learning pathways for a considerable period of time. In
our submission, we draw attention to the changing nature of work and jobs and that that has contextually altered
much of how we need to consider best assisting people making those transitions now and into the future. We have
been quite concerned for some period of time about the language, literacy and numeracy skill levels of school
students and how that can contribute to disadvantage. Once people become disadvantaged or not in employment,
education or training, it continues to disadvantage them for a considerable period of their life if not their entire life
journey, and early intervention, as described previously, is incredibly important to help these transitions or to
improve them.
We are also a strong proponent and advocate for the apprenticeship and traineeship system. We are concerned
that apprenticeship levels, as in the trade based apprenticeships, have been declining as a relative proportion of
the labour market, and traineeships also really do need to be strongly revitalised. They are a really important
stepping stone for many people to make those transitions if there are not other alternatives for them and they can
be particularly effective in new industries with particular cohorts, often females, and other disadvantaged groups
and that is an important element as well. And we express ongoing concern about careers education, information
surrounding careers and how they need to be more reflective of how the world of work is emerging.
Ms Lambert: Improving the number of successful transitions of young people from school to work is a
critically important policy objective. I'm sure all the organisationsourselves and 80 also association members
who are part of the chamber networkvery strongly believe that this is such a very important issue with effort
needed in two areas. We need a broad cohort response in career education, job readiness and the like and
apprenticeships are in that category. There are also specific at-risk responses that are required in this space to
make sure that we are really doing all we can to make a successful transition for most students.
As my colleague from NESA says, it is an issue with a long history of policy inquiry. We point this out fairly
strongly in our submission. It is an area where there has been success achieved but is also an area littered with
programs which have started and then discontinued. Some of those programs have been successful but are still
being discontinued for a whole range of reasonspolitical reasons, change of government and the like. But some
of them have commenced and then not achieved outcomes. There is a lot we can learn from those experiences and
we certainly not only see this inquiry as a very important part of that but we have encouraged the inquiry to put in
place some really significant evidence gathering to see if we can get some long-term funding commitments in this
space because there is nothing more important in this space than having long-term commitments to tried and
tested mechanisms as opposed to what quite often happens where funding starts, funding stops and expertise gets
lost.
To address the broad cohort, though, many of what my colleagues have raisedissues of apprenticeships, job
readiness, literacy and numeracywe have also raised in our submission as being very important. Evidence
shows us that one of the big issues is that, even though a lot of young people when they are at school do part-time
work, in fact the total number of people who are teenagers and are involved in the workforce is less than it used to
be, because of the number of people staying to year 12. That has great benefits for long-term career outcomes, but
it also has policy consequences with fewer people being familiar with what work expects, how to fit into the
workplace and get work experience. So I think any up-to-date inquiry, as my colleague from Ai Group said,
should not only take into account the future of work challenges but should also look at ways we can make sure
that as many young people as possible are prepared for the workplace. They also need to ensure that they have all
the career information they need. Apprenticeships are clearly an area in which we need to beef up the response,
because evidence shows that many young people get as much of a career outcome and the earnings capacity from
an apprenticeship as they do from higher education, but it is not getting the same profile. There are a lot of
opportunities in the apprenticeships and traineeships areas, particularly in traineeships, with the increase in
servicing and health areas, where traineeships are so important. We certainly need to be very conscious of
providing people with career advice and guidance. We are very keen for this inquiry to reinforce the importance
of beefing up a career education strategy.

But we should not forget the at-risk side of this cohort. Again, there has been profoundly detailed analysis done
on a whole range of funding programs. It would be very good to make sure that this inquiry teases out the best of
those. Some organisations like Brotherhood of St Laurence and Beacon Foundation have been working with at-
risk young people for a very long time and have some tried and true mechanisms. Sometimes these programs that
have been going and working successfully for many decades are better than the idea of recommending a whole
new Canberra-designed program that is going to be the fix-all for at-risk young people. We encourage you to look
at that sort of balance in the discussion, because you are not operating in a vacuum. We know that there is a lot of
information and a wealth of experience out there. We look forward to participating in this discussion.
CHAIR: We don't propose a structure for this discussion. We will just basically see how it evolves. Megan
we will just be on first-name terms, if that is okayyou have some interesting graphics in your submission. This
is an attempt, I think, to break down the requirements of the future jobs. I found it interesting that you referred to
the high-touch growth in community and personal servicesthe high-skilled professional group growing as well.
There was a reference also, I think, in NESA's submission saying that of those not employed or educated or
trained they have started doing reasonably well with engaging women, possibly because of the favourable child-
care policies in Australiaso that was an observation. We spent a fair bit of this first session talking about how
we educate mostly young Australians with the skills of tomorrow. But I wonder that, if there is a huge growth in,
say, personal services and the high-touch professions, is it absolutely vital that we are driving literacy and
numeracy and foundation skills in that group, or do we keep thinking that foundation skills are overemphasised
and potentially there are different skills for different typologies. So, if there is fast growth in some of these more
creative sectors, there may be a different solution there than there is for the care givers, as you have referred to. Is
it really that important that we have a single solution to the skills for the next generation or are we actually
coming right back to early teens and middle school and identifying people who may well be in the carer
professions and basically fast-tracking them into where they have the area of most opportunity?
Ms Lilly: First, I would respond to that by saying that there is really never a single solution to anything. It
would be nice if there were. But I would also put the comment out there that young people will have many
different careers and jobs within their lives, so I don't think we can afford to categorise them and prepare them for
only one element or aspect of that. I think that would be doing them a disservice and it would probably invite
more labour market disjuncture, but perhaps a different points in their lives. I would also say that sometimes with
the caring professions it often emerges as a second phase of a career as opposed to an initial starting point of a
career. So I think we need to be careful of the assumptions that you get from the numbersbut you actually dig
into them and you find different patterns and different mobility emerging. So I would maintain that the foundation
skills, however they are defined, are equally important for everybody to enable all of those things to occur.
CHAIR: The other matter is in chart 2 in your submission. I was really quite surprised by the large proportion
in Australia who are engaged in both education and workand there might be some data set differences there.
But what really stood out, both for low upper-secondary and those achieving upper-secondary education, was the
large proportion of Australians who are in both education and work. Can you see any significance in that data or
is it just the way it has been cut?
Ms Lilly: This is OECD data, so it is the way it is presented.
CHAIR: So it is just a high degree of education/work blending in Australia, which really did surprise me.
Ms Lilly: If you go into it a bit further, Australia has always had a high proportion of young people doing
part-time work that is not necessarily related to education. So you actually need to work out what you are talking
aboutthat is the classic work at the supermarket or the fast food outlet, but not in a structured employment
modenotwithstanding that they do exist, and with great respect, so there is an opportunity for greater integration
at that point or to enhance structures around that.
Ms LAMB: Thank you for the submission. In point 4 you referred to the ABS reporting of the labour market
conditions for youth improving in recent years. Can you talk to us about the improvement of the market
conditions, given that the submission goes on to talk about underemployment, growth of part-time employment,
dying occupations and a decrease in the apprentice system? But it is saying that labour market conditions have
improved.
Ms Lilly: It is using the ABS data
Ms LAMB: What do the businesses you represent say about labour market conditions?
Ms Lilly: With respect to what?
Ms LAMB: Going through where it says we are experiencing underemployment, part-time employment and
dying occupations, what are the labour market conditions they are experiencing? Is that their experience as well?

Ms Lilly: Is your question: how does a business feel about this element, because it is a completely different
way to look at the question? I'm sorry to make the same statement again, but businesses do not have a single view
on this. You can give different examples for different companies. Some companies have very sophisticated
approaches to dealing with these issues, particularly bringing people into their workplace, while others do not.
Large companies are often better at it than SMEs. It depends also where they are positioned in the economy. A
company that has a pretty flat order book will be struggling to just keep itself going rather than dealing with a
whole range of other things. But there is a lot of commentary from companies about the skills and ability of
young people transitioning into their work environments, and their questionable readiness around work or their
questionable literacy and numeracy type skills. There has always been a concern about that. Some of that is
anecdotal and it is questionable how people remember those things. You can measure it, because there are
measurement points around those sorts of things. I know of a company in northern Melbourne that has enormous
difficulty getting suitable young people to take on apprenticeships. They are very keen to. That is a suburb with
an area of significant youth unemploymentand the non-engagement piece. So there are significant disjunctures
that cause some of these problems.
Ms LAMB: This is what I'm trying to get to. If businesses have demand for apprentices and we have a great
labour market environment, what is going wrong here? Where is it that we are not fitting?
Ms Lilly: There are pockets of it all around the country. The statistics around Wollongong are pretty
significant too. We've got very high pockets of youth unemployment and not necessarily very good transitions
into employment, or education and employment.
This is not a new problem. You have to look at the disadvantage within those communities and also, on the
employer's side, you have to encourage school-industry partnerships at earlier intervention points within the
system. You actually have to start opening up some of those transitions in a more effective way. But they're
voluntary; they're not structured, so you have a whole lot of community dynamics playing into that. The school
can actually play a facilitative role as well. Some do incredibly well and some don't.
Mr GILES: At the very end of your report you said that 19 per cent of employers reported established long-
term relationships with schools. Clearly, getting that to increase involves action on the part of businesses, schools
and, obviously policymakers. What would you say the major barriers are to that?
Ms Lilly: The best school-industry programs I've seen over a sustained period of time are where they're
partnerships but where a lot of the energy actually comes from the company. The reason I say that is because
most people within systems are often funded or employed to have KPIs that do these sorts of thingscompanies
don't. If they make a significant commitment then it's a very genuine one. What's difficult for them is resourcing
it, and, often, structuring it in the sense of, 'How do I go about doing this, because my business is running the
business; my business is not a school-industry partnership?' So, what is it that makes it work?
The other comment I'd make is that over time there have been some national frameworks put around this sort of
stuff that have actually been very helpful, but they are variable. But, yes, they need to flourish locally. Usually,
you find champions who actually make them flourish. It would be great if it could be replicated more consistently,
but, unfortunately, we're not in that position.
Mr GILES: This comes back to Susan's question about the evidence that has been given to us and which is
given generally, that there seems to be a big mismatchparticularly at the lower level of skills: entry into
apprenticeships or otherwisewhere we have businesses claiming not to be in a position to find local qualified
people to fill vacancies. This appears to be the case regularly in areas where there is significant socioeconomic
disadvantage. I suspect that this is not where the school partnershipsthe 19 per centare replicated. So in
trying to find a way through I guess you are looking at some of the national overlays that have existed in the past.
Or are there other incentives that we might look at from the Commonwealth point of view?
Ms Lilly: There could be a range of incentives. In a general sense I think you need to incentivise the company
of the employer to open the doors and to create that culture and environment. But you actually need an equal
structural incentiveor KPI or whatever you want to call itparticularly around school or other community
structures, because they have to work together. If they don't work together you actually don't build those
transitions. But then there needs to be programs that sit in the middle of that which actually help ease those
transitions as well.
Ms Lambert: Can I make a comment there as well? I think there are two important things that could
potentially be put into that question. The first is about making sure that the school leadership is better skilled and
equipped to reach out. Megan is right to say, obviously, that when a company makes a commitment it means that
it's a genuine commitment. They've got to look at what works for their business, but they can't just go and knock

on the doors of schools. Schools need to invite them in. That's an important way that schools maintain their own
discipline around their environment.
But if you think of most principals, they go from school to university themselves and then into school and rise
up through the ranks. Their interaction with industry is usually very limited. The interaction with schools is quite
often through the P&C raising money through the local raffles or trivia nights or whatever. So principals need to
have better skills to reach out to industry. I think that would be a really important mechanism, getting the school
leadership more comfortable with that relationshipwhat it can deliver to students and why it's important to
students.
You made a really important point about the disconnect between why it is that high unemployment areas can't
get the people and why we are facing problems in general in attracting people to apprenticeships and traineeships.
I'd say about three or four years ago we had very little problem attracting young people. It goes through cycles,
but we had very little problem attracting people. The biggest issue was that employers started to disengage from
the system because of a change to the funding mix. We're now trying to get some of that energy back into the
system again. But young people have disengaged a bit more from the system, and I think that has coincided with
the rise and push in the uncapped demand driven higher education system. So you've got that competition, if you
like, for 'where do I go from school', which is really driving a lot of that connection, and maybe a concern about
whether apprenticeships are being appropriately promoted in schools. And I think that's been a big issuetrying
to get traineeships and apprenticeships promoted more.
CHAIR: If I could just introduce Rebecca Sharkiegreat to have you with us. Sorry you were blown off
course.
Ms SHARKIE: Yes, I was. I did start out very, very early. It was just a long plane ride.
Mr Coward: If I could just echo my ACCI colleague's comments there as well, we feel that a lack of
involvement by industry at a school level is what then leads to a lack of information among students, which then
leads to incorrect perceptions among students as to the benefits of the VET system, which is what I referred to in
my opening statement. If you look at the main sources of information that students use in terms of evaluating
decisions that they make post high school, there are four, and industry isn't one of them. Those sources are their
peers, their fellow students at school; their parents, who have a critical influence in terms of the way they make
their decisions; their teachers, who also impart a variety of knowledge and wisdom to school leavers; and, finally,
careers advisers.
We think that, within those four sources, there are avenues for industry to become more involved, particularly
through those career advisers. We think there is potential for the professional development of these careers
advisers to involve labour market information, which would result in the positive benefits of the VET sector being
explained a bit more clearly: 'Yes, there are a lot of job prospects for you after you finish your apprenticeship.
Your chances of being in a long-term career path as a result of that are very high.' Actually, the average salary of
a VET graduate is higher than that of a bachelor degree graduate. We think that this information isn't being
received by students at the level at which they need to hear it, which also goes back to what my ACCI colleague
was saying before, in that this information is not been promoted adequately and we think that there is potential for
that information to be promoted a lot more regularly so that students actually receive the information they need in
order to make these kinds of decisions that affect their transition into post-school avenues.
Ms LAMB: I'm quite keen to explore a little bit more the transition from school to work. From your opening
statement and from the data you've provided, hospitality seems to be this great opportunity. We're expecting an
increase in turnover of between 2.4 and 4.8 per cent. We've got projected growth of another 84,000 jobs by 2020.
Mr Coward: That's just been revised. That submission was actually
Ms LAMB: Yes. It seems to me we've got this great opportunity, but there is a skills shortage. On page 5 of
your submission you talk about chefs being among the top 15 occupations by 2020, yet women are only one-third
of the chef trade. In students moving from school to work, what are we doing about, in particular, young women
moving into an industry that, from all accounts in your report here, is the place you want to be in the future? How
do we do that better? I think we're at point 2 here of the inquiry's terms of reference, which is about opportunities
to better inform and support students.
The other part of my question goes toI suppose it's a little bit out of curiositythe sector employing 380,000
young people. In relation to that figure, are they 380,000 young people that have come out of the school system
into work, or are they visa workers as well?
Mr Coward: That figure in terms of young people refers to those aged between 15 and 24; it is not necessarily
people that have come directly out of high school.

Ms LAMB: We are talking about visa 457s; we are talking about tourist visas in that number?
Mr Coward: That was taken from the Australian jobs report from the Department of Employment. I believe
that refers to the industry as a whole.
Ms LAMB: Do you know the real number of students that have had the opportunity to come out of schools,
given that this is what this inquiry is aboutout of schools into the industry. How many students are
transitioning?
Mr Coward: I would have to take that on notice.
Ms LAMB: Thank you. It seems there is great opportunity in this industry. Yet we have women who are not
picking up the one occupation in the industry that seems to be the best-paying one.
Mr Coward: There is definitely statistics to show that participation of women at a chef level is not where it
needs to be. However, in other hospitality occupations there are actually more women than there are men. Some
of the statistics from the ATO show that amongst occupations such as cafe and restaurant managers there are in
fact more women than there are men, and in occupations such as baristas, for instance, there are significantly
more women than there are men. So, as a whole, the hospitality sector does employ a very large number of
women compared to other sectors. There is a very high number of part-time roles within hospitality as well, and
perhaps that flexibility goes somewhat to explain the generally high participation rate of women in that industry.
But there are definitely areas for improvement in terms of employing more women as chefs. As an association, we
have been very active in discussing that shortage in recent months. Our CEO, Juliana Payne, is a woman and she
is very active in terms of promoting the pathway of chefs to young women as well as recognising them, their
participation and their contribution to the industry as a whole.
Ms LAMB: How do we do better in that transition of getting students from school into this industry? What do
we need to do better?
Ms Lambert: One of the big things that changed in the last few years has been the drop off in support both at
state and federal level for traineeships, good entry level traineeships into hospitality and tourism and broader
services sectors. We saw, in 2010, 2011, 2012, quite significant increases in that area. We firstly had some drop-
offs in, for example, state funding for traineeships. In Victoria they invested heavily in traineeships but they
pulled back in the areas that affected the hospitality and services sectors, and retail traineeships were significantly
cut. We've seen some changes in incentives at the federal level in 2011-12 that made a big difference to
supporting traineeships. We saw traineeships which we used to be up around the 40,000 number of people 15- to
19-year-olds. We lost 50,000 traineeships out of the 15- and 19-year-old cohort. Some of that was part-time
traineeships and they were not providing the service.
But, with all these things, policy throws the baby out with the bathwater. You end up trying to address some
specific concerns or issues about the way traineeships are used and you end up losing some very good
mechanisms whereby people can leave school and, if they got a retail or hospitality traineeship in cert II or cert
III, that would be a fantastic beginning for them to transition from school to work. And the funding was really
significantly cutboth state and federalin those areas. That would be certainly one area we would like to see
readdressed in policy terms.
Ms SHARKIE: That is an area that is a real concern to me. When you look at five years ago, I think the
statistics were about 195,000 down on apprentices and trainees. So my question is we have the PaTH program
now. Do you think that that is adequately going to turn that around with those numbers? It is a $10,000 payment
to an employer if they take on a young person.
Ms Lambert: PaTH is going to particularly address the at-risk cohort, those who may have had a poor
transition from school to work and have been out of work for six months. We think there should be a lot more
work done on having PaTH as a structured mechanism to link in to a traineeship. We are very keen to see a model
that more proactively links the training that happens in PaTH to a formal traineeship, so that the host that has
taken on the young unemployed person can start some structured training within the PaTH program and then
move towards a formal traineeship as a mechanism of job placement. So there is some work being done there but
we think more can be done to structure that.
For those people who are literally coming from school and looking for a job, there could be a lot more work
done. There has been a lot of struggle with the school based apprenticeship or traineeships and mechanisms to
link in. There have been some limitations on being able to do pre-apprenticeship at school. Schools have been
very keenand I don't mean schools specifically school; I mean 'school' as in state governments and independent
and others. The Board of Studies accreditation programs have been sort of pushing certificate 3, whereas quite
often what industry wants is really good pathway VET programs and pre-apprenticeships and the like. So we were

stuck for many years in this mentality of: 'Oh, well. The only thing that counts is certificate 3. Therefore,
everything at schools has to be certificate 3.' Yet the industry is saying that the quality of VET at certificate 3 at
schools is very inconsistent, and in some cases woeful.
So we would prefercertainly many of our industry body members would much preferto see really good
quality vocational training pathways into traineeships and apprenticeships and good quality vocational training,
even if it is at the lower level, to get a good connection into further qualification beyond. At the moment you are
seeing too many peoplehundreds of thousands of young people at school do VET, but many of them either have
to redo itthey do not get recognised for that qualificationor, in the worst possible cases, they sometimes do
certificates that almost preclude them from doing an apprenticeship because of the award and the competency
based recognition systems. So there is a lot we could do to improve and to make sure that the vocational training
at schools links better into traineeships and apprenticeships and industry qualifications.
Ms Sinclair: I just want to pick up on the threads of the conversation that we have been having to date. It does
remind me in terms of going back to some claims that our colleagues from the chamber made and that we made in
our submission, and that is around the history of national frameworks, consistent application of youth policies and
programs, looking particularly at transitions. If we look across the last 30 years, we have dropped the ball when it
comes to specific policy emphasis in a cohesive and coherent coordinated way as it comes to addressing issues for
young people both in school in the middle years and transitioning into employment and sustaining employment
Having said that, in relation to PaTH, which obviously our members are directly engaged with, whilst we
believe in principle the concept is a good one, it is a good initiate, it is another exampleparticularly the second
set of, for want of a better expression, 'job search skills training'of fracturing the sector. They were core skills
and core deliverables that employment services did at the inception of the job network and they used to be called
'job clubs'. Again, what we are still doing is, in an endeavour to address specific cohort requirements, shifting the
skills base, shifting the money around and creating more programs and, dare I say, more confusion for young
people and also for employers. So I think we really need to take a step back and have a look at what would be a
more coherent approach and a more coherent strategy.
CHAIR: The job clubs demise of course was that it was not outcomes focused and we were increasingly
paying you for a placement and the longevity of its survival.
Ms Sinclair: That is right.
CHAIR: So now we have come back and realised we need this.
Ms Sinclair: We need to chart pathways. In the desire to evaluate, some of the naturally inherent pathways for
preparing young people for work have fallen by the wayside. Mechanistically, there is a whole range of things,
even in the current employment services framework, where, we would argue, if there was less red tape and less
prescription about what you do and how you do that, it would actually lead to better outcomes. Let the system be
genuinely outcome driven, and not outcome plus a whole of other rules and regulations, which is what it tends to
be. It is also an activation model, and, by its very essence, you have to have some regulation in there but, to a
certain extent, if governments contract these intermediaries to do the work, let them get on and do the work.
CHAIR: Is there some flexibility around those foundational work preparation courses in PaTH so the service
provider can deem that clients have the skills already? Can't you actually
Ms Sinclair: There are flexibilities, but my point is that it's not about the organisations that are in there. At a
threshold level, what I'm saying is that it disaggregates the backbone, if you like, of the service delivery, which is
the employment services. There are ways to achieve these things without always necessarily reinventing the
wheel. That also goes toif I look back over the decadesthe whole question of intermediation. Employment
services used to be able to go into schools and talk about the world of work. It goes to what my colleague from
the Restaurant & Catering Industry Association said that there is a need for a strengthened career development
strategy, which is basically end to end and not necessarily siloed in particular policy departments, but which
genuinely looks at the range of actors involved in working with young people, either in schools or as soon as they
leave school. How can we have strategies that will deliver better results? It's better for a young person to make a
successful transition, rather than for them to drop off the cliff, go onto income support, stay on income support for
a while and then you try to pick them back up to get them through a whole range of different career options. We
need to have a career development strategy which includes those employment services being able to talk within
the school framework about the world of work.
We also know that place-based strategies are key in areas of high unemployment levels and yet with good work
opportunities. What's going wrong there? We also know, through some of the work that's been done in Australia
in the past but also internationally, that where you've got good local governanceand that's with a small 'g',

rather than a big 'G'structures and arrangements, where you get all the stakeholders around a table and everyone
has a vested interest in making sure that there are good strategies and pathways for those young people, then you
do get better outcomes. We've seen progressively a disconnection in getting those intermediation arrangements
for want of a better termin place.
Ms SHARKIE: Didn't we have a program like that called Partnership Brokers at one stage?
Ms Sinclair: Yes, we did. We had the discussion previously about the good things which have been working
but which, for whatever reason, have fallen by the wayside and some things which are not so good but which
might be funded for a bit longer than they should be. I think that goes to the whole question of the coherence of
the policy framework.
Ms SHARKIE: So something like that, which is the glue between the school, employers and the wider
community?
Ms Sinclair: And with other stakeholders. If you look, for example, at employment services, it includes the
PaTH providers, industry providers and the transition-to-work providers and those like that Beacon Foundation,
which operates with philanthropic funding and employers. It's not just one or two particular stakeholders, but it's
getting everybody together in a place-based strategic approach. We believe that is key in getting a more effective
outcome. I also note, though, the issue of engagement with schools, and we are currently delivering a workforce
development strategy and the Remote School Attendance strategy on the half of Prime Minister and Cabinet. We
are dealing with 69 regions and 75 schools across remote Australia. And it is true that it works where the school
allows you to make it work. That's as fundamental as getting the kids to school. That's developing a workforce
which gets kids to attend school, and it's not always as straightforward or as easy as one would think it would be,
because you would think it would be in the best interests of everybody for the children to attend school. There are
clearly arrangements, in terms of funding, which can perhaps better drive the right sorts of outcomes and
behaviours at the school level to enable some of these strategies to really take effect.
Probably the only other thing I'd just like to mention while we've been talking about some of these areas is
what you mentioned, Chair: the growth of the care sector and the whole notion of the gig economy. Our services
and the way they're funded and the metrics and the KPIs don't really currently respond to the way the world of
work is developing. In employment services, you've got to get a full-time employment outcome which is
sustained for at least six months, probably going into 12 months with some of the new program arrangements that
are developing. So when you're talking about young people and you talk about the gig economy, and you're
talking about the care workforce where, typically, people are going to sort of determine when they are available
for rostering, they may have three jobs on the go at any one time, it doesn'tthe two systems don't really mesh.
So there is a needwhatever the arrangements and the mechanisms areto better appreciate not just what the
aggregate growth is but what does that actually look like. It's notit is about the numbers, but it's also about,
what's the profile of the care workforce, and how is it organised, so that we've got the right incentives in the right
service systems to be able to respond to that.
CHAIR: Any other reflections on that challenge? Particularly the one that you see, Sally, but we have gone
from the problem of having training for training's sake, and everyone complained about that; to 'make work'
programs, where Work For The Dole was mostly on public property, doing work that didn't seem to be related to
the workforce; and now we've got the new creation path which is saying, maybe we need to just throw people in
with an employer and see what happens. Is there some sense that employers are having a choice of PaTH
applicants? Or are they being handed someone who is deemed to be work-ready and safe, and it's, 'A, meet B'?
Can they interview three or four candidates?
Ms Sinclair: I think it's a challenge, always, in these circumstances where we talk about a program like
PaTHdesign, construct, intentabsolutely; the concept of internships, for want of a better expression, is a very
strong one; work trialling and work hardening, there's no argument there at all. When we're looking at
employment services, it is important to understand that people who are in employment services are already
eligible for income support, which means they are already disadvantaged in the labour market. We get a lot of
discussion about, you know, people who are in jobactive, for example, who are stream A, which is 'job ready'. But
they are only job-ready relative to the other people in employment services. They are not actually job-ready
relative to the labour marketbecause if they were, they wouldn't have ended up on income support, or they
would have been unlikely to end up on income support. I think that there is always this expectation. It's a bit of a
mishmash that happens. Employers get frustrated because they're not getting, perhaps, the standard of candidate
that they would optimally want. But on the other hand, you've got the employment services who are working with
people who are disadvantaged in the labour market. So it's a question of the extent to which the program elements
that have been designed will be able to bridge that gap and build those pathways for employment, to ensure the

effective placement and retention of those young people. Jenny may have a view on this, but I think we're not
quite there yet, because it has taken us a while to get going on a number of different elements of the program.
Ms Lambert: I think Sally's last point there is really important. We've been extensively involved with PaTH.
There are 70 industry organisations broadly involved and supportive, but there are a couple who are specifically
very involved in detail, in both the delivery of training and the placement of people. The important point
CHAIR: Who are they?
Ms Lambert: It includes the Australian Hotels Association and the Australian Retailers Association, both of
which are members of ours. I'm actively engaged with their experiences and understand their experiences on the
ground. When it works, it really works, but it's going to take a while for the systems to work in its favour. As
Sally pointed out, it's a very large workforce in employment services and they all have to understand how the
program works and implement it. Similarly, there is a range of training providers who have put up their hand to
do PaTH. Some of them are industry bodies like the ARA and the Hotels Association and others are just doing the
training for the sake of doing the training. It will, in the end, gravitate towards placing people to do training in
places where the training providers are helping to find the positions. That works well in some models. It works
very well where all the partnersthe employment service providers, the training providers, the hosts and the
others are all working well together.
To answer your question about whether employers or hosts get choices in the system, it depends on which
model is being used. In some cases there are many vacancies that are going begging. In other words, a host
business has to put up their hand to say they're willing to host someone and it's not happening. Coming back to
the first thing, some of these programs need a while to settle in, and we shouldn't be making short-term decisions
about this program or any other, because it will take a while for all the players, all the stakeholders, to understand
the program, how it works, and to maximise the benefits of it. We are absolutely committed to working with the
government and our members to make it work because we have a longstanding view that, for many of the people
who have been disengaged from the workforce, they really need to get the work experience on the ground. You're
right: they don't have to do the training; they can go straight into the placement. In fact, there are many examples
where they're doing the training and then going straight to a job outcome; they don't need to do the placement.
There is a range of experience.
CHAIR: To pull the thread together, we commonly hear that it's so important to have secure employment, and
typically that's full-time employment. We tend to traduce part-time employment and casual employment as being
a bad thing, and that's not necessarily the case. When I speak to employers about PaTH, I really have to explain to
them that, if you have a pool of people to pick from, typically you'd have a shortlist and pick the best person in
the group. You need to understand that PaTH is potentially bringing you one of the most vulnerable people that
we could possibly get to a position, where they've got just enough competence and pre-skills training to get them
into your workplace. They need to understand that this is a completely different candidate. There's no gain in me
having PaTH participants who could easily get a job somewhere else. The market has already determined that
they can't, as you've pointed out. The only thing that really matters to me about PaTH is whether there are
genuinely disengaged, long-term unemployed people who we can see having a different pathway because of what
PaTH offers. Are you absolutely confident that the group of people we're plugging into PaTH would have had no
other opportunity through training course after training course to get a start and PaTH will make a difference?
Ms Sinclair: In the context of employment services, it is one strategy for the cohort that the employment
services are working with, but it's not the only strategy. That goes to, if you like, where we are at the moment, in
terms of numbers, unfilled vacancies et cetera. We can't look at PaTH in isolation. We'd have to look across the
whole system and say, 'How many are getting a benefit through Transition to Work? How many are getting a
benefit directly through jobactive? In jobactive, the way the Star Ratings model works, which basically drives the
behaviour, the ratings are first and the financial investment is second. It's about how quickly you get someone into
a job and how long you keep them in a job, multiplied by how many. The emphasis in the ratings is on how
disadvantaged they are. The more highly disadvantaged people who you get into work quickly and keep in work
is what's going to give you the best star rating. If PaTH proves to be a good part of that fabric, then, yes, that will
be an option. But the threshold answer to your question is: yes, the people coming through employment services
are disadvantaged in the labour market. There's no question about that. Is PaTH the only solution? Not
necessarily, because you'd have to look across the whole framework of employment services. Of course, there are
disability employment services as well.
Mr GILES: I think that's a pretty good caveat leading into my question. Ms Lambert, you said something
similarthat it's too early to say. It has been suggested that PaTH is, in essence, a subsidy to industry and not an
employment program. How would you respond to that criticism?

Ms Lambert: I can respond by saying that, whether it be talking about PaTH 'interns' or talking about work in
the graded learning placements from colleges, employers don't line-up to take these people on. You only have to
look at that evidence alone to see that it's not easy. If you're running a business and you're bringing someone on
who lacks experience, that can be very dislocating in your workplace. You'd ask yourself: 'How do they get on
with their peers? Who's going to show them how to do things in an informal sense? What structured training do
they need?' Those are questions that relate to all types of inexperienced jobseekers who are coming into the
workplace for experience, whether it be a year-10 student at school, a university student looking at will or a PaTH
intern. With a PaTH intern, there's even more of a question because of the extra layers from them being
unemployed for at least six months. You'd ask yourself: 'What have been the barriers that have prevented them
from getting work? What needs to happen?' To suggest that it's a subsidy to businesses for these people to come
on is really not taking into account the fact that people are not lining up around the corner to take them on in any
of those scenarios.
In order to sustain work for the workforce that they have now, a business has to be profitable and successful.
So the most important question that actually has to be asked is: over the course of a day, a year or 10 years, what
is going to be a sustainable approach? They've got to take into account all of those decisions when asking, 'Do I
take this young person'in the case of this type of inquiry'on to give them a go?' If the answer is, 'Yes, let's
give them a go,' they're often doing it for what we'd call CSR reasons. They're often doing it because they want to
do the right thing. There's very little of the, 'I'm doing it because it's free for a short period of time.' There's just
not enough evidence to show that employers are lining up to take on free labour. They just don't do it. It's too
dislocating to their business.
Mr GILES: Let me ask the question a different way: what is the benefit of the PaTH program for employers?
Ms Lambert: The critical benefit to employers is that they are seeking, particularly in a whole range of
industries. We just heard a lot of evidence about the hospitality industry needing long-term skilled, semiskilled
and unskilled labour to provide, and they're really looking for the right people and the right fit with their business.
The benefit of PaTH is that it gives an opportunity for both sides to actually ask: 'Is this the right fit for the young
person? Is it the right type of job that they like to do? Are the peers that they're going to work with and the
employer that they're going to work for the right fit for them?' Similarly, it gives the host business an opportunity
to try that out. Many of these businesses are looking for staff, and we see that by the fact that some of these
businesses, particularly in regional areas, are reaching out to working holiday-makers and the like and trying to
get people to be a committed workforce for them. That is the benefit to them. But, as I said, it is a question of
each business asking, 'Have I got the time to take this person on?'
One of the real benefits of PaTH, from our point of view, is for small businesses, particularly since over half of
employment in Australia is with small business. For many small businesses, to take on what might be a 20 per
cent increase in their workforce with an extra one person is a big step. Can they afford it? Will they generate
enough business as a result of it? The benefit of PaTH is that it allows the employer to say, 'I can see how this
works.' I used the example of a small mechanic shop in regional Australia that potentially has worked without
someone in the office. They have to keep stopping. They get out from under the car to answer the phone. Can they
afford it, will it be better for them and can they service more cars as a result of taking on an extra person? The
benefit of a PaTH program is that you can demonstrate to a small business that to go from four staff to five staff is
something that is going to be worthwhile for them. I think that's what we see as a big benefit.
CHAIR: This is directly related. Can I flip that question: how small can we make the disadvantage for an
employer to take on an employee who is absolutely lacking in the skills that would normally be expected by an
employer? How small can we make that disadvantage? Often it's only a $1,000 payment, which to most
employers isn't much in the scheme of things. So an employer is probably saying: 'A year from now, if I'm
realistically in this program because I want to give someone a go, can it be less than a $5,000 cost to me to bring
this person up to a level where the top of the pile will be in six months time? Because I could just advertise in the
paper and have 20 people and pick the best one.' That's the starting position. Is it worth it for them to lose $5,000
or $10,000 over the next year in supervision time, lost opportunity and a whole lot of other things before they can
get that person to a speed where they're just as productive in the workforce as the best candidate? I'm trying to flip
this question. I don't think they see huge benefits in the program. You're really saying, 'Try something different by
employing the least suitable person,' because if they were the most suitable they'd have a job somewhere else.
They ask: 'Is that going to cost me less than $5,000? That's the wage subsidy I'll get at the end.' Is this making
sense, from an employer's point of view?
Ms Lambert: Just to answer the question about the dollars and cents side of it, from the detailed discussions
we've had over a period of time with the Department of Employment and also from what we've seen on the

ground, for a wage subsidy to in any way change behaviour has got to be $10,000-plus. I think you're seeing
that
CHAIR: It is only $10,000 in PaTH for the most disadvantaged applicants. Typically, it's half that, isn't it?
Ms Lambert: But it's not just PaTH. The $10,000 relates to youth employment for the disadvantaged in
general. There has been a good take-up of that subsidy in relation to taking on
CHAIR: I just wanted to point out that it's not always $10,000. It's not always $10,000.
Ms Lambert: Subsidies have variously been less than $10,000 over the years.
CHAIR: But the PaTH one isn't $10,000 unless it is the most disadvantaged category. I want to make that
clear to employersthey are not guaranteed $10,000. It does depend on their history of unemployment and a
range of other assessments.
Ms Sinclair: I think that's right.
Ms Lambert: I think that's right. The $10,000 relates to the most disadvantaged end. I always think of
subsidies in employment in three ways. The first base is to get the employer to engage. A vast majority of
employers don't engage with the employment services system. So if we're talking about that second cohort in
youth transition, which are the ones that have had a poor transition, what can we do? Actually getting employers
to even consider putting their job with the public system is the first step.
The second step is trying to get the match right. Your comment about PaTH helps a lot because otherwise the
employers are always worried about whether the jobseekers that have been suggested to them through the publicly
funded system are suitable for them. That's the second base.
The subsidies are almost the third base. If you've engaged with the system and you think these jobseekers are
worth considering, the wage subsidy is a third-level issue, if you like. You've got to get through the first two bases
first. I think subsidies can make a difference. The $10,000 does seem to be a bit of a trigger point to actually get
them to proactively seek out the system. Otherwise you have to rely on the system trying to seek them out
because the employers are not proactively engaging with the system. So to actually become a changer of
behaviour, which is what you're hoping for these subsidies and incentives to do, that tends to be the figure, but it
certainly varies. Subsidies and incentives alone are not going to do it; you still have to find the suitable people.
CHAIR: Is there anything from the Restaurant and Catering Industry Association on what they are
experiencing in PaTH and whether those subsidies are sufficient for employers?
Mr Coward: I would definitely agree with Ms Lambert's assessment of the $10,000 subsidy being the point
where it really creates an adequate incentive for employers, but what I would say is that a lot of the businesses
within our sector, at leastare definitely experiencing an inability to find the talent that they need to sustain the
profitability and the sustainability of the sector as a whole. Our research has found that 70.7 per cent of hospitality
businesses that are members of the Restaurant and Catering Industry Association were experiencing either some
difficulty or extreme difficulty in sourcing chefs, and there are similar numbersat a slightly lesser levelfor
cafe and restaurant managers and cooks. But obviously, when you have people at an entry level in the hospitality
sector, what we're trying to doour aim or our overriding goalis to ensure that those people that don't have
those skills at present obtain sufficient workplace training and the workplace development that they need in order
to secure a long-term pathway within the hospitality sector. That's where we really think that the employers in
hospitality have a lot to contribute in being able to take people that are either straight out of school, potentially
still within school or completing training or courses, and investing in their ability and showing them the ropes, so
to speak. Then, from that point on, they have the ability to stay within the hospitality sector for five, 10, 15 or 20
years and get to the point where they become the head chefs or executive level chefs and they pursue this
extended career path which will then help with the skill shortages which I've previously outlined.
Ms LAMB: Can I just ask a question. We're heading towards the end of the year. We're going to have a whole
cohort of students that move from school either to higher education and training or straight to the workforce. The
Chamber of Commerce and Industry's submission says:
The recent debate about penalty rates also has an impact on the employment market for young people. Too much emphasis is
made on the impact on the pay of existing workers and not enough is made of the additional opportunities for work that
will be created.
Have we already started to see these additional opportunities for those school leavers who want to go directly into
work?
Ms Sinclair: I think, yes, it is happening. As I said earlier, I think we are seeing such a rapid change in the
way that work is organised. If we look, however, at how employment services respond, of course that is then a

function of the individual coming into the employment services system. Althoughwithout getting too
technicalthere are some mechanisms where, if you're not on income support, you can find your way into things,
by and large you have to have got to a point where you're registered for youth allowance to then find yourself in
the services. So it comes back to that point: if we are able to engage before the person departs school and connect
them with opportunities in a way that's not allowed under the current rulesbecause we may be seen as
encouraging young people to leave school rather than continue their educationthen the risk that we run, if we're
talking about employment services, is that they drop out before they get back in. It would be much better if we
had a system which was much more seamless. I'm talking about employment services because that's the bit that
I'm here representing. It's talking broadly across the stakeholder base.
Ms LAMB: I suppose my question was: are our employment services starting to see more opportunities as an
artery to put people into those industries?
Ms Sinclair: Absolutely.
Ms LAMB: For that industry that had a reduction in penalty rates from 1 July, are we seeing more jobs there
for them to be moved into?
Ms Sinclair: I don't know whether we could say that. I suppose we will see once that cohort comes through. In
terms of the reduction of penalty rates per se, one of the challenging issues anecdotallyagain, because we're not
working in the schools we would hear it anecdotallywas when we went through that challenging period around
minimum hours of work, for kids who would typically have been building their work experience after school.
You're looking at minimum three-hour allotments, and that's not the way it actually works in a dynamic sense. I
think that's illustrative, going back to that high-level discussion we had about the prevalence of the gig economy.
Talking about the gig economy, we can talk about casualisation and part-time work et cetera, but the way the
world of work is operatingand penalty rates can be a component of that, and minimum hours in any one shift et
ceterawe've got to make sure that it's reflective of contemporary society.
The other thing I would say is that we do see young people, once they transition into employment services,
who actually want the flexibility. They like a flexible working arrangement. There's an objective that it's all about
full-time work, all about secure employment et cetera. But who's making all those decisions? Certainly the young
people my members would engage with and talk with say they want flexibility. A lot of them are quite creative
young entrepreneurial types in their own right, looking at their own start-ups. They have a different way of
interacting, really, in the labour market to perhaps what we've seen in previous generations.
Coming back to Megan's point, it's not one size fits all. Can we say there are penalty rate impacts? I'm not sure
that I could give you a definitive answer to that. But I think there's a range of factors in all of this, and looking not
just at the demand side but also at the behaviours of the supply side and what drives their decisions these days.
Ms SHARKIE: Jenny, I want to go back to your point about the supports for employers who are taking on
trainees or apprentices and how that's changed maybe over the last decade, and what you would see is needed in
order to change those figures around. If we're having difficulty getting electricians now then I'm really concerned
that in a decade, when a whole group of highly skilled tradesmen retire, we're going to be left in a vacuum. So,
what do you think we need to be thinking about or doing? I'm thinking that it's partly school and partly employers
and needs to start much earlier than when you're in year 12 and asking what you're going to do.
Ms Lambert: I think it is a range of different strategies but connected towards the same outcome, which is
raising the engagement again. What we're facing now is, having had almost a halving of the number of people in
the system, particularly in the traineeship areait was up around 500,000, or 490,000, in 2012, and it's now
around 275,000 or so in training. So, that's a pretty significant decrease, mostly in the area of traineeships, and in
trades there certainly has been a reduction. One of the things we talked about earlier is that it has forced a
disengagement, if you like, of thinking about it. The first step is to re-engage. The Skilling Australians Fund,
which is going through the mechanism of state and federal negotiation at the moment, to get the settings of that
right, is focused on trying to get that going. But the re-engagement's got to happen for both the jobseekers and the
people at school, and that means right back to getting that embedded within the career education strategy at
school. We talked earlier about making sure young people see that as a worthwhile pathway for them. That's
about informed market and career education strategy, and then the other side is to get employers to re-engage with
the system.
In the last three years or so we've really seen disengagement by a whole range of employers. We have to re-
energise the employers as well. What we've been working through with the Skilling Australia Fund is potentially
looking at particular industries to kick-start particular projects. They could be focused on retail or hospitality.
There is the growth side, and, certainly, kick-starting trade apprenticeships in key areas that have been struggling

to find them. And there is looking at those areas of greatest growth, such as aged care and the like, and ways
there.
So, re-engagement is a really significant issue now. How do we get that re-engagement with employers? How
do we get jobseekers and school leavers re-engaging with the system? Yes, that is about promotion, about getting
the settings right and about making sure that the settings suit particular industries. One of the really significant
things in apprenticeship and traineeship policy in the last few years is that, as I said, we've thrown the baby out
with the bathwater. We had a complete incentive for certificate II or then we had none. Then we had a complete
incentive for part-time traineeships and then we had none. We didn't take into account the fact that what we were
trying to do in changing some behaviour actually took out all the very good things.
For example, in retail: so many young people had part-time or casual Saturday night or Friday night shifts at
General Pants or Just Jeans or whatever. They were then denied the opportunity to take up a traineeship at the end
of school because we completely removed the existing worker traineeship on the basis of trying to change some
other behaviour in other areas. So what we have to do in apprenticeships and traineeships is actually to look,
industry by industry, at what the key qualifications are that would be fantastic in supporting young people to
transition from school to work. Which industriessuch as James's area in restaurant and cateringwill lap up, if
you like, the opportunity to take people successfully from school into structured training and work in a
traineeship? If we can do that and then promote it in schools as being the specific opportunities then I think that
will kick-start that re-engagement. The challenge now is that disengagement.
Some people are even saying: 'Oh well, it's gone now. Our opportunity to reignite traineeships is all gone now.
The model has to change.' We say, 'No, hang on a minutewe just want the policy to actually be more responsive
to kick-start the system again.'
Mr Coward: I think that the promotion area, which you just identified, is a really critical aspect of ensuring
re-engagement. It's not just re-engaging with the system overall but also having the employers and the students re-
engage with each other. We think that needs to be happening at a much earlier level than it is currently. We need
to have a system whereby the most successful people within those sectors are acting as role models for the people
coming up from high school and going through the training courses. They can show them exactly what can be
done and what they're doing within the career that they're inwhat their biggest achievements are, how they did
those and what their training did to help them achieve those. I think that once you have that clarity thereif it's
actually enunciated to them at the start of their decision makingthen that will then act as a significant incentive
for people to try to pursue that pathway.
I think that the idea of promotion and providing students with the clarity of the pathway that they need to
follow in order to get the outcomes they want to achieve is a really important aspect that is often overlooked in
the debate on the transition. Transition is thought about in the short-term view but you want to think about
transition in the long-term view. That is what I talked about before in terms of viewing careers, like in hospitality,
and that sense of what you can achieve in an extended period of time as opposed to, 'What will my salary be once
I finish my certificate or advanced hospitality deployment?' I think it's really about engaging people to view
things over a longer term outcome.
Ms LAMB: Continuing from what we heard in Canberra and what we've heard this morning: it's critically
important what those industry links are with education providers, and that if we're looking for the best way to
ensure that there is a successful transition from school into work those should happen as early as possible.
Megan, chart 8 refers to the industry links with all education providers. Clearly, as written in the summary, the
area where the respondents were saying is the least area is the secondary schools, where industry is having that
partnership with. But then we go to the bottom part of the graph, which talks about there being no education links
at all for 30 per cent. Can you talk us through this graph?
Ms Lilly: We do a survey on workforce development needs every two years. This question has been asked
this is probably the fourth time we've asked the same question, so the figures are a pretty consistent pattern. Bear
in mind that you can dig further into the survey and look at what types of companies respond and see where they
are in the economy, what size they are and where they are geographically. Having said that, the issues come up
and I think this is more of a reflection on schooling than on companieswith the secondary school figure that
you pointed out. I think Jenny made a comment earlier about school leadership. A lot of schools are very caught
upthey have a very crowded curriculum and are very caught up with internal stuff, parental stuff, aspiration and
all that sort of stuff. I think they are less focused on looking externally, beyond community. Community is
incredibly important, but basically I'm referring to industry, and there are a number of schools that are poor at
that. They're not measured on it, either. There isn't a KPI or something like that sitting with the principal to drive
some of that behaviour. There are examples of some European countries where they do make that a critical KPI of

the school leadership. You actually drive different behaviours. I don't think we've done that in Australia.
Therefore, I don't think it's been valued as much as it could and should be. It doesn't just mean they can knock on
the door of any company and it all gets rosy from that point on. You need to build relationships and make them
sustainable. You're almost building that social infrastructure around making it work. Certainly, bigger companies
usually have more of an internal infrastructure to deal with stuff. If you deal with small companies, if you go to
industrial parks, they will often struggle with this sort of stuff. But you've got terrific co-location in an industrial
park, so you could come up with an innovative strategy, if you chose to.
Mr GILES: Briefly, I was pleased, Ms Sinclair, that your submission touched upon young people with
disability and employment outcomes and transition. I know it's a huge issue to start at two minutes over time, but
perhaps I could seek a reflection from employers around the present capacity of the school education system to
equip young people with disability with the skills to more effectively function in the labour market. You're
looking at a rate of participation of about half, which is an enormous loss.
Ms Sinclair: Clearly, our perspective is that there is a lot more that needs to be done. We do have different
program arrangementsboth state transition-to-work programs for young people with disability and specialist
disability employment programs that are funded federallybut, again, we had some program changes which
made it difficult for providers to work with potential early-schooled leavers. That's now been restored, but these
sorts of things don't always help. Regulatory arrangements to try and manage for perhaps some aberrant things
that would happen in the program mean that everybody ends up getting affected. That goes back to the broader
issue of let's put things in place and stick with them: take a long-term view and get sustainability of the
investment. If little hiccups come along the way then let's correct for the hiccups.
At the end of the day, Australia, by and large, just doesn't do well on a broad basis around the employment of
people with disability. We need to really lift our game overall. The business community is responding in part.
There are some great leaders in this area, but it's not consistent and it's not cohesive. Is that about incentives? Is it
about policy arrangements? Is it attitudinal? It's probably all of those things. There are many stratas I think that
we can look at. I'm currently chairing the employment reform working group for the National Disability and
Carers Advisory Council. It would be fair to say that there's a lot of work that we need to do, but we're starting
with employer engagement because there is certainly a need for much more coherent policy and strategic
responses to getting better employer engagement in Australia compared to other jurisdictions which are doing a
hell of a lot better than we quite frankly.
Ms Lambert: We're very actively involved in disability employment issues, and I'd like to make a few points
there. Firstly, of very strong relevance to this inquiry is that much more can be done to provide work experience
opportunities for young people with disability while they're still at school. I think that employers have
demonstrated with the vast amount of year 10 placements that happen throughout the country that employers do
take on young people at school, that they're willing to do that for the benefit of their community support, but
there's much more that needs to be done to inspire young students while they're still at school with what's possible
for people with disability and, much more, to demonstrate to employers what's possible in taking on kids with
disability. I think there's a really good opportunity there to do that while young people are at school, if they have a
disability at school.
There are a lot of other policy responsesfor example, there should potentially be a PaTH program for people
with disability; there should be active and kickstarter traineeships for people with disability; and we have a
longstanding view that it was a very poor policy decision to move disability employment from Employment to
DSS. We've certainly taken a very strong view that, although there are major issues with the engagement of
employers with the broader jobactive space, there is still a much greater likelihood of economies of scale in
achieving engagement between employment services and employers than there will be with a relatively small
system like disability employment operating in isolation. One of the really important things is to try for it not to
be such a supply-driven system. You're never going to get that when you've got a small system.
That said, when on the transition disability employment force. We're very committed to trying to do what we
can, but we think there's some fundamental policy change that's needed there.
Ms Lilly: Can I just take the opportunity to talk to you briefly about a projectthe pilot project Ai Group's
involved in. I'm speaking professionally but also as someone personally involved in the disability sector. We're
running a higher apprenticeship project for Industry 4.0. I'm happy to provide further information, but the point I
want to make is that Industry 4.0and the fourth industrial revolutionhas the ability to ameliorate the
disadvantages of both gender and disability. The companies that are leading it globallythey are mostly
Germantalk very openly about that. We have one pilot group going through at the momentonly 20 are
involved. We couldn't advertise the course name when we were starting it, because it wasn't fully accredited, so

we got caught up in some of the machinations of the system. We probably didn't get the gender diversity that we
were looking for, but we absolutely did get some of it, and we also have a student with cerebral palsy doing it.
They are doing this highly technical, completely advanced, really exciting, innovative stuff and at the same level
as anyone else engaged in the project. It really has the capacity to make a substantial difference. It's really
important that we get the messages out early that that whole new part of the economy that is opening up can be
opened up for everybody.
CHAIR: If you could provide that it would be wonderful. Thanks very much, team, that was much
appreciated. I thank you for the quality of the submissions in this session in particular. I appreciate it very much.
Megan, to whoever's doing your graphics: well done! Your submission was fantastic.
Ms Lilly: I can assure you it's not me!
Ms Sinclair: Thank you.
Ms Lambert: Thank you.
Proceedings suspended from 13:09 to 13:42

BEGLEY, Ms Kate, Policy and Government Relations Adviser, Vision Australia

CAIN, Mr Paul, Inclusion Australia
CLARKE, Mr Indi, Manager, Koorie Youth Council
GOTLIB, Ms Stephanie, Chief Executive Officer, Children and Young People with Disability Australia
KENNY, Miss Edmee, Policy Officer, Multicultural Youth Advocacy Network Australia
LIDDY, Ms Nadine, National Coordinator, Multicultural Youth Advocacy Network Australia
NAZARI, Mr Ali, Business Trainee, Multicultural Youth Advocacy Network Australia
CHAIR: I welcome representatives of Vision Australia, the Multicultural Youth Advocacy Network,
Inclusion Australia, Children and Young People with Disability Australia, and the Koorie Youth Council. Do you
have any comments to make on the capacity in which you are appearing today?
Mr Clarke: I'm representing the Koorie Youth Council but also the Youth Affairs Council of Victoria and the
Youth Disability Advocacy Service, who send their apologies today.
Mr Cain: Inclusion Australia is a national association representing people with intellectual disability and their
families.
CHAIR: This is intended, as much as anything, for us to hear from numerous sources but also for you to
engage with each other. We think that is incredibly valuable as well, so we do value polite interruptions of each
other. Don't feel that you can't do that.
We don't require that you give evidence on oath, but we remind you that this hearing is a legal proceeding of
the parliament and warrants the same respect as proceedings of the House. The giving of false and misleading
evidence is a serious matter and may be regarded as a contempt of parliament. The evidence given today will be
recorded by Hansard and attracts parliamentary privilege. We traditionally start with an introductory statement
but, with a roundtable, that can take up half an hour of the valuable hour that we have together, but I do invite
you, if you wish, to make a very, very brief introductory observation. I think that would be important.
Mr Clarke: Firstly, I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet, the
Wurundjeri people, and pay respect to the elders both past and present, for they are the elders and the legends that
have worked before myself and everyone in this room today. The Koori Youth Council, YDAS and YACVic
welcome the opportunity to bring the voices of young people to the table and present to the Australian
parliamentary inquiry into school-to-work transition. I will touch on a lot of Koori Youth Council's
recommendation today. Our recommendations have been informed with young people, and our submission
recognises that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people have cultural needs that differ from non-
Aboriginal people. We recognise, as said by Dr Muriel Bamblett in the Not one size fits all report:
For too long Aboriginal children have been assessed using measures and assessment approaches which do not take into
account their culture, beliefs, connection to community and place, spirituality and their individual experiences. Furthermore
the assessment of an individuals social and emotional status independent of the family and community is an alien concept to
Aboriginal people as well as being ecologically uninformed.
These findings are consistent with the work of the Australian Indigenous Psychologists Association in their
development of an Aboriginal social emotional well-being framework, and we highlight that implementing this
guide as a basis for understanding Aboriginal young peoples needs at school and work is a vital and important
step towards culturally-informed systems.
Ms Gotlib: For those of you who don't know, Children and Young People with Disability Australia, CYDA, is
the national representative organisation for children and young people aged nought to 25. I am the CEO and we
have about 5 thousand members nationallythe majority being families of children with disability. We also
have some young people with disability who are members.
If I could summarise the school-to-work transition, I would say that the support that is given in that post-school
transition period is extremely variable and typically poor. It is a difficult space for many young people, given a
range of systemic barriers, for people without disability but, when you put disability in the equation, that
difficulty is entrenched and magnified.
Mr Cain: In preparing our submission we wanted to show a good news, bad news type of picture of the way
we see the issue of moving from school to work for people with intellectual disability. The good news is that we
have pockets of excellence in Australia that is undoubtedly world class. The stories that we showed at the front of
our submission are examples of that world-class practice. The bad news is that it is rare, it is not common

throughout Australia. Most young people with intellectual disability and their families don't have access to that
kind of quality and level of transition support.
Another piece of good news that I would mention is that, having looked at the international scene, we are
incredibly generous with our funding , and there are plenty of resources to underpin good support. But we're still
stuck in some old ways of thinking about what actually works to help young people with intellectual disability
move from school to work. I think part of our challenge is changechange from low expectations, change from
old models of what we thought worked but doesn't and thinking very carefully, if we're going to scale up, about
moving to something that actually has effective outcomes because we're very good at running with ideas that don't
and finding it very difficult to stop them many years later.
Ms Liddy: The Multicultural Youth Advocacy Network is the national body on multicultural youth issues, so
we represent the rights and interests of young people from refugee and migrant backgroundsnot only those who
are newly arrived but also second-generation young peopleand the services and workers that support that group.
The reason we made a submission is that we were very keen to ensure that the committee considered the
particular experiences of young people from refugee and migrant backgrounds. Those who come to Australia and
those who were born in Australia are highly resilient and come with a range of capabilities but they also face a
range of barriers to engaging in a whole range of supports and opportunities and making that transition in relation
to this particular inquiry and that transition from school to work. Some of those factors are: language, family
structures, cultural and social capitalso building a new life in Australia for those who are more newly arrived. It
comes with a whole range of challenges, and young people are negotiating that while negotiating the really
significant developmental tasks of adolescence.
We also have a national support role with an important program that's funded out of settlement services in the
Department of Social Services called the youth transition support pilot, and we have supported the
implementation of that program in three states. There are six providerstwo in Queensland, two in New South
Wales and two in Victoriaand we've played a national support role in the implementation of that pilot. I would
just highlight that it's in our submission, but I think it's a really excellent program that provides targeted support.
It allows for innovative practice but also a holistic approach to supporting young people in the settlement context
to navigate the transition from school to work. It allows for employment-focused initiatives, individual casework,
group work programs, a recreational component, a sporting component to focus on social engagement and social
cohesion as well as education support within the school with intensive English language schools but also in the
mainstream system. It allows for transition programs and targeted support outside the school setting.
The key thing is: young people from refugee and migrant backgrounds really need targeted support and, if we
don't ensure that they receive targeted support at the school end all the way through to training and into
employment, there is a risk that this group disengage from socioeconomic opportunities.
Ms Begley: Thank you for the opportunity to present today. There are also a lot of challenges for people who
are blind or have low vision with school-to-work transition. Similar to what Nadine said, it's the targeted support
that we're recommending in our submission. When it comes to career counselling, we need counsellors trained in
the specialist requirements of people who are blind or have low vision, who know which courses, for example, are
accessible to people who are blind or have low vision, the employment outcomes from that qualification and
whether it's realistic for someone who is blind to be able to pursue.
One of the major barriers for students who are blind or have low vision is that many of the online learning
platforms within tertiary education don't meet minimum accessibility guidelines. This excludes students as they're
not able to pursue their education goals, which affects employment outcomes. The unemployment rate among
people who are blind or have low vision is 68 per cent, so more than 10 times higher than the general population.
So accessibility is one of our key recommendations.
One of the other big barriers to school-to-work transition is traditional first-time jobs like working at
McDonalds or in a cafe. Students who are blind or have low vision can't do those jobs, so they're almost always
lacking in those soft life skills that their counterparts will have. They might get all these qualifications at
university but when they come to the workforce they're just not able to keep up with the soft life skills that their
counterparts have gathered over the years.
CHAIR: Thanks all of you for your submissions and for coming along today. I would like to echo Andrew's
comments that it's very useful, from our point of view, to have this as a conversation and to put on the record a
clear view in dealing with the challenges we face, at large, in post-school transitions. We don't move from a
starting point that there is a one-size-fits-all model, so it's really important that we have this diversity of views
that, hopefully, can inform a series of recommendations that reflect the needs of all young Australians.

One thing that I thought might be a useful starting point is you commented, Nadine, on the effectiveness of the
transitions program that's federally funded. Could others comment on other federally funded transition programs?
There are a few in the disability space and some that have been tailored, particularly, at Aboriginal young people.
Could I get some views on those as a starting point?
Mr Clarke: I can start, if you like. For us we showcase best practice, in the employment and mentoring
program, as Wan-Yaari, which is currently being run out of Geelong. Wan-Yaari is an employment and
mentoring program that grew from the need to support Aboriginal and young people from school to work, within
that cultural framework that I was speaking about before. Wan-Yaari recognises that while Aboriginal young
people need support non-Aboriginal people also need support to create culturally safe workplaces.
One of the best things about the program is it provides culturally appropriate and empowering mentoring
support with a holistic approach that focuses on three main areas: cultural strengthening, professional mentoring
and personal guidance. That's working to meet the individual's needs and, as we highlighted before and
throughout the submissions, that tailors the program to the individual. It takes a strength based approach that
acknowledges the cultural identity and pride of the participants as well as the barriers to workplace inclusion,
such as intergenerational trauma and discrimination.
In addition to working with the young people, the program provides culture education to the schools and
workplaces to increase their cultural capacity. This helps to create culturally safe schools and workplaces that are
able to understand and support Aboriginal young people within their framework. This training is key to ensuring
that Aboriginal young people feel safe and connected at work, by valuing their voices and identity. One of the
most important things with their voices is their participation. As we know, youth participation leads to successful
young people.
Mr Cain: Post-school transition to work for students with disability has been, traditionally, state based
funded. That's changing now with the NDIS. NDIS is taking responsibility for that function and we're in that
process of change. Under the NDIS it's going to be called School Leaver Employment Supports. I've been doing a
lot of work on that, in the last few years, talking to participants and families about things like informed choice and
what kinds of things they should be looking for from providers and the like.
The history of it is interesting, because it really came about through trying to address a barrier. After we set up
open employment services in 1986 we had a period of sunshine, where a lot of people were accessing it straight
from school, but it came to a big halt. Generally speaking, low expectations entered the discussion, where families
and students were concerned that it was too big a leap to go from school to the open labour market. New South
Wales was the first state jurisdiction to introduce transition to work in 2004, and the example of individuals in our
submission comes from a provider that piloted that between 1999 and 2004. The pilot is based on a very simple
recipe: if we give young students with disability, in this case it's intellectual disability, a taste of success in the
workplace, that can change expectations.
Probably the second thing is that for this particular group of people learning skills is most powerful at a
workplace. We know, after many decades, that classroom based learning doesn't transfer very well, for this group
of people, to the workplacethe idea of generalisation and transfer.
Since that, Victoria copied a little bit of the New South Wales program here in around 2009 and '10. Other
states struggled to implement anything. So, for us, at the moment, the NDIS is an extremely luxurious thing where
every student will have the possibility of having two years of transition-to-work support to build their expectation,
build their confidence and try work. I can't emphasise that enough, because the biggest barrier is not skill or
capacity for us; it's expectation. If we can change expectations, the skill part's the easy piece. I hope that answers
your question.
Ms Gotlib: But I suppose that begs the question: what happens to the kids that aren't on the NDIS? That is the
majority of kids.
Mr Cain: I suppose the NDIS is particularly focused on a group that has the most significant disability. You're
right: there is a gap. You could argue that the Commonwealth's Disability Employment Services is still an option
after school, and there's 18 months of funding. But, for some, it's still a struggle to move straight in there from
school.
Ms Gotlib: I just wonder, though, about kids who are at uni and wanting assistance with getting part-time
work. I absolutely agree with everything that you've said, although I think there's a bit of variability in the NDIS
SLES program, from what I can gather. They can't access those services at the moment.
Mr Cain: What Stephanie's alluding to is that, again, we've got great aspirations, great policy and great
funding; the biggest barrier is the skills on the ground, and that's what I was alluding to in the opening statement.

While we indeed have world-class support and providers, they are few and far between, so moving to a national
Transition to Work program for students will probably require investment in building capacity not in the students
but in the providers, because particular expertise is required and we simply don't have it on a national scale at the
moment.
Ms Liddy: Can I just jump in there? In terms of other Commonwealth funded programs, there are some
specific programs funded out of the Department of Education: the Empowering YOUth Initiatives and TTW,
Transition to Work. We've had some engagement with the department around those programs and we'd like to
track what the engagement of young people from refugee and migrant backgrounds into those programs looks
like, because we would agree that one size doesn't fit all and the programs that work best for all young people are
those that are flexible and allow for a more targeted approach to particular population groups. Just picking up on
the skills, we would argue that workers on the ground delivering those programs need capacity building to ensure
that the needs of young people from refugee and migrant backgrounds are met in those programs.
I just want to say a couple of other things. The Youth Transition Support pilot program through settlement
services in DSS has an independent evaluation component to it. That's something I would like to highlight. We
would certainly argue that the evidence base is insufficient across all sectors over policy, programming and
program planning to give us the data that we need for policymakers and those developing programs to ensure that
programs are meeting needs. So I would just highlight that YTS has an independent evaluation funded as part of
the program, and we would like to see that across all programs.
The last thing I want to say in relation to Commonwealth funding is in relation to English language, or EAL,
funding. That comes from the Commonwealth to the states, and I'm going to read from our submission. On page
6, one of our recommendationsand this is something that we have made recommendations about over many,
many yearstalks about:
the development and implementation of nationally consistent definitions, measurements and cost structures for English
language provision to newly arrived young people
We want to see much better, nationally consistent definitions, measurements and cost structures, because what
we're hearing through our very broad networks on the ground is that there's insufficient accountability around
how that EAL funding is spent within schools. We want to see much better accountability, so measurements
around cost structures, but we also want that funding, as part of the measurements, to be tied closely to
educational needs and outcomes, because we see a major gap there, and there's inconsistency. Some schools are
doing fantastic, innovative, targeted work to meet the needs of this cohort and others are not.
Mr GILES: I just have one follow-up question. Is this capability development that a few of you have touched
upon principally about engaging with clients, or is it about appreciating the changing dynamics of the labour
market and educational settings, or is it both?
Ms Liddy: I'm going to jump in, and I'll be very brief. For the target that we work with, it's understanding
those trends and the implications for young people from refugee and migrant backgrounds, because they look
different for different population groups, I would argue. So I think it's understanding what that all means and what
a targeted approach might look like, or what those service providers need to do to meet the needs of particular
population groups in light of, for example, labour market trends. For young people from refugee and migrant
backgrounds, there's a whole lot of work that needs to be done around building social capital and strengthening
networks for young people. Networks are critical in understanding employment culture, career pathways, how to
get your first job and what's required, and often young people in this group have very limited networks and social
capital.
CHAIR: On that topic, isn't there a Friendly Nation Initiative where major corporates are partnering? Can you
just update us on that program. As a subquestion, do you think there is any importance in having a same-
language-speaking supervisor for some of these first employment placements so that, for instance, you have an
Arabic-speaking workplace supervisor for a young Arabic-speaking person moving into the workplace for the
first time.
Ms Liddy: Yes, and I might leave Ali to also answer. The Friendly Nation Initiative was something that was
set up with the Migration Council of Australia as a response to the increased humanitarian intake in response to
the Syrian crisis. That wasn't youth specific, so I'm not across how that rolled out in meeting the needs of young
people, but it was a great initiative because it really brought on board the corporate sector, which I think we don't
do so well in the NGO sector. So I think in that regard it was a great initiative.
I think what you're alluding to is cross-cultural capacity of employers. As to whether that is a supervisor in first
language, we wouldn't necessarily be recommending that, but what we would be recommending is the

development of cross-cultural skills and knowledge to support a culturally diverse workforce, so to understand the
context and the needs ofagain, for usyoung people from culturally diverse backgrounds but also to help
young people build their skills and knowledge around cultural competency and the different cultural expectations
within the employment or labour market. Ali, do you want to say anything in relation to what has helped you in
workplace settings or finding work? You're in a traineeship with the Centre for Multicultural Youth.
Mr Nazari: Yes. Basically, I just finished high school last year, and, like many other young people, I
struggled to find jobs, especially something that matches with the career that I want to achieve in later years. But
this traineeship gave me the experience I wanted, because I am studying at university right now but also attending
a traineeship at the Centre for Multicultural Youth, with the Multicultural Youth Advocacy Network, which is a
program there. It has certainly helped me to achieve that experience of working in an office and having all sorts of
experience and being paid. Especially for a refugee and asylum seeker, it was a very great experience. There are a
lot of people who are in a similar situation and from a similar background who really struggle hard to find jobs
and access education due to not having enough language support or, I would say, enough support in high school
that could prepare them better for the next step in university, TAFE or any other physical work that they're going
to do. It definitely helped me to build my skills, in terms of my language and communication, and how things
work in an office. So, yes, it has been a great experience since last December, and there's a few months left of my
traineeship. It has certainly helped me a lot with getting more experience about office life.
Ms SHARKIE: Obviously each of you will have a different answer, but have you looked around the world
and seen any examples of best practice in working with first peoples, indigenous people, aboriginals, people with
disabilities or intellectual disabilities, people from refugee backgrounds or young people? Where can we learn
from?
Mr Cain: I would just say be careful thinking that everything overseas is better.
Ms SHARKIE: I'm listening to what you're saying already and thinking, 'Well, surely
Mr Cain: I know because I've looked overseas. I've been researching this area for 25 years. I have travelled to
the US, Japan and Europe and looked at all the so-called 'best' that are published in all the journals, and there are
some good ones but, like Australia, no country is doing this perfectlybut there are really good exemplars and
examples of really good practice. When you look at the stuff that I believe is world-class here, we've borrowed
from most of those really good examples. For instance, that set of examples in our submission is a hodgepodge of
stealing different ideas from different good practices. For instance, the very first demonstration of this to people
with intellectual disability was a conglomeration of taking three pieces from three different universities in the US.
If I could just use that as an example of your question, Andrew, about capacity, when we talk about capacity
we're talking about the capacity of the people who are providing the support. Those three pieces are about finding
jobs because it's a different way of finding jobs for people with intellectual disabilities. It's not seeking advertised
vacancies; it's negotiating a customised job where you're trying to find a position that's going to help the employer
but also fit the young person. It's a very different skill set. And then you have to teach the job on-the-job, and
that's a different skill set again. That's having to know how to do explicit instruction and break down jobs into
pieces and teach different components, and then you have to know how to provide long-term ongoing support to
deal with change and those kinds of things. So when we talk about capacity, we talk about the support being
provided because that's the glue that makes it work. That's the glue that creates the successful long-term job
sustainability from school to work.
When we're looking overseas, all those pieces feature in the best overseas things. For instance, for autism, one
of the most successful overseas examples is called Project SEARCH and, generally, what they do is explicit
instruction on the job for at least a year of unpaid work experience, simply to break down expectation, build
confidence and skill before they can move into a paid job. And that kind of system is what the New South Wales
Transition to Work providersthe better providers, because they're not all gooddo to achieve those outcomes.
We're always looking at what works versus sustainable outcomes, and what works is the skilled support. When
we see that we go, 'We'd like to have that skilled support being available to every student and every family
considering moving from school to work.' It's a very explicit set of competencies. Unfortunately, what most
families and students get offered are not those competencies. They'll get offered to go into a day program, for
instance, where they think if you do this preparation in this other place it somehow builds capacity to work, and it
doesn't. We've known it for years, but we still have 40 to 50 per cent of students with significant disability going
into non-work day programs year after year. It's like clockwork, and very few go on a pathway of the evidence-
based transition to work.
Ms Liddy: Can I reply to that, Rebecca?

Ms SHARKIE: Yes.
Ms Liddy: There are two things I would say straight up. The German government's investment in vocational
education and training, the VET system, is utterly impressive. Unfortunately, over many years now, the
Australian government has de-invested in the VET system in Australia. I visited Berlin last year and met with the
German government, and we had conversations around the integration of young migrants and refugees and what
the German government is doing. They have had an enormous intakehundreds and thousands of refugeesas a
response to the Syrian crisis, and a large proportion of those are young people. They are investing billions of
dollars into a very well-established VET system. So, straight-up, I will highlight the fact that having adequately-
funded apprenticeships, traineeships, on-the-job work experience and infrastructure to support the transition from
school to work fundamentally is a really important approach.
The other thing I will say, as a response to your question, is that Australia is a world leader when it comes to
settlement. No other country with reasonably-sized resettlement programsso a humanitarian programand I'm
talking about Canada, the US, the UK, probably Germany now and some other European states, invests in new
settlement like Australia does. I also want to highlight that. If we're talking about new arrivalsboth migrants
and refugeesin that first five years of settlement, the Australian government is highly regarded globally. There
is no youth-specific targeted settlement support in those other countries. There are no organisations like the
Centre For Multicultural Youth or the Multicultural Youth Advocacy NetworkMYAN. That investment from
the Australian government is impressive in terms of youth settlement.
CHAIR: Very quickly, is that partly because a lot of those European countries are only offering temporary
protection?
Ms Liddy: That could be part of it, but, fundamentally, I think it's about recognising the importance of
investing in supporting the integration of young people. They are the future. Whether they are here for five years,
seven years, 15 years or 55 years, investing in young people is really critical.
CHAIR: The actuarial argument then.
Ms Liddy: I think it's a recognition of the needs of young people in the settlement context and the importance
in investing in young people in terms of integration outcomes. It's interesting that, in terms of concerns around
security and adolescents being particularly at risk, there isn't really the investment in settlement. Can I also just
flag that the MYAN has developed a National Youth Settlement Framework to support the settlement of young
people, and that includes a set of four domains, including economic participation and indicators across those. We
would certainly argue that education to work fits in across all of those domains, so we've developed some tools to
support it.
Ms Begley: I just want to answer your question. We've looked overseas at a pre-employment program that has
been designed for young people who are blind or have low vision. It really tries to embed those soft life skills that
I mentioned earlier. At the moment, we're about to roll out the building stronger futures empowering youth pre-
employment program over the next two years, and we're really basing it on that American theory of a strong focus
on all the soft life skills that might have been missing in the years prior to gaining a qualification. Overseas, the
key thing for people who are blind or have low vision is that there's much more success in terms of accessibility
guidelines for web content and ICT procurement. So schools, universities and workplaces are more accessible
places overseas than in Australia at this stage.
Mr Clarke: Can I make two quick comments in relation to your question. In relation to looking overseas for
Aboriginal examples, I think we're very much of the same view that we should look in our own backyard because
we have 60,000 years of wisdom and values that are embedded in the Aboriginal culture. When you look at best
practice, a number of these programs have the Aboriginal values and concepts embedded. But, also, if you look at
the diversity of Aboriginal nations within Australia, there are over 250 different nations, so I'd be very sceptical in
looking at overseas examples, even though there are a number of good examples. Also, just in regard to Wan-
Yaari's funding stream, I'm not sure where that comes from, but there are a number of initiatives that are funded
through the Indigenous Advancement Strategy which have the same kinds of objectives and values that Wan-
Yaari works off.
One is the Mildura Aboriginal employment program, which is currently run out of Mallee District Aboriginal
Services. That looks at mentoring the organisation and the young person to make sure that it is an easy transition.
It highlights, as YDAS and KYC believe, that a successful transition is only achieved through inclusive
education, and that doesn't just stop with schools but also with the organisations involved and the staff that will be
working with those young people. So I think there are a number of really good examples that are happening in
Australia, before we look overseas.

Ms SHARKIE: Fantastic. Thank you.

Ms LAMB: Earlier today we heard about the role of industry in students moving from school into work, but
it's not something that I've heard about yet in this session yetthe role of industry. Is that because it's remarkably
absent or
Mr Cain: No, it's a big piece. It's interesting you ask that question, because in the general disability sector we
like to bag employers a lot for having bad attitudes. But Inclusion Australia take a very different view because we
see them as not only critical to our people but very capable, and they respond very well to the evidence based
practicesextremely well.
Ms LAMB: In terms of informing the young people that you represent about a pathway into work, what are
they doing in that space?
Ms Liddy: They're critical.
Mr GILES: Yesif a young person with a disability is half as likely to be in employment as one without,
where's the problem?
Mr Cain: This is why we keep coming back to the skilled support. Where there is the skilled support, that
barrier is not recognisable as such. Because of that nexus with not being able to fill an advertised vacancy, you
need someone on your behalf to make that connection and that negotiation of customising that position. Where
you've got that, employers respond extremely well and we get very high rates of job placement and job retention.
Where that skill is not there, the barriers are massive, and it's almost like a dance that can't happen because here
you've got this young person who can't fit an advertised vacancy trying to compete with everyone else for a job
that they cannot do in its complete form. It's almost a naive way of looking at inclusionthinking that you're
going to compete on the same level as everyone else. So, when we see really good outcomes, we see these skilled
providers knowing how to work with industry and employers. I'm a big fan, because big employers like
Woolworths, McDonald's and Coles are very, very good in engaging with good providers, but so are a broad
range of other employers are not very well known. I'm very upbeat about it.
Ms LAMB: Are there further protections needed, though, to ensure that students transitioning from school to
work aren't exploited; and what are those further protections?
Ms Liddy: Can I just take a quick step back. To answer your initial question, I thinklike you, Paul
industry is really critical, and we've seen some really great outcomes for young people from refugee and migrant
backgrounds where there have been conversations, very intentional partnerships and collaborations, between
employers and young people, such as in forums that bring together industry and young people so that industry
meet young people from culturally diverse backgrounds. They may have had some unconscious bias around the
capabilities of this group of young peoplelanguage, culture. There are inevitably some assumptions about their
capabilities. So those forums are really important for industry to build their knowledge and understanding of who
this group of young people are and what their capabilities and skills are, and for young people to get to meet
employers and understand what is expected of them and also understand what the labour market in Australia
looks like, how to navigate that, how to get your first job and what's required.
There are also some fabulous work experience programs around the country, and work experience is a really
important way to do that capacity building not only for young people in terms of their skills, knowledge and
networks but also for industry by meeting young people from migrant and refugee backgrounds and going, 'Oh,
actually a whole lot of them do speak English really well. Oh, a whole lot of them have completed year 12. Oh, a
whole lot of them do have university degrees.' I think that knowledge and capacity building is really important.
On your second question, I would be suggesting that for the young people we work with it's about skilling them
up around their rights in the workplace. Again, as part of more limited social capital here in Australia, there is
often an unfamiliarity with their rights and responsibilities as employees. Skilling up young people to understand
what those rights are is really important. In terms of
Ms LAMB: Not everybody is exploited
Ms Liddy: Absolutely. The risk of exploitation is there. I wouldn't comment on whether that is higher with the
population group that we represent.
Mr Cain: I think it does happen. Most employers want to do the right thing because they know the law is
quite sound. The Disability Discrimination Act and the industrial relations features, things like the supported
wage system, are very solid, and there is independent evaluation if there's a wage below the award. Most
employees want to do the right thing. There are times where we've had to chase advocacy and get things fixed and
deal with complaints, but on the whole it's done rather well. I have to say again, and I hate to be a broken record,

that where there is really good skilled support, you also get very strong advocacy from those providing the
support. There's a need to make sure that the person is protected as they go through the process.
Mr Clarke: From an Aboriginal community perspective, some industries historically don't have the best
relationships with Aboriginal communities. Where we have seen it work well is with industries and employers
that embed cultural competency and cultural safety in their organisations. We do need to recognise that cultural
competency and cultural safety can only be achieved by ongoing relationships with Aboriginal communities,
people and businesses. When you see that working wellas with Wan-Yaari it's exactly that. It's an ongoing
relationship between an Aboriginal organisation and the industry that the young person may be involved with. For
example, look at the police: historically, it hasn't always been the best, but they're starting to embed Aboriginal
employment programs and strategies for their school-based traineeships and they're pretty well in line with best
practice in breaking down those barriers and creating spaces for young people to achieve what they want.
CHAIR: Is there any progress in public sector placements? Or are you finding that industry is just as willing
to
Mr Clarke: Just at the Victorian state levelthat's all I've been able to witnessthere is a number of
initiatives that are really working well. For example, the Koori graduate program for the public sector, which is
run out of the Department of Justice and Regulation, is a really good avenue for young Aboriginal people to enter
the Victorian public sector. They gain valuable insight into how government works and then the young people end
up taking on greater leadership roles through those positions.
CHAIR: Are you concerned that Aboriginal organisations, many of which receive IAS money, are
increasingly focused on public sector employment? To give you a terrible generalisation, communities are fully
engaged in youth ranger programs, which is basically an expensive form of unemployment benefit. Is there an
adequate focus on private sector positions for young Indigenous Australians?
Mr Clarke: In Victoria it depends on the local community. We have seen a number of initiatives that are
ranger focusedwith the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planningbut we have seen initiatives
like the Mildura employment where people are going into local council and trades and apprenticeships. The
diversity lies in the localised content. For me it's about rewarding and resourcing those Aboriginal communities.
With the IAS a number of groups are running with minimal funding for those programs.
CHAIR: We might stick with the Indigenous topic, but I'd like to invite contributions from others of you on
the Indigenous topic. In the Indigenous space, the old generalisation was that if there was a mine nearby that
should be a great opportunity for Indigenous Australians in that area. Is there evidence that employment levels are
higher in communities that are close to large mining enterprises?
Mr Clarke: I'm unable to make comment on that, out of lack of experience in that area, but I would say that it
also comes down to the negotiations between the Aboriginal communities and the mining companies obviously.
As we've seen, that can be problematic in some communities, and in some communities it might work well,
depending on the negotiations. But I'd say that is a very sceptical kind of question because of the various kinds of
degrees in terms of land rights and native title rights.
CHAIR: As to the Indigenous procurement strategy that this government has pushed quite recently, which is
trying to have a minimum proportion that is procured through Indigenous-led organisations, have you seen any
evidence of that working in Victoria?
Mr Clarke: It's pretty early days for that Victorian procurement policy, but a number of organisations in
Geelong hosted a forum, probably two or three months ago, at which Wan-Yaari was making connections with
various employers. I would say that at the moment it is early days yet, but I'm very encouraged to see
government's ongoing commitment to the Aboriginal procurement process. I think that having that as part of a
systemic change will be encouraging for Aboriginal communities. It's about Aboriginal organisations being aware
of those opportunities, as Wan-Yaari has been, and we're starting to see some really good examples in Geelong.
CHAIR: Just to finish on the Indigenous: there is always an element of corporate engagement. Woolworths
was very active in promoting an Indigenous employment strategy around the country. Without identifying the
good guys and the bad guys, do you sometimes look across major corporates and say, 'That group is really doing a
lot more than this group and we really need to push that corporate harder'? Is there a real sense that some are
leading and some are lagging?
Mr Clarke: Yes. I will come back to the comment beforethat where it works successfully is where they
actually practice cultural safety and cultural competency, and where they have an ongoing relationship with the
Aboriginal community in question. For example, I will highlight the department of justice again for what they do
with the Koori graduate program. That is because they have strong partnerships with the Aboriginal community.

They have the Koori Caucus, which is the governing body of the Aboriginal Justice Agreement. They can actually
have a say in what's happening in those spaces. It's about having that ongoing dialogue with the community in
place.
CHAIR: Sorry to interrupt, but I would have thought that all of the corporates we'd be dealing with would be
large enough to accept that point of view and ask that it just happens. Are some corporates not achieving that, do
you think?
Mr Clarke: I believe a number of them are actually achieving that and then there is a number that wouldn't
actually go to that level. It's about making sure that the localised content is there as wellthat it is not one size
fits all.
Ms LAMB: Indi, first of all, thank you for the acknowledgement of country, and I join with you in doing the
same. There are two points I would raise. One is an observation that the YDAS submission speaks to young
people as being 12 to 25, but we typically talk about 15 to 24. Is there a particular reason why that's the focus of
where you carve out 'young people' and pick up 12-year-olds? There has been a lot of conversation about how
early we should be talking about transitioning to work and early intervention, and that submission actually picks
up 12although we have been focusing a lot on 15.
Mr Clarke: I can't make a comment from YDAS's perspective, but KYC works in a very similar role and we
work with ages 12 to 25 as well. But for us it is understanding that Aboriginal young people take on adult roles
necessarily a lot younger than non-Aboriginal people do, and it is respecting that and empowering them earlier
rather than later. It's about addressing it earlier on so we can get to the bottom of it. I'm pretty surethis is just a
commentYouth Disability Advocacy Service is the same, but they also provide one-on-one advocacy services
to the individual, so it's a really unique space for YDAS to work in, when they provide that one-on-one support
for those young people and work with the family as well.
Ms LAMB: My other point goes to point (1) of the terms of reference of the inquiry, about the measurement
of gain. I note that, in the submission, you refer to social and emotional status being measured independently of
family and that that is quite foreign or alien to our Indigenous people. What needs to change in measuring gain for
our Indigenous people with that in consideration?
Mr Clarke: I refer to page 16 of the YDAS, KYC and YACVic submission. You will see the Aboriginal
social emotional wellbeing framework. That works off of the holistic social emotional wellbeing of an Aboriginal
person. It highlights that an Aboriginal person's social and emotional wellbeing is connected to so many different
connections and that we can't evaluate a young person or an Aboriginal person's holistic social and emotional
wellbeing without taking into account all of those different areas. What we've seen is that a number of agencies,
and a number even in the education space, will do that. They're not tailoring any programs or support services to
an Aboriginal young person's needs. Some of the highlights are that Aboriginal community is a connection, that
an Aboriginal young person's culture and identity is not separate of that, and that we must take that into account.
Ms LAMB: Is there any way that a government can, with all of the information, genuinely work out where we
need to do better and make sure that we can target resources?
Mr Clarke: Yes.
Ms LAMB: How do we do that?
Mr Clarke: It's looking at the best practices. It's looking at Wan-Yaari's employment services, looking at the
Australian Indigenous Psychologists Association's framework and looking at and questioning: 'How can we make
sure that we embed these values and these systems within our own systemic areas?' It's also about having those
conversations with the Aboriginal communities in those areas around, 'How do we localise the content?' or, 'How
do we support the young people in your area.' It's making sure that we have ongoing relationships with those
communities.
CHAIR: A tangential question: are there any views on these Indigenous scholarship programs that airlift
young children down to boarding schools that are often in Victoria? Do you guys tolerate that program or have a
view for or against what it's delivering?
Mr Clarke: I wouldn't be able to make a comment on that, because I haven't been witness to it. I do have a
couple of family members, personally, that I have seen go through that. Where it has worked was because they
had a strong relationship with their community and family back home. It's about that support system behind them
pushing them through those spaces.
CHAIR: Stephanie and Paul, because you're generally covering all sectors in your positions, you're invited to
jump in at any time, but we'll probably do some vision-related questions next if we can, Kate, and then come back

again to some final questions. Vision is a slightly different challenge because, for many employers, technology is
going to make the difference between someone being fully functional in the workplace and otherwise. What's
your sentiment when dealing with employers? Is their main concern completely alleviated once they realise
there's a piece of technology that can allow someone to operate in their workplace?
Ms Begley: Not completely alleviated. One concern is how much it might cost them to get the whole set-up of
all the specialist equipment required. Once we talk to them about the JobAccess program and the government
funding provided to employers for that equipment, then it's alleviated somewhat. One of the major problems is
that the computer systems within a lot of businesses, organisations and companies aren't aligned with the software
that people who are blind or have low vision have to use to have their screen reading program read to thema
program like JAWS, for example, or a magnification program like ZoomText. The big worry is the cost of
changing a whole computer system and the expense of that, which obviously isn't an easy fix like JobAccess
funding is. Yes, I think accessibility is the major problem for employers.
The other problem is just a general sort of fear of blindness and a stigma around whether there'll be OHS risks
and whether they'll will be less efficient in the workplace and unable to keep up with their sighted counterparts. A
lack of disability awareness that needs to be addressed with employers is a big one. Because there are so few
people who are blind or have low vision in workplaces, it's not as if they're prominent. That stigma's very hard to
break down when they're really not in workplaces for people to get educated to the fact that people who are blind
or have low vision are completely capable and normal except for the fact that they can't see. That's a big one we
try to work on, that awareness.
CHAIR: Is there a real sense that a number of people with moderate to severe visual impairment are doing
tasks or roles within the employment space that are probably far lower than if they'd had better support through
their education and within the workplace? Have many people settled for low- or less-challenging work as a result
of their disability?
Ms Begley: Yes, they have. A lot of people are very grateful to have any job and are very loyal employees for
that fact. Traditionally people who are blind or have low vision are advised to go and work maybe in a call centre
or as a therapeutic masseusejobs like thatwhich don't necessarily take a huge amount of skill. And because of
the lack of access to education sometimes, because of accessibility, people end up in these jobs. Their careers
really are stalled because of accessibility and stigma, yes.
Ms Gotlib: I don't think that's specific to people with low vision, although it's a very real issue for them. But I
think that's something that's experienced by all people with disability, not just those with vision impairment or
blindness. I think there are very real issues around assumptions that are made around ability and capability and
what that means for a workforce. Attitudes and expectations are deeply embedded right throughout our
community, and we're a far cry from seeing disability as just a different ability, but it's still seen as an inability.
Ms Begley: That's true; I'd agree with that. It's very broad. I think the fear of complete blindness, according to
some research, is the No. 1 fear. So, I think it is something that some employers are very fearful of and are
worried about when taking someone on. The danger of people having accidents is another part of that.
Mr GILES: Kate, I should probably know the answer to this, but how does Australia's performance at
involving blind and low-vision people in the formal labour market compare with that of other OECD nations?
Ms Begley: I can't break it down to blind and low vision. I know for people with disability we do pretty
poorly. I think we're 21st out of 29 countries for workforce participation. But I can't break it down for blindness,
I'm sorry.
CHAIR: Thanks, everyone. We might move to migration. I know there hasn't been a lot of high-quality
research around the proportion of arriving populations in the workforce, but a migration survey that was done in
2011-12 keeps getting quoted.
Ms Liddy: Would that be Graeme Hugo's work on the economic contributions of humanitarian entrants?
CHAIR: It could be. Was it funded by the department of immigration?
Ms Liddy: Yes, it was. And it was a significant piece of work.
CHAIR: My recollection is that there were some really stark differences between different nationalities,
which didn't sort of accord with my stereotypesfor instance, some African populations having higher
employment outcomes than some Middle Eastern ones. So, I just wanted to see whether you had any better or
more-recent data or whether you thought that what appeared in that report was completely unreliable and should
be ignored.

Ms Liddy: No, it's not unreliable and shouldn't be ignored. I recall one of the key findings being that if we're
going to consider economic contributions then we need to take a generational perspective on that, because often
it's the second generation that, again, have more established networks and improved social capital and education
and are more able to get employment. I think the other key finding of that, if we're talking about the same report,
was around entrepreneurial skills and small businessesthat humanitarian entrants often come with those
capabilities more than the family or skilled migration stream.
CHAIR: They also looked at one- to nine-year arrivals, so there could well have been nationalities
overrepresented nine years ago or one year ago. It wasn't really staged
Ms Liddy: Precisely, depending on settlement trends and the humanitarian program trends, yes.
CHAIR: Some of the data was really quite diabolical. And to say that you rely on the next generation is just to
say that we're basically going to accept that we'll fail with the first generation. We don't want to do that. What if
you had to pick two or three thingsAli, this is a question for you as wellwe could do that would absolutely
transform the first generation? I want to throw three things out there. The first one would be to actively interview
arriving families about employment skills and experiencewhat would be an approximate income?before they
leave for Australia. At the moment there's a very low level of information collected, and in most cases
Immigration workers just click 'unemployed', which means you're basically a standing start on arrival in Australia.
That's a first concern.
The second one would be the focus on language skills taught in isolation from employmentthe possibility
that you're off learning English for one, two or three years outside of a workplace, which allows all of your
employability skills to decline just as fast as your language is improving.
And then the last one is that there could be way more active partnerships with corporate Australia than the ones
we've just mentioned, which are extremely tiny. Participation in that was talking about taking half-a-dozen people
into a company. At these three levels we're not going to just give up on a generation and say, 'Let's hope things
are better in the second.' What would be the game changer in that space? Having said that, the Syrian cohort have
almost completely arrived, so it's almost too late to do much for that group. They've just followed the same path
we've always followed. But what should change to really make a difference?
Mr Nazari: For me, I think what a lot of refugees and people who came from a migration background, the
first generation, struggle with is the language support that they get. Communication is very important when you
want to go to a job or a workplace, and not having it means that they are not a part of society and they feel like
they're not a part of society; they don't have the support. I was privileged to have that support in my school and
language school, but there were pupils who needed more support and they didn't have the support. They will
definitely find it a struggle later to get jobs in the workplace, to get employed. So that language support is very
important for migrants and refugees to get while they are at school, or at language school, once they've come to
Australia. The process is that when you come to Australia from a non-English-speaking background you've got to
attend language school and high school, and having that support in school is very essential for them for the next
step, to get them ready for the workplace. I've got some friends who got employed but, because they had this
communication problem, they couldn't follow what the boss said. That's why they struggled to continue their jobs.
They had to resign. They couldn't do the job because of the language barrier. So I think that language support is
very important at a young age, at the early age of every refugee and migrant here in Australia.
Mr GILES: We spent a bit of time this morning talking about how, when we're measuring progress, we
measure 21st-century skills, soft skills. We also spent a lot of time getting evidence on the changing demands of
the labour market and the need for these things. It strikes me as pretty fundamental. If you can't express yourself
fluently in English, your employability on the basis of these skills, however you've acquired them, is absolutely
minimal if you can't engage with your employer effectively in English.
Ms Liddy: I think your employment prospects are limited by your own cultural or linguistic community, and
young people have potential to transcend that. We would talk about bridging and bonding networks, and the
bridging networks are really critical to getting a job.
I would just reinforce what Ali said about language. In the inquiry into migrant settlement outcomes, we called
for a national youth settlement strategy, and English language learning needs to be at the core of that. That is
either in schooland, Ali, you talked about within schoolor, for the older cohort, youth-specific AMEP
classes. Again, AMEP is an impressive program that's funded by the Commonwealth. Not every state offers
youth-specific classes for the 16 to 20 or 17 to 20 cohortthat group for whom engagement in school, because of
their English language ability, may not be viable. They might be 17 but get placed in a year 8 class; they are not
going to last. We need alternative options for all of those cohorts and for all of those needs. There is a whole lot

of ground work that exists. The foundations are there. In Australia, English language is critical. I have mentioned
before that we would like to see better accountability arrangements in that funding model from the
Commonwealth to the states. What is the accountability? What are those schools reporting on? Because it is ad
hoc; it is not consistent. In terms of the national resettlement strategy, what do young people need to ensure that
we do support this generation now? Young people come with a whole lot of capabilities. They learn English
language faster. We know that. There is evidence around that. They come with a whole lot of skills and resources
to support their family, to settle well. To navigate networks, they just need targeted support to help.
The last thing I would say in assessment of skills prior to arriving in Australia is we have indicated some
caution around an integration test within the Humanitarian Program. The Humanitarian Program is based on
vulnerability so we would like that to be maintained. That is what the Humanitarian Program is about.
CHAIR: Once they are accepted then the interview happens the following day. You do not do the interview
before acceptance, I would 100 per cent agree, but nothing is happening even after they are accepted as a refugee.
Ms Liddy: How are we gathering that information?
CHAIR: It is a drop-down menu and in most cases immigration clicks 'unemployed'. They do not actually
ask: what have you been doing in the border camp? It is 'I have not done anything for two years'. That is all we've
got.
Ms Liddy: Actually there are some great examples of working with young people in putting together a CV.
Young people say, 'I've been a refugee camp for the last six years and haven't done anything.' Let's unpack that.
Actually you ran a small business. No, it is not in the Australian context but you have skills around x, y and z
because that is what you have been doing. So I think, by all means, if we can build a better picture with more
information around the capabilities, skills and resources that humanitarian entrants do come to Australia with, that
is going to be a much better foundation for ensuring that they receive the kind of streamlined targeted support
they need. And provide information to service providers who can make decisions about where resources are best
placed. It is the evidence base, actually.
Mr GILES: On that point, I think your contribution about a more focused youth settlement approach is
something that we should give more thought to. But one thing I'm very conscious of as a representative of the
chunk of northern suburbs with a reasonable chunk of the Syrian intake and a very high refugee and asylum
seeker population as well is there is a lot of anecdotal anxiety about English language program availability here.
Generally you have got to get Collingwood at best.
Ms Liddy: We've heard this too.
Mr GILES: So we seeing a very large chunk of young people effectively being denied effective school
participation. I'm just wondering if there is data that supports that.
Ms Liddy: We have not seen it. We work nationally. Our auspice organisation, Centre for Multicultural Youth
works in Victoria. As far as I understand, it is anecdotal. But it is disappointing. We knew that that cohort was
coming, and I think young people need access to English language support. Everybody knows that it is part of the
settlement services' whole suite of services so, to answer your question, I do not think we have the evidence; it is
anecdotal.
Miss Kenny: To add to what the chair was asking before, if you are going to collect that data pre-arrival then
it needs to be used for this sort of purpose. We knew those young people were coming but we did not have the
places for them when they got here.
Mr GILES: There were old people too.
Ms Liddy: It was a planned intake.
CHAIR: It was also in the end mostly driven by a small number of ethnic minorities who were primarily
bringing those arrivals to one location in Melbourne or Sydney. I did not see any Syrians at all.
Mr GILES: On that though, being really frank about that, the intake I have is largely the Muslim intake
whereas the mostly Christian minority would be further to the west in Maria Vamvakinou's electorate. All things
being equal, those who have been resettled in the electorate that I represent are a smaller number than people
might have expected and yet demand has massively outstripped supply, so I am told
CHAIR: Demand for?
Mr GILES: for English-language services for young people in schools.
Ms Liddy: What's happened in that process between the Commonwealth and the states in terms of planning
for this intake? That's the question. We don't have any concrete evidence. We've heard exactly the same thing,

Andrew. Our questions would be: how has that happened; and what's happened in the communication between the
Commonwealth and the state? Where has it fallen down? We can't afford for this to happen to any young person.
English language for our cohort is a significant barrier. Again, there are the foundations where great work
happens in Australia in terms of skilling up young people. It's not consistent enough; hence, our call for a national
youth settlement strategy that includes education as one of several key focuses.
I'd like to add something about industry. We would say there are some great examples in our sector as well and
we need to do more. We need to invest in it. There is perhaps a cultural difference in how the corporate sector
operates as to how those in the NGO sector, who are often the service providers, operate. We need to do more of
what works. There are some really good examples. You've given them in the Indigenous context. They exist in
our context. How can we do more of that? We have a national conference in November where education to work
is one of three key themes. We hope to have some really vibrant discussion about engaging with corporates and
how we do that better, because we see really good outcomes. On the ground, there is Woolworthsthose sorts of
big organisations. There are some really good examples of those companies being open to work experience and
open to supported work placements for our population group. We need to invest in doing more. It's resource
intensive. That's also what we know. It's about supporting young people. You guys have talked about it a bit as
wellsupporting young people to maintain work placement. For them to build their knowledge and
understanding of workplace expectations in Australia takes quite a lot of resources, but the outcomes are
significant. In terms of the economic participation for young people, the outcomes are significant. That's what we
want for all young people.
Ms Gotlib: I just want to highlight the gross disadvantage that students with disability are facing in the present
education system. I would say it's almost farcical for us to attend here because the education system, in CYDA's
view, is failing young people with disability. We're getting many students whose needs are not adequately being
met. They're often not afforded the status of a learner, so they're not getting the chance to obtain basic numeracy
and literacy and education skills. We've got many kids with disability who are out of school at very young ages
and have missed a significant proportion of time in school, so they haven't got a chance. This translates to when
we look at post-school transition, which is typically very poor for students with disability. I don't think they've got
a chance in hell of getting a job with that type of backdrop. There's been no significant reform, in CYDA'S
opinion, around students with disability. It's not in sight. We can look at the small proportion of people with a
disability who will access the NDIS. We're great supporters of the NDIS and want to progress that, but the
majority of people with disability sit outside that system and it needs to be addressed if we really want to look at
the economic participation of young people with disability.
Mr GILES: When we're talking about transitions, it appears to me from your evidence and that of Paul that
there really isn't enough to transition from to be able to talk about a transition at the moment for young people
with disability. Would that be a fair reflection of your evidence?
Mr Cain: I'm sorry, can you repeat the question?
Mr GILES: Unless I misunderstood your evidence when I asked you earlier about industry's willingness to
take on board young people with disability, you said that industry is willing but the skill development isn't there?
Mr Cain: Yes. Just to pick up on this discussion about soft skills and the like, if you look at the research by
the New South Wales Transition to Work program there are four barriers. You could say that the four barriers for
the success or failure of the school, of the eight of the 12 years of schooling, are: the lack of ability to use the
public transport systemso, they haven't been trained in doing that; the lack of ability to stay on task in a
workplace; difficulty in following instructions; and endurance and staminawe take very good care of our
students with disabilities in classrooms and they don't really stand on their feet for most of the day.
The top providers are telling us that those skills can be addressed very quickly. But the big question in
Inclusion Australia's mind is, 'Why aren't we doing it earlier?' We used to do a lot of functional curricula for
students with disabilities in the seventies and eighties and we did very poorly with numeracy and literacy. Then
we did this big pendulum swing to discrete subjects. It was the right thing to do, but we left the functional
curriculum off again. So we're getting a lot of students coming through who have graduated but who don't have
these very basic things that they need to be successful in the workforce.
The very good post-school-transition work providers know that these are the things they have to work on
during the work experience so that they're ready to go into a paid job. They argue to me that, ideally, it would be
good to do it earlier. But they see the education system as a bit of a monster. They think: 'Gee, that's a big task to
take on. How can we take that on?' And it's a variable; some skills are exceptional, some are average and some are
not.

I don't know if that addresses your question, but we could do

Mr GILES: I will ask the question more directly, then. Is the Australian school education system adequately
supporting the learning of students with disability to prepare them to transition out of school?
Mr Cain: No.
Ms Gotlib: No.
Mr GILES: Thanks.
Ms Gotlib: They won't if you have broad disadvantage and intersectionality
Mr Cain: And I'd hate to be disrespectful; there are pockets of excellence
Ms Gotlib: Yes
Mr Cain: But if you want a yes-or-no answer, then it's no.
Mr GILES: I think that's it.
Mr Clarke: I will just comment on that. Whitehouse's recommendations are very aligned with what both
Stephanie and Paul have said as well. At the moment, schools aren't inclusive for children with a disability.
They've talked about the development of a nationally consistent inclusive education framework that is actually
done in collaboration with young people with disabilities. At the moment it's not. And they've talked about
support for transitional programs that provide opportunities for challenge and growth of young people with
disabilities. At the moment, that's not being done, and they're being placed in the too-hard basket.
There is one which is happening, which is the Australian Network on Disability's Stepping Into program. It
provides transitional experience to university students as they approach graduation. That is one form of positive
experience that they've highlighted.
Mr GILES: I have two more question to you, Steph. Firstly, you made 16 recommendations in the school
transitions inquiry about three years ago
Ms Gotlib: Yes, in 2015.
Mr GILES: Have any of those recommendations been taken up?
Ms Gotlib: I think that some have. I would have to go through themdo you want that on notice?
CHAIR: Yes, please.
Mr GILES: That would be handy. It's a big list of recommendations.
Ms Gotlib: Yes, some have. I was looking at them yesterday and some have. And different jurisdictions have
done particular work with them. But a couple have, yes.
CHAIR: It was in the Closing the gap report?
Ms Gotlib: Nothey're different recommendations. I wish we had a closing-the-gap-type analogy!
Mr GILES: In your view, for closing the gap in employment and labour market participation between young
Australians with disability and the population at large is it of fundamental importance to get adequate funding of
the disability loading? Is that a fundamental prerequisite for that?
Ms Gotlib: I think that funding isn't all, but it's a critical part of it. We've said that through our work over
many years, that it's a critical part of ensuring that we have a quality education system for students with disability.
Mr Cain: Can I just make a quick comment on that? One in 10 adults with intellectual disability work in the
open labour market, and that's been decreasing from about 18 per cent about 10 years ago. To me, that's our
marker that we're going backwards and not going forwards. Whether that's related to educational funding, I'm not
too sure. I'm not convinced that it's related to educational funding.
Mr GILES: Let me put this to you: compared to then, how many jobs are available now that require no post-
school qualifications? Has it gone up or down?
Mr Cain: In my field, that's a difficult one to answer because most of the jobs people with intellectual
disability getif you look at the highest-performing providersare routine jobs. I listened to the earlier
discussion this morning. Even though routine jobs for the bulk of the workforce have gone down, routine jobs still
exist. They're still there. For instance, our top providers in Australia have a rate of job placement that's actually
increased over the years. We've got demonstrations that have been going for 30 years. Over that time the labour
market has changed dramatically, but their rate of job placement has not gone down. It's a very different area of
engagement with the labour force as compared to people without intellectual disability. We always struggle when

we hear these general conversations about the effect of the labour market because it doesn't really apply to our
population. We're always looking for routine work because that's their capacity and their capability.
Mr GILES: I'm not in a position to gainsay that, but to suggest that changes in the labour market do not apply
to people with disability, I think, is a pretty extraordinary statement.
Mr Cain: For this particular group they don't. For people with intellectual disability they don't because they're
not going to be surgeons, they're not going to be lawyers and they're not going to be doctors. The way the
customising and the engagement happens changes. For instance, one of the opportunities for good providers is
multiskilling gone too far, which has been a boon for getting jobs for people with intellectual disability, because
you can go into a place that's having difficulty with that and carve out and customise a job of lower-order tasks
and create a new position while freeing up higher-skilled workers. A lot of employers are taking this on at the
moment because it's actually increasing their bottom line. For instance, in New South Wales, the Harris Farm
Markets chain are totally committed to employing people with intellectual disability in every one of their stores
because for them it makes business sense. It's a different discussion for employees with intellectual disability
compared to the general trends of the other populations. But I take your point.
Ms Gotlib: A huge part of the difficulty is the lack of data. I was just listening to you speak then, and we
could both probably talk of lots of anecdotal things, but it's really hard because the nationally consistent collection
of data is very specific about specific things. We don't have a lot of data that we need on education, post-school
transition and this specific stuff around employment.
Mr Cain: It depends on where you look. New South Wales Transition to Work has been providing data since
2004 on job placement for people with intellectual disability. We've got some areas where we have some strong
areas of data
Ms Gotlib: National data?
Mr Cain: But you're right, Stephanie; nationally we don't have it. For instance, we don't know the outcomes
of people with disability or intellectual disability coming out of TAFE. We don't really know their employment
outcomes. So there are some gaps. But there is some strong data, like in the Disability Employment Services
program. We've got amazing data. I can tell families which provider in which area gets what sort of job placement
and retention outcomes. I can break it down to that level.
Ms Gotlib: But Paul, I'm interested in data even on work experienceyear 9 or 10 work experience.
Mr Cain: No, we don't have any of that.
Ms Gotlib: My gutI think I could make a pretty sizeable bet and win itis that it would be pretty low. It's
not because of the different abilities that someone has due to their disability; it's because of lack of expectation
and lack of opportunities. We're not providing these young people with these opportunities which are very basic
to moving on to future employment.
CHAIR: That's a useful addition. Thank you. It has been very helpful for us at the end of a very successful
day. We'll move to Sydney tomorrow. Thank you for your time that you've dedicated to helping us with our
inquiry today. All the best.
Committee adjourned at 15:09

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COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA

Proof Committee Hansard

Transition from school to work

MONDAY, 18 SEPTEMBER 2017

BY AUTHORITY OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

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STANDING COMMITTEE ON EMPLOYMENT, EDUCATION AND TRAINING

Monday, 18 September 2017

Members in attendance: Mr Giles, Ms Lamb, Mr Laming, Ms Sharkie.

Terms of Reference for the Inquiry:

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BEGLEY, Ms Kate, Policy and Government Relations Adviser, Vision Australia

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Ms SHARKIE: Fantastic. Thank you.

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I don't know if that addresses your question, but we could do

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