Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Pratt for her question. Today Senator Carr and I revealed the details of the next plank in the government’s 10-year reform agenda for higher education when we released the new draft compacts and performance funding framework for consultation with Australian universities. Compacts will be the mechanism by which new teaching and learning performance funding is delivered to universities across Australia. Performance funding will strengthen universities’ focus on improving outcomes for students, especially the important national goal of increasing the number of Australians who enjoy the rewards of a higher education. We expect that every university will contribute to achieving the government’s ambition that, by the year 2020, 20 per cent of undergraduate students will be from low socioeconomic backgrounds. For this reason, the government is asking every university to agree to improve the participation of people from a low socioeconomic background by 2.5 per cent over the next five years.

As we move to a student demand driven funding system for higher education, the government wants to ensure that universities continue to offer high-quality education. To do this, the government will ask every university to agree to targets to improve students’ experience of university and the quality of their learning outcomes. My department, together with Senator Carr’s department, will write to universities today to seek their feedback on the draft compacts and performance funding framework.

Universities play a significant role in enhancing the productive capacity of the Australian economy, whether they are metropolitan universities that attract students from around the state or whether they are regional universities focused on meeting the needs of the local community. The government believes that it is important to place the right incentives to reward universities for contributing to higher productivity through continued improvement in the quality of learning outcomes that they deliver. That is particularly important as we work towards the government’s goal of ensuring that, by 2025, 40 per cent of young Australians will hold at least an undergraduate degree.