Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Chalk and talk! The old style teacher joins me here in the person of the member for Braddon. I am sure if he was chalking and talking the students would be fascinated! Yes, a mark for three from the member for New England for that interjection. However, this generation will face a much more complex world, and those technologies are reinvigorating classrooms and re-engaging young people. I am very passionate about the fact that schools with top-class music programs and top-class multimedia subjects are actually engaging a lot of the formerly disengaged young people.

I too visited an old alma mater. I was invited to my old high school, Airds High School. It is in the member for Macarthur’s electorate. It was a tough school with a tough population to service but it had a tremendously dedicated staff. They have won many awards. They have a very high Maori population and they have engaged those young people through music. To me it seems like a really logical thing to do and it has significantly improved levels of engagement and retention. So I think a lot of the things that both the previous speakers identified are very important in terms of engaging with our young people.

I have spoken to a lot of rural and regional young people when travelling around with the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Training—which the member for Lyne is also on—and I know that a lot of them connect to the outer world through technology, through the web. They seek connections and form friendships and groups in that way. The National Broadband Network will be really important in that it will give them educational opportunities as well—and, more broadly, medical services and better delivery of government services. I am sure we are slowly getting there, with things like online claiming from government departments. It is a slow and painful process but something we need to be doing.

I just wanted to acknowledge the University of Wollongong’s role in that. I think that Wollongong and the University of New England being regional universities means they are really committed to expanding and to engaging those young people to create professionals—teachers, lawyers, doctors and nurses—who stay and work in our rural and regional areas.

In the few minutes left to me to speak I want to heartily endorse the member for New England’s endorsement of TAFE. I have no bias, being a former TAFE teacher! I think the Australian TAFE sector provides world-class education. Young people who graduate from TAFE and go overseas to work get snapped up, and other countries do not want to let them go. We have a tremendously successful TAFE sector across all states, despite the slight variations between them, and TAFE has a presence in just about every rural and regional community. It is a lot like the public school; the public TAFE is a very common presence and a really well regarded one. I heartily endorse the member for New England’s comments on the importance it plays as a pathway for young people in rural and regional areas.

I also want to acknowledge that the member for Lyne talked about the issue of aspiration. I think that is a really important contribution. I am the first person in my family to have gone to university. I come from a long line of coalminers and women who did not get an education or work. It was interesting in my early political activity to have a lot of people say to me, ‘We don’t want one of you university people representing us in a working-class type area.’ They said it less politely than that, but you get the general idea! And I always said to them, ‘The great aspiration of the working class was to get their children a university education and get them out of the coalmine or out of the steelworks or wherever it was,’ and to some extent I think my generation and I are a reflection of that. My mum left school and worked at a cake shop until she met Dad. She was an amazing woman who could have gone a long way in her life with the support of education. My dad went and did an apprenticeship and did very, very well, and I do not think he ever regretted it. But he is also someone who would have done extremely well with a university education. As I said, I was the first in my family to do that—and there was a culture of the working class aspiring to better education for their children.

I think you are right, Member for Lyne; to some extent we have lost that a bit. It is important to value all forms of education. We are all great advocates of that, whether it is vocational education or academic education. But the aspiration needs to be there. Let us not talk down schools. Let us not talk down education. Let us not talk down the teaching professions. (Time expired)

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