Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is an opportunity to ask some valuable questions of the Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science, particularly around collaborations that are developing between our tertiary education sector and industry. There has been a lot of publicity around the global ranking showing that Australia is not high on industry-tertiary education collaboration. Whether that methodology is absolutely watertight or not, we know that countries like the UK rank very highly in that area. We know that that translational work that starts with workplace integrated earning is vital so that the great work being done in our world-class universities actually translates into the commercial sector.

We know how the economic growth that keeps people in jobs is utterly reliant on the work that you are doing, Minister Hunt, and your portfolio. You have got the car keys, effectively the economic engine in your control as well as the front two rows. So asking these questions is pretty critical about where we will be in maybe 10 or 20 years' time.

We have antecedents coming through the education system and we are asking questions about why young women are dropping STEM related subjects of maths and physics. I know both sides of the chamber would be most concerned about young women dropping science as they go from primary to high school. We have high schools that have just a handful of students doing advanced maths C in grade 12, so few students in some of our state high schools that they cannot even employ a teacher to teach it. We are going to see the demise of math for a whole range of reasons but mostly it is the laissez-faire approach, where students can pick what they feel like doing regardless of workplace signals that are often generations down the track. The decisions that are made by students in subject choice do not reflect the workplaces they going into. They do not have absolutely perfect and symmetric knowledge in this respect.

You do not have to go much further, Minister, and you have the teaching faculties around Australia playing absolutely no active role in ensuring that teaching graduates take up STEM related courses and get a major in maths. In Queensland, we have a plethora of 16,000 proud primary school education graduates without a job, and we are producing more. At the same time, we can barely find teachers with a maths major.

That presents a problem that is often not observed by us in this place—that is, the misallocation of maths teaching resources. You will see general statistics saying that about 30 per cent of our children with maths teachers in secondary schools do not have a teacher who has a maths major. There are a whole host of reasons around that, but I will tell you where most of the qualified maths teachers are. They are more likely to get a job in the city, where they want to be, and they are mostly teaching higher SES high schools, low-fee independent schools and private schools. That is where the maths teachers are. They are mostly teaching students who are going on to do professional degrees and who are not going to use their maths very much—people like many of us here. But out in regional Australia—this is the engine room—you are flat out finding those maths teachers, and you move to these perilous statistics that around half of these students do not have a maths teacher teaching them maths. If you come from a regional area of Australia, the proportion of your teachers trained in maths should be of great concern to you.

Minister, you will know that we have plenty of health and physical education teachers—we are not short on those; we have a generation worth of HPE teachers—but the issue here is that you just study what you feel like in your first year of university. When you are busy working your way through your first year of drinking, you are also deciding what area of teaching you are going to go into. There is no driving of these young students into subject areas. There are inadequate rewards for them to go into the areas of STEM. They are hard. These areas have atrophied down to vestigial levels even before those students get to university, and we are paying the price.

How are we paying the price? We just need to look at PISA. We are producing one-third as many students in the top quartile on PISA as the five best education systems in the world and we are producing twice as many in the bottom quintile. We are producing twice as many who are going to struggle and become social and economic issues and a third the number of geniuses in the top quartile—the people who are meant to be driving this fabulous ideas based economy. If you are worried about ideas, creativity and problem solving, I do not really care what you study, but I need to know, Minister, that those degrees absolutely maximise the human capital of Australian students.

At the moment my concern would be whether industry itself feels that it is getting the antecedents that it needs, and the clear message that I am getting is that it is not. Is workplace integrated learning adequately provided for from the industry side of things? Universities talk about long- and short-term placements being few and far between once you move outside of some areas like engineering—they are certainly low in most other STEM-related areas. We have physics departments that are citadels unto themselves. We have STEM that is not being translated across university sectors, and then, ultimately, we have an industry that feels that—despite these fabulous CRCs, with billions of dollars invested—it has no real chance of developing a link with the tertiary education sector.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Federation Committee adjourned at 18:27.

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