Schools

• Ensure all students have functional literacy, numeracy and digital skills.
• Focus on the outcomes we want to achieve in schools, not just the quantum of funding.
• Be more learner-centred and acknowledge children display different types of intelligence that should be nurtured, not just academic intelligence.
• Embrace multiple methods of learning by adopting new teaching methods like inquiry-based learning, particularly in areas students find difficult such as maths.
• Give school principals greater autonomy to make decisions on staffing and resources within a school.
• Empower and support teachers through better data, defining what we mean by ‘teacher quality’ and establishing a national index for teaching quality.
• Adopt a different approach to career counselling so students are guided to careers that suit them.
• Improve students ‘work readiness’.
• Download our guide to being work ready here.
• Read Jennifer Westacott's Future-proof National Press club speech here and the Future-proof report here

Post secondary education and skills

Move to a post-secondary education and skills system with five core components:

• Maintaining the unique character of each sector– Vocational education and training as an industry-led sector based around competency-based training and applied learning, and Higher Education in providing advanced qualifications, learning for the sake of learning, academic inquiry, and world-class research.
• Better market information so learners know what jobs are available, what they might earn, what courses are available and how much it will cost them.
• Putting the learner in charge by giving every Australian a capped lifelong skills account that can be used to pay for courses at approved providers.
• A culture of lifelong learning that encourages people to use qualifications to build a strong foundation, and then dip in and out of short, accredited modules to effectively create their own ‘credentials’ that allow them to upskill and retrain throughout their lives.
• A shared governance model clarifying the roles and responsibilities of each level of government and industry.
• Support TAFE as a central part of the vocational education and training system but hand TAFE greater autonomy to allow the sector to innovate.

Download report: Australia’s future post-secondary education and skills system

Apprenticeships

• Reform is needed to build a modern apprenticeship system that can serve as a pathway to work for the traditional and emerging industries. Structural reform is needed to:
• create a genuine national system that is easy for students and employers to use.
• increase the number of Australians starting an apprenticeship and moving into work.
• remove duplication between governments and better align their programs, services, and funding. 
  • Read the Business Council's joint proposal for a national partnership on apprenticeship reform here.

Adult literacy, numeracy and digital skills

• Define the expectations and needs of employers around workforce numeracy, literacy and workplace skills.
• Hold a national inquiry into literacy and foundation studies.