The productivity working group at the Government's Australia 2020 Summit has presented key ideas including "2020 scholarships" that would specifically target skills shortages and encourage people to start apprenticeships or further education.
Productivity working group co-chair, Mr Warwick Smith, said it was important to recognise the value of the nation's human capital, and to deploy it efficiently and fairly in a way that addressed problems such as the skills crisis.
"Fundamentally, our ambition and our goal is to maximise wealth, excellence and equity by driving up productivity (and) continuing to focus on the growth of productivity in our community to be like that of other developed countries," he said.
"We want to equip all Australians through the education and training systems and lead the world with a focus on excellence and inclusion."
Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who co-chaired the stream, said the government had been challenged to make good on its promise of an education revolution.
"What we all know is that education can change an individual's life - it changed mine, it changed the prime minister's ... and the productivity stream is saying to us that education can change the nation's life," she said.
For Australia to be prosperous in the year 2020, there must be investment skills and capacity of all its people, she said.
"It's a virtuous circle, if you invest in education you grow economic wealth (and) you can also grow social inclusion and stop people being left behind and left in disadvantage.
"The challenge from the productivity group to government is to say the education revolution must go further, it's a revolution without end we'll certainly take these ideas and consider them very deeply."
Recommendations summary
The key recommendations from the Productivity, education, skills, training, science and innovation stream are:
1. Equip
- Supporting kids: Overcome the public/private divide in education by, for example, funding students according to need and encouraging private investment;
- Extending HELP: Extending Higher Education Loan Programs (HECS, FEE-HELP) to all students in post-secondary education;
- 2020 Scholarships: Providing merit-based scholarships to vocational education (TAFEs and colleges) and Universities in skills shortage areas;
- Community Corps: Allow community service to reduce a person's HECS-HELP debt;
- Science and Maths Connections: Improve science and maths education by connecting scientisits and others with primary schools;
- Rewarding excellence in teaching: Focus on the connection between quality teaching and productivity;
- Celebrate teaching: Celebrate the vocation and contribution of teaching;
- Teaching First: Establish a national program to attract talented graduates and career-changers to teaching, reward teachers for working in national priority areas including disadvantages communities, remote areas and shortage subjects;
- Innovation Australia: Establish a national institute for innovation and creativity.
2. Deploy
- Windows on workplaces: Empower employees to choose their preferred workplaces by informing them about employment options such as work-life balance and family friendliness;
- Skills development: Encourage employers to develop the skills for their workforce and industry and in return provide access to a flexible, demand-driven training system;
- Work in the bush: Incentivise people to work in rural and regional Australia by supporting re-location needs;
- Mobile labour market: Enable movement of labour from Asia-Pacific to Australia which is underpinned by Australian workplace standards;
- Learning for life accounts: Develop lifetime participation accounts for all Australians from birth into which the government and others can contribute payments for education, training, parental leave, superannuation etc with the capacity to go into deficit and income-contingent repayments which maximise choices and flexibility for each person.
3. Connect
- Parent and children centres: Ensure communities have access to integrated services to support children's health, development, learning and care. Childhood development should be supported through a place-based culture that offers integrated services and community support;
- Life Learning centres: Provide service centres supporting working age Australians with their family and career needs.
- Release latent value in Australia's human capital by:
- One curriculum - more money for schools: Creating a national curriculum and rationalising curriculum and assessment institutions, with freed up funds going to children in schools;
- Business - school connections: Creating a coordinated partnership program between Australia's top 100 companies and schools. This program could also include universities and vocational education and training institutions;
- Golden Guru: Provide retired people acting as mentors in the workplace;
- Science, business and arts into schools: Connect scientists, business and the arts with the education system;
- Australia Unlimited: Create and organise alumni network of both Australians living overseas and former foreign students;
- Connecting Australia: Build and enable the use by all Australians of a world class broadband system to foster full participation in the digital economy.
- Business - research connect: Improve collaboration between public and private business, industry and research to foster innovation to OEC standards.
