What the Tasmanian Liberals will do:

Invest $2.5 million per year into Pathway Planning for Tasmanian high school students to ensure that up to 35.5 FTE Pathway Planning positions are available to work directly with students, schools, training providers, industry and the community to help students understand, plan and develop potential pathways to engaged future learning, training and qualifications, and job futures.

Tasmanian Liberals believe that the disbanding of the Guaranteeing Futures and Pathway Planning Programs is a huge mistake and is out of touch with what is really going on and what is needed in our High Schools.

The Tasmanian Liberals see education as one of the most powerful forces for social progress and a growing, productive and smart economy. The current situation of educational underperformance and low qualifications in Tasmania is not acceptable and we are committed to working to fix that.

Schools have been told that they will have to find the money from their own individual budgets, and use their teachers to deliver pathway planning, at least in name only.

Pathway planners are not a luxury. Their job is to not only guide students into careers but also play a significant role to play in ensuring our children can achieve their learning potential and emerge from education with jobs.

Tasmanians agree that we need to have more Tasmanian students achieving better qualifications, successfully finishing their schooling, and being engaged and getting the most out of their education and training. This is about the Bartlett government penny-pinching on the future career opportunities of our children while it continues to waste money on minders and spin doctors for itself.

Too important to abandon

Pathway Planning Officers have the connections and contacts in their local community, and with industry, to enable them to work with the individual student, help determine key areas of interest to them, get them appropriate industry experience and also often feed this information to the teachers who work with the students so that a customised learning program can be developed to guide them into careers.

Mandating that teachers take on the role previously undertaken by Pathway Planning Officers, when they are not qualified nor have the time to do so, is both out of touch and ill-advised. Schools are already stretched to the limit in terms of resources and to ask them to take on this role, in addition to all their existing responsibilities, is totally unreasonable.

Personalised learning pathways, especially in Years 9 and 10, are vital for many students who might otherwise be deemed as at-risk of dropping out, sometimes because they are talented and gifted in need of extension, have special needs, or are unmotivated, disengaged and not succeeding in the regular program.

The Tasmanian Polytechnic, Tasmanian Academy and the Tasmanian Skills Institute were established as a way to try and increase retention and qualifications in Tasmania. The State Labor Government failed to recognise that retention and increasing qualifications is more about being engaged and succeeding in High Schools than shuffling the deckchairs in a Tasmania Tomorrow experiment.

Pathway planning is needed to ensure that Tasmania’s retention levels and level of qualifications do increase and to ensure that the State’s growing rate of school absenteeism and high number of dropouts can be turned around. 

Schools and students need this pathways planning resource, as will Tasmanian employers when they look for a skilled workforce in the future.  This is all about jobs for our children and no government should penny-pinch on that.