Topics: ‘P-Tech’ school pilot programme.

E&OE…

Tom Elliott

In America they have these schools called ‘P-Tech’. They’re essentially – well there’s one of them in Brooklyn in New York, a school that’s run by IBM. Now it is openly run by a corporation, in this case IBM, and the idea is to train people in some of IBM’s methods. There is talk that McDonalds wants to do this here in Australia. I’m intrigued by this – I don’t know everything about it. Joining me on the line now, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Education, Senator Scott Ryan, good afternoon.

Scott Ryan

Good day, Tom. At least it’s warmer today in Melbourne.

ELLIOTT

It is very warm – 30 degrees outside so I don’t mind going and getting my reception outside, if indeed I could do that. Now tell me, Senator, tell us what a P-Tech school is, first – these sort of business-run schools in America.

RYAN

Well in the US, the school that you refer to in Brooklyn, it’s actually run in partnership with the school authorities, IBM and one of the universities in New York. What it does is it gives kids an education – their normal education – and augments that with programmes put together, in this case by IBM, to sort of make them work-ready, and it gives them a first opportunity at jobs at IBM in those sorts of roles. So it creates a direct link and pathway between school and work.

ELLIOTT

I do recall this – if they graduate through the programme, IBM gives them a chance – like, puts them to the head of the queue in terms of applying for jobs?

RYAN

Exactly.

ELLIOTT

Okay.

RYAN

It doesn’t replace what they’re taught in school, it adds to it. Like a school day at that school is longer, for example.

ELLIOTT

But what sort of things does IBM add to the curriculum that wouldn’t otherwise be there?

RYAN

Well in that school – and the announcement the Prime Minister made last week was saying ‘let’s look at the pilot project in Australia because we do things a bit differently here’. But at that school, they add things like programming to actually make them work-ready at IBM, because IBM is one of the larger employers in America. The announcement the Prime Minister made last week was about a pilot programme, the likely location of that will be at Geelong, to actually try and get some business involvement not to replace our schools, not to replace their management at all, but to add to the education that students receive.

ELLIOTT

So is it for, say, people who are likely to drop out of school, or is it just particular schools where they say ‘here’s a unit that is, perhaps, business education’?

RYAN

Well in the case we’re looking at, and the case in Brooklyn, it’s actually aimed at areas of disadvantage, it’s aimed at areas where you tend to get higher dropouts, where kids don’t go onto further education, where you’ve got higher unemployment, and a greater risk of kids missing that jump between school and work, which we know is proving a bit of a problem in areas where the economy is dropping off – or where there’s been a change in the manufacturing industry, for example.

ELLIOTT

Right, and is Geelong one of those areas?

RYAN

Well Geelong is going through an important transition, as it did 20 years ago. Ford downscaled, we had the Pyramid [Building Society] disaster in the early 1990s – it’s now got a situation where Ford is concluding business there and they’ve got Alcoa. So it’s like all areas, permanently, are in an area of economic transition and the job of Government is to partly try and make that transition just a little bit easier.

ELLIOTT

Yeah, I think “transition”, that is a euphemism for shedding jobs. Is it not?

RYAN

My Dad, Tom, lost his job in the recession we had to have just not long after the truck manufacturing industry and auto industry closed down. And I know a lot of people in the area I grew up – in the western suburbs of Melbourne – did. So I don’t mean to use it as a euphemism, but the economy in Geelong is changing. You know, we don’t have the same businesses, for example, making shirts and clothes; we don’t make as many cars. People tend to buy foreign-made cars in Australia.

ELLIOTT

No, that’s undoubtedly true.

RYAN

We do need to find new jobs for our school leavers.

ELLIOTT

Okay, now it’s rumoured that McDonalds is interested in, perhaps, partnering with the Government to create one of these schools. Now if IBM teaches people programming, what would McDonalds teach?

RYAN

Well, to be fair, that was a bit of a red herring. I think the first people to mention McDonalds were the Greens, because, you know, they just wanted to try and get a bumper sticker slogan to attack this proposal. So that was put to us in Senate discussions yesterday and what the Government has said is we’re in early discussions with the Victorian Government – this will be a partnership between the Federal Government and the Victorian Government – and no business has been chosen or selected yet. Those discussions will happen after the school model is set up in consultation with the community.

ELLIOTT

Okay, just on this issue of making students more work-ready, and I think that’s a very worthwhile goal. But I mean, one of the things I hear from employers – and I’ve been an employer myself, so I can say this from my own experience – is, you know, employers just want people who can read properly, write properly, do a reasonable amount of maths in their heads, and have a bit of knowledge about the world around them. Now, surely schools shouldn’t necessarily need a corporate involvement to teach that sort of stuff, should they?

RYAN

Well one of the things I hear from employers more and more often is that despite kids spending longer at school, they aren’t as work-ready as they used to be. Part of that is that there aren’t as many part-time and casual jobs around in some areas as there used to be. I pushed trolleys around Safeway and independent supermarkets for six years when I was at school and uni.

That teaches you the benefit of turning up 15 minutes before your shift, don’t turn up five minutes after, be clean and clean shaven, wear decent clothes. And the truth is, in areas of high unemployment and where you might have intergenerational unemployment, we’ve got to be reasonable and say some children in some parts of Australia grow up without seeing those examples in their family. Now, I was lucky enough to see that in my family – most Australians are – but there are some kids at risk from areas of high welfare dependency where they might not have those lessons that you and I probably imbibed from our parents and friends and relatives.

And so, that’s another one of the challenges, but employers are saying that. And in defence of McDonalds, I even got a message today from an employment consultant in Maroochydore, Queensland, who got to me on Twitter and said ‘you know, McDonalds is actually not a bad thing to have on a CV for a young kid,’ because the employers love it. It does teach kids work values. But this idea of McDonalds schools is just a furphy thrown up by the Greens to attack the proposal.

ELLIOTT

Senator Scott Ryan, thank you for your time.

RYAN

Thanks Tom.

(Ends)