University students to receive financial support for unpaid placements

This is a pre budget announcement that’ll be pretty welcome news for some university students. These are payments targeting students in three particular sectors, nursing and teaching and social work. Now degrees in all of those areas require significant practical placements in order to get those qualifications. Hundreds of hours across a degree and this is all unpaid work. So there’s been a concern for quite some time that that fairly onerous requirement to do such significant work unpaid has seen when some students drop out of these courses altogether. They simply can’t afford to do this unpaid work and often give up their part time or casual job in the meantime to get those qualifications. And all three of those sectors have a pretty significant demand for graduates to be heading into those industries as well. So the government says it has listened to those concerns. It’s now responding and offering these new payments of $320 or so a week. This will kick in from July 1 next year. So 2025, it will be means tested too. The government says this is just some financial support to try and help those students and keep them in these qualifications in these degrees. This has prompted questions this morning though as to why these specific sectors and not others that have also very similar onerous practical requirements to the Education Minister. Jason Quitclair had that question put to him this morning. Here’s a bit of what he had to say. What said is this is where we go first. My reckoning is having a look at the report They said look at teaching, early education, nursing, midwifery, as well as social work. So that’s where we’re focused first. Very female dominated professions, well and and and and well and. And. I guess another observation is about 60% of students at uni are women. And these are such important jobs, they’re jobs where not everybody who starts the degree finishes it. We’re in a school today, only one in two people who start a teaching degree finish it. You know, part of the reason for that is the course. I’m reforming the course. Part of the reason is the challenges of paying the bills while you’re doing the prac. And so, Tom, the budget just over a week away and there is some unexpected money flowing in. Yeah, and this is becoming a bit of a familiar story, Gemma. A week or so out from the budget the government announces, it’s come across a few extra 10s of billions of dollars, $25 billion in this case, over the next five years, flowing into the government’s coffers, primarily due to higher commodity prices, which has led to higher corporate tax takes tax, high corporate tax take and also a stronger economy leading to a higher income tax take as well. We saw this before the past two budgets as well. They were higher upgrades in those cases is more than $100 billion in both cases, but the government says this is still welcome. However, the Treasurer is pushing a bit of a dual message a week out from the budget, saying there are spending pressures that need to be addressed. Money will have to be spent in some areas of urgent need, so we’ll see what he’s referring to there on budget night. But there is also a need for financial restraint to try and keep a lid on inflation, which remains a problem across the economy.