Lifelong Learning for Australia’s Future

The upcoming GAP Annual Economic Summit will consider ways to prepare new generations of Australians for a future characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.

Global Access Partners’ tenth annual A Vision for Australia Summit focuses on education and lifelong learning. The Summit brings together 100 delegates from multiple disciplines and organisations into the Legislative Assembly Chamber of New South Wales Parliament House to share their insights on agile learning and the future of education.

The Summit will develop recommendations that the delegates propose to action. The role of GAP, as it has been for the last 22 years, is to provide a framework for discussion and collaboration across a multidisciplinary group of engaged individuals with valuable experience.

Lifelong learning is a theme of broad relevance and wide interest. We have all learned and are learning, and a lot of us have taught or are teaching. The Summit has selected creative thinkers from multiple disciplines to discuss pressing questions about how the education system can address the learning needs of Australians, and the role of non-traditional education institutions.

The focus of this year’s Summit is a natural evolution of the multitude of relevant work that GAP has championed since the Taskforce on Tertiary Music Education in 2011, to the  Leadership in Education Advisory in 2013, Taskforce on Early Childhood Education in 2016 and Taskforce on Youth Transitions in 2019. The state of education in Australia, from the importance of learning in the early years to the government’s tertiary reforms and beyond, took centre stage at the fifth A Vision for Australia Summit in 2014. GAP has also championed integrated models of service delivery in  early childhood education to help vulnerable children achieve developmental goals.

As the Summit proceeds in Parliament House in Sydney, the GAP Taskforce on Youth Transitions will be in Canberra presenting its final report and recommendations to the Hon. Dan Tehan, Minister for Education.

GAP has been running its annual flagship A Vision for Australia Economic Summit since 2010. This is an invitation-only, parliamentary-style event that reviews Australia’s strengths, highlights opportunities for progress and develops a plan for growth. Ministers and members of Parliament, secretaries of government departments and agencies, global business executives and thought leaders have all addressed GAP summits over the last ten years.

A Vision for Australia sketches a year of activities for GAP and its network with impact on public policy, and I cannot wait to embark on these with our delegates.