A new report published by former Labor policy advisor Tom Bentley on the state’s education system emphasises the need for structural change to secure the state’s economic future.

Principal Advisor to the Vice-Chancellor at RMIT University, Mr Bentley completed the research as a Peter Underwood Centre visiting scholar and released his Achieving more together: reflecting on collaboration and education in Tasmania’s future report last week.

The report lays out five core priorities: identifying need, building platforms for professional collaboration, growing the community voice, creating shared pools of data and reshaping governance around learning.

Mr Bentley said reforming the education system to be structured around cross-sector and cross-school collaboration could help strengthen Tasmania’s economy and the future wellbeing of young Tasmanians.

The report warned that “if education is not to act unwittingly as an agent of further inequality and division … then a long-term Tasmanian strategy must effectively focus on how to engage, enable and develop the whole of Tasmania’s population”.

Mr Bentley said he was surprised at the level of collaboration already underway.

“There’s so much going on across the community created by schools and different networks of partners, often environmental or arts organisations, or employers and industry, have been busy just creating their own thing at works in a local community,” he said.

“It’s one of the things about Tasmania that there is so much local diversity and people are very active in creating solutions and focusing on what’s happening in their own particular local area.

“That creates an amazing potential to keep weaving it together into a bigger vision that helps to improve outcomes right across the state.”

His findings reflect commentary by Queensland’s former director of curriculum, Professor Bob Lingard, who visited Tasmania in July this year. Professor Lingard noted a strong enthusiasm for addressing the negative impacts of low socioeconomic status, and said he believed the cross-sector support for reformation stood Tasmania in excellent stead – something Mr Bentley agreed with.

“It is fair to say that education institutions historically have been quite fragmented, and a lot of policies in recent years have been about trying to overcome the downsides of that,” Mr Bentley said.

“It was very encouraging to see how much community-level collaboration there is, but also what a strong appetite there is for building it up.”

Mr Bentley pointed to the “concentrations of disadvantage and opportunity” pocketed around the state as areas where active collaboration between schools, communities and businesses could help reduce inequality and strengthen economic outcomes.

Initiatives such as the BIG partnership in Burnie, directly addressing the juxtaposition of high rates of unemployment and unfilled vacancies, show the kind of self-determination Mr Bentley wants to see more of across school communities.

Education Minister Jeremy Rockliff said he was pleased by the report’s emphasis on building community voice.

“Working in partnership with business and industry and providing improved and varied pathways for our learners to attain a year 12 or equivalent qualification clearly supports the Hodgman Government’s plan for education,” he said.

Mr Rockliff said the state government’s partnerships with Beacon and the Ramsay Foundation developed fresh collaborative approaches.

Likewise opposition education spokeswoman Michelle O’Byrne said Mr Bentley’s report accurately reflected Labor’s policy on developing self-sustaining school networks to allow for greater focus on individual community education needs.

Looking ahead, Mr Bentley said there were clear goals for Tasmania to pursue.

“I’d hope to see a much higher level of participation, continued improvement in those Year 12 completions and tertiary enrolments, a much wider range of place-based partnerships … I’d like to see groups of employers, skills providers, community organisations working together on that regional basis,” he said.

“And I’d like to see much greater organisational diversity … creating networks and collaborative forms that can support interesting projects and encourage this kind of interaction between the informal learning communities and the big structured education institutions.”