CHAIR – Minister, in relation to workplace health and safety, how many TasTAFE staff are on workers’ compensation for stress, bullying, psychological or psychosocial reasons, physical injury and other leave due to being unable to work? Can you provide this data over a five-year period?
Mr ELLIS – Thank you, Chair. I’ll pass to TasTAFE.
Mr GARDNER – Chair, to help me understand, are you seeking information in relation to the current body of workers’ compensation claims for a specific period?
CHAIR – How many workers are off on workers’ compensation?
Mr GARDNER – We can provide you with that information.
CHAIR – Thank you. Do I need to put that as a question on notice?
Mr GARDNER – Yes.
CHAIR – Can you provide that with a five-year breakdown?
Mr GARDNER – Historically yes, to the extent that we have that broken down; whatever data we have in relation to the breakdown. We currently report on physical and psychosocial. I can’t be clear that we have that breakdown for the last five years, but we certainly do now.
CHAIR – Have you noticed an increase in workers’ compensation claims, particularly for psychosocial issues?
Mr GARDNER – Not noticeably, certainly the incidence of psychosocial claims is increasing as a proportion of the overall claims, but in line with national trends. There’s nothing that we would see in our organisation that’s any different from what we’re observing and reading in this broader space nationally.
CHAIR – Do you do any surveys of workers? Can you just give an indication of what you’re seeing in those surveys?
Mr GARDNER – Over the last two years, we have conducted pulse surveys to get a sense of the sentiment of our workforce across a range of fronts. We did that in 2024 and we’ve done that again in 2025. We’ve seen from 2024‑25 some moderate improvement in overall engagement, but it’s fair to say that this is a long exercise and we’re continuing to invest and we want to get it into a much better place because, ultimately, the success of TasTAFE is driven by the quality engagement of our people. That’s what we’re about and we continue to invest in that.
CHAIR – Any trends in relation to particular campuses that raise concerns for you?
Mr McSHANE – Through the minister. Our surveys do go through to be talking more about the various departments and areas. If we’re talking about specific teaching areas as opposed to locations, so we don’t drive down into the location rather than the various, dare I say, schools or facilities that operate within it. We don’t go down specifically to campuses.
We also recognise that, certainly, it’s difficult to drill down, particularly if you have limited numbers of participants because if there are low numbers of participants in surveys, if they get singled out as hard for them to trust.
CHAIR – Is it okay, minister, to ask for that methodology to be tabled please?
Mr ELLIS – I’ll look back to the TasTAFE team as far as that. One thing I will say in general though is since the transition, I have been very appreciative of the work that the TasTAFE board and executive have done to uplift safety at a range of different campuses. I know it’s been a significant area of work. Sometimes the training work in certain areas, construction, for example, is higher risk and the work to uplift safety on campuses is actually very much focused on aligning with industry training and expectations as well. I’ll pass back to the TasTAFE team to see what’s available.
Mr GARDNER – Thank you, minister. I’m happy to provide some information around the methodology we apply. In this context, we have been applying the human synergistics model as a basis for understanding where our culture is at and we are working off the organisational – it has a cultural inventory model and we undertake a survey of the back of that model to see where our workforce all sits in relation to that.
That allows us to point to areas where we can seek to improve and focus, particularly some of the areas that we’ve identified through that process around role clarity, role conflict, some quality-of-service areas. In overall employee satisfaction, we recorded last year, 58 per cent of our employees who responded reported satisfaction to a great or very great extent. We’ve seen some improvement in that this year, but we want to drive that to a much stronger point.
If I may return to a question that you asked just earlier in relation to workers compensation claims, in July 2024 we had a total of 29 workers compensation claims on foot, 13 of those psychosocial, and 16 physical; and in July 2025, we had 32, 18 psychosocial and 14 physical. We had an increase in psychosocial and a slight decrease in physical.
CHAIR – What was the first date?
Mr GARDNER – July 2024, a total of 29 claims.
CHAIR – That’s fine, I won’t take up too much more time.
