Transcript

Monday 4 July 2016 - Future Proof

SARAH FERGUSON, PRESENTER: Welcome to Four Corners.

If Australians intended to deliver a shock to the political system on the weekend, they've certainly achieved that. It will be days, maybe even weeks before we know the result of Saturday's election.

Malcolm Turnbull's mantra of 'jobs and growth' clearly failed to convince Australian voters.

But whoever ends up forming government, the challenge of jobs and secure employment will be uppermost in their minds - in an era when job security has been in decline across the western world for years.

Some experts predict more than 40 per cent of jobs in Australian may disappear over the next 10 to 15 years - that's 5 million jobs , most of them replaced by automation and a new generation of computers learning to think for themselves.

But as jobs disappear new ones are being created. So, what will those jobs of the future look like? And are we educating our children to be ready for them?

Geoff Thompson reports.

Are you alive? Not the same way as you but yes I am. How old are you?

GEOFF THOMPSON, REPORTER: At the Good Shepherd primary school north of Adelaide, students are getting to know a little robot called Pink.

Howdy.

Can you feel emotions?

I don't have feelings like you but I can detect emotions.

Are you hungry?

MONICA WILLIAMS, ASSOCIATION OF INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS SA: They really engage with the robots in a way that's much more than we had expected and the other thing is that most of the students really identify with the robot and really feel like they develop a relationship with the robot which was something we didn't expect.

Finlay: "We're programming Pink the robot to do meditation ...

Q: So you're teaching the robot to meditate by squeezing a lemon?

A. Yes that's just the first part, there's a lot more to do.

GEOFF THOMPSON, REPORTER: Ten year old Finlay and 11 year old Maddison are utterly absorbed by the challenge of teaching Pink what to do, by programming the computer which controls her.

Maddison: You can get to create something, what you want it to do.

Finlay: It's a bit cool.

Q. Lots of fun?

Finlay: Yeah.

Maddison: Yeah, we've got the power to control her.

Q. What are you teaching Pink to do?

Kid: We're programming her to do the actions to Wheels on the Bus ...

GEOFF THOMPSON: Four schools in South Australia are using Pink to help kids learn computer coding. It's a skill they'll need to control technology and compete with it for the jobs of the future.

OLIVIA COLALANCIA: It's kind of weird thinking about it because there's a lot of little children who say want to be a teacher, kind of think what if robots take over the teaching area. Got to work out what type of job a robot can't take over.

RYAN MATTNER: If jobs get done by robots still need to code them to do it. Still be jobs to code them, that's why it's important to learn to do this stuff.

NATHAN BECKER: It's like a reward, if you get it right it's like a reward to see something in action what you've actually done ...

Q. What do you think?

Kid: That was good. Relieved that we got it work.

Q: Exciting?

Kids: Yes. Didn't stuff it up, so that's good.

MONICA WILLIAMS, ASSOCIATION OF INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS SA: If they're going to be in a world where there are already robots, having understanding about how they can be used in an ethical way and how jobs can be created around those robots has to be the best way to help them with the thinking and the sort of learning they need to be well-equipped for the world they are going into.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Today almost 12 million of us have a job, but Australia's Committee for Economic Development predicts that technological change could eliminate five million jobs within the next 15 years. Stephen Martin is CEDA's chief executive.

STEPHEN MARTIN CHIEF EXECUTIVE, CEDA: What we did was apply an analysis to with all things being equal what will be the likelihood of jobs disappearing in Australia over the next 10 years, and what we found is something like 40 per cent of current jobs as they are structured at the moment is likely, are likely to disappear, but that in regional areas that could be as high as 60 per cent.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Machines have been replacing human workers since the industrial revolution. Since then any routine, repeatable task has been an endangered job. Now automation has broken free of the factory to overtake more complex arenas of human labour. Last year, the introduction of robots at Sydney's Port Botany cut the number of dock workers in half.

HUGH DURRANT-WHYTE, UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY: There are still people working on the port, but they're much, much fewer. They drive cranes, ah they sit in the control tower over- oversighting what's going on, they deal with exceptions, they deal with maintenance, things like that. The main bulk of the operations are automated. And I think, I will say it is important because i-it's driven efficiency um and we now have at Port Botany arguably the most efficient, most ah technically integrated container terminal in the world. And if I said that 20 years ago about Port Botany I would have been laughed, laughed out of the building.

GEOFF THOMPSON: This is the man leading Australia's robot revolution. Hugh Durrant-Whyte helped automate the ports in Port Botany and Brisbane. On the other side of the country he led the development of driverless trucks for Rio Tinto's mines in the Pilbara.

HUGH DURRANT-WHYTE: It has been a very concerted effort to build an automated mine from all the way from the pit to the port. So you're looking at automated drills, ah automated trains, ah a completely new way of doing business, computer programs that read in data, that make automated decisions, that understand how to do maintenance and all these sorts of things. And of course just to celebrate it is the fact that once you have all of that under control you can actually run the mine completely remotely.

GEOFF THOMPSON: With driverless semi-trailers already being tested around the world, long-haul trucking jobs may soon succumb to the robot revolution.

BERNARD SALT, KPMG: There is no doubt that truck drivers I think are on the front line, they're in one of the top ten occupations in Australia. So I would see a significant level of structural change particularly at that occupation, ah, as, um, the driverless vehicles make their way forward and that might be say from 2020 through to about 2035 over that 10, 15 year period.

HUGH DURRANT-WHYTE: I think the first thing off the agenda is really going to be um for example driving autonomously between Sydney and Melbourne on the highway. Ah it's not hard to imagine and indeed the technology exists ah for dedicating a lane and saying this is going to be for autonomous trucks.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Bank tellers, supermarket check-out staff and airline check-in staff have already been pushed aside by technology. The next wave of automation will be driven by cognitive computers, which learn to solve complex problems by themselves.

JON WILLIAMS PwC: This year for the first time a computer has beaten the World Master of the game Go, the Asian game Go, which requires thinking about strategies ah future strategies ah to beat your opponent. In winning those challenge matches it made a couple of moves that the experts watching the game didn't believe anyone else any human had ever made and which they couldn't quite understand why it had made those moves. And that's possibly the future of computers is not just doing things that we've told them to do better and faster but actually coming up with new ways of doing things that we wouldn't have thought of.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Jon Williams is a managing partner with the global consulting giant PwC, which predicts that 44 per cent of current Australian jobs are at risk over the next 20 years.

JON WILLIAMS: So many of today's jobs will disappear. So there'll be fewer of today's jobs, but we believe that there'll be more of tomorrow's jobs to replace them. Really what what's happening is the same thing that happened to blue collar work in the Seventies and Eighties and Nineties is gonna happen to white collar work in the next ten to fifteen years.

GEOFF THOMPSON: The Australian workforce has survived seismic shifts before. Fearing the rise of the machines is nothing new. Four Corners was reporting on it in 1969.

"When this circuit board learns your job, what are you going to do?

GEOFF THOMPSON: And again in 1978.

"This is a word processor, offspring of the mating of transistor and typewriter. It makes 1 typist the productive equal of 6.

"The salesman introduced this machine as the new accounting department. It does everything around the office except make the tea. It replaces clerks, office girls, office boys.

"Jobs are going to be destroyed by a holocaust, a firestorm of technology ..."

MARK WOODEN, UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE: I still think you'll find that going forward it's the f- white collar professionals who are going to do well, it just won't be the secretarial jobs but they're already gone, I mean when I started in this business there were typists, now everyone's a typist but no one's employed as a typist so they're long gone. So the real- the routine jobs have gone.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Mark Wooden from Melbourne University runs the leading survey of Australians' work and income. He's been tracking changes in employment trends over the past century.

MARK WOODEN: If you go back to say the turn of last century, 1900, we were very much dependent on farming, agriculture.

GEOFF THOMPSON: At its peak agriculture employed about one in four of all Australian workers.

MARK WOODEN: And then over the next century of course there was a big change, um, agriculture would produce more and more and more but with f- fewer and fewer workers. Ah, today one in 50 Australian workers, two and a half per cent of the workforce in agriculture. So nothing but they're producing, I don't know, a hundred fold more output, um, with those fewer workers.

GEOFF THOMPSON: By 1960 manufacturing employed 28 per cent of Australian workers. Today manufacturing employs only 8 per cent.

MARK WOODEN: I don't think it's being very brave to suggest that in a decade's time it'll be five per cent.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Isn't the inexorable momentum towards an economy that needs fewer human beings working?

MARK WOODEN: Ah, well the history of the last two hundred years says no, okay, that there are more jobs than ever before. We've become wealthier and we're spending, ah, our money on services and we're not sort of, ah, not spending our time doing the heavy lifting, the dirty work.

GEOFF THOMPSON: In the 80s white-collar workers found new jobs as Australia's service sector grew to become the great employer it is today. It's where more than 75 per cent of us now work.

BERNARD SALT, KPMG: Jobs of the past have been replaced by jobs of today, jobs for today will be replaced by jobs of the future.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Demographer and commentator Bernard Salt is a partner at KPMG. He says if the past is any guide, there is no need to panic about the future.

BERNARD SALT: We have had digital disruption, ah, in social media, in the media, in the taxi industry, we've had the globalisation of manufacturing, particularly impacting Australia and yet the evidence is there's still more people in work. From the year 2000 to 2016 the number of workers in the Australian workforce has increased by three million. The number of people who are unemployed comparing 2000 with 2016 has virtually not changed, so about 6 per cent compared to 5.7 per cent. So the number of workers has increased, the nature of work may well be changed but the kind of work, ah, has, ah, has simply shifted, the middle class is doing other jobs.

GEOFF THOMPSON: The jobs most vulnerable to computerisation include accountants, lawyers and real estate agents. Demand for beauticians, personal trainers, manicurists and intensive care nurses has been booming. The number of baristas in Australia tripled between 2006 and 2011.

BERNARD SALT: There are other jobs that are expanding and these would be jobs in personal services for example or in technology, or in healthcare or in aged care, childcare for example. The nature of work is changing, some jobs are diminishing, other jobs are evolving.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Some of the jobs of the future are already here.Ben Simons is the technical director of the University of Technology's cutting edge Data Arena. It turns vast amounts of information into an immersive 3D experience, like this glimpse of outer space.

Now that we're up close, we can actually see the 36 million stars ...

GEOFF THOMPSON: By visualising data from radio telescopes, he isolates young stars which may reveal secrets about the origin of the universe.

The stars we're interested in are these ones at the top here, these are the red stars, these are the needles in the haystack ...

So the red ones are the young ones? They're the ones we're looking for.

BEN SIMONS TECHNICAL DIRECTOR, UTS DATA ARENA: It's very hard to make sense of data when it's a list of numbers. I mean anyone who's looked at a spreadsheet knows that you know there's not eh much that you can figure out. As soon as we turn it into an image and to make it spatial ah when the data's visual then eh we can actually start to understand what we're looking at.

GEOFF THOMPSON: In previous lives Ben's been a CSIRO scientist and the visual effects boss on Happy Feet 2.

BEN SIMONS: I've done 15 feature films for the past 10 years where in fact we ah do work with big data but for entertainment. Ah we're now taking a lot of those techniques and bringing it back into science and engineering so that we can chall- take on the challenge of the big data and try to get it on the screen and make sense.

GEOFF THOMPSON: There will be more high-tech jobs like this in the future, but not for everyone.

CHARLES BRASS, THE FUTURES FOUNDATION: There are all sorts of jobs today I couldn't have conceived of 40 years ago and in 40 years time there'll be all sorts of jobs that I can't conceive of today, that is true. The question though is what sorts of jobs will they be, how many people will have access to them and how will those people be able to survive in the world through the jobs that they're doing?

JON WILLIAMS PwC: There was an agrarian revolution, there was an industrial revolution, there was a computer revolution um and each time we've found ways as a as a species as a as a ah as humans to respond to that and create new jobs for people to do. Having said that it's ea- easy with hindsight to look back and assume and that all happened very smoothly um. I-if you look at the actual history time there was tremendous social and political upheaval um caused by those shifts and I think we have to expect there's going to be some degree of social upheaval um as the world of work significantly changes over the next ten years.

TARNYA STURGISS: "Been unemployed now for the last year, which made it really difficult because the longer I'm unemployed the harder it gets ...

GEOFF THOMPSON: Twenty year old Tarnya Sturgiss lives in Adelaide. Like an increasing number of young Australians her working life has been a string of casual and part-time jobs.

TARNYA STURGISS: I've worked in tapas bars, retail, chemists, chicken shops, bakeries, sandwich making ... Started out at Coles as check-out and really enjoyed it, want more of a career now, something long term not short term, that's where it's difficult because I want full-time work not casual.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Just like her mother Christine, Tarnya left school in year 10.

Christine you finished school in Year 10 like Tarnya but it wasn't hard for you to find an opportunity?

CHRISTINE BERIMAN: No because you didn't have to have computer skills like these kids today, if you had what they were looking for they just took you on face value and gave you a chance.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Are you concerned for Tarnya's future and the future of work for someone her age?

CHRISTINE BERIMAN: Absolutely. What future do our kids have if everything's going to be run by technology. I'm really concerned, I have a younger daughter too, what future will she have? If Tarnya can't get back in work force what future do our kids have.

GEOFF THOMPSON: South Australia has been hit hard by the decline in manufacturing and has the highest unemployment in the country. The suburbs around Adelaide are among the worst places for young people looking for work.

How you been going this week?

I've applied for a lot more jobs than usual ...

Have you found there's a lot of jobs out there for you to apply for?

Not at the moment ...

GEOFF THOMPSON: Staff at the youth services network Re-Engage are helping Tarnya to find a career.

CAROLYN HABIB, RE-ENGAGE: With advancement in technology many of the entry-level jobs that traditionally went to young people are diminishing. If you're young and unemployed in South Australia, it's tough and it's definitely getting tougher and I know compared to when I was looking for a job and finishing high school, there were jobs available in retail and hospitality that you didn't even need qualifications for. Now there's an expectation that you're not only qualified but you're experienced, so for young people like Tarnya it's really challenging and it's really disheartening.

TONY NICHOLSON, BROTHERHOOD OF ST LAURENCE: In years gone by, we have expected young people just to be able to leave school and walk into a job and then find their way in a career path, in this modern economy, ah that's not the case. So it's an important point that the transition from school to work has become much more problematic for young people than it has been in decades gone by. In the decade ahead, we've got to give much more public policy attention to the issue of ah assisting those young people make the transition successfully.

CHARLES BRASS, THE FUTURES FOUNDATION: We are already at the point where there are not enough jobs for everybody who wants them in Australia. There are, quite apart from the 5.8 per cent who are unemployed, there are a significant number of others who have just given up trying to find a job, they're discouraged. So we're already at the state where we haven't got enough jobs and it seems that it's increasing.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Futurist Charles Brass argues that if machines keep learning to do our work more cheaply than we can it's inevitable that there won't be enough work to go round.

CHARLES BRASS: If you're an individual business owner or a manager of a large business your objective is to make as much money as you can out of the business that you're in. If you can do that by employing technology and not employing human beings, you're going to employ technology and not employ human beings. I know there are people who say don't worry about it, the jobs will come, but the debate is done. The evidence is in. What jobs are being created are part time, casual and fragile. There's not enough money in those jobs to sustain people and there aren't enough of those jobs for all the people that are falling out the bottom.

HUGH DURRANT-WHYTE: I think one thing that's different in the next 10 or 15 years is the fact that that automation is occurring in the middle, in the middle-classes, in the middle jobs, and not just at the bottom end. Fundamentally the big difference now is machine learning and artificial intelligence in particular are actually solving jobs that we thought traditionally were very highly qualified jobs, people like lawyers and doctors and accountants a-and bankers and these sorts of things. They're actually changing those. So in fact it's eating out the middle of the job market, rather than the bottom end.

GEOFF THOMPSON: A university degree was once seen as a sure pathway to a secure career, but not any more. The full-time employment rate for new graduates is now under 70 per cent, the lowest rate in more than 30 years. Some graduates like Brett Edman have to settle for low-skilled jobs outside the profession they trained for.

BRETT EDMAN: You heard people saying it wasn't a matter of finishing your degree and then having to go out and look for work it was a matter of if you're in your final year then you start looking at what jobs are available and start applying for them and usually you get snapped up before you graduated.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Brett Edman is an electrical engineering graduate who also speaks Mandarin after a year studying in China.

BRETT EDMAN: I came back to Australia and thinking oh yeah it'll be fine like there'll be still enough jobs but yeah like there was just nothing.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Brett says he gave up looking after applying for more than 100 electrical engineering jobs. Now working as a casual labourer, he's back living with his parents and back at university studying to be a science teacher.

BRETT EDMAN: I do know that science teachers are in massive demand. But then again that's the exact same thing I said when I was studying engineering so hopefully that situation won't have changed by the time I graduate this time.

GEOFF THOMPSON: The latest unemployment figures confirm a trend that's been growing for decades. Two-thirds of all new jobs created in the past three years have been part-time. Since 1980 the proportion of part-time jobs has doubled from one in six to almost one in three.

JIM STANFORD, CENTRE FOR FUTURE WORK, AUSTRALIA INSTITUTE: There's no doubt from the hard numbers that the average quality and security of work in Australia has deteriorated ah over the last few years. Ah we see the growth of ah what you might call precarious work in all kinds of forms. Ah part-time work, temporary work, ah casualisation, what that means is ah not for all Australians but for more of them ah work is eh increasingly insecure, they don't know when they're gonna be working, they don't know if they'll have enough work, and the average pay and compensation ah of work has declined. So the overall trend is definitely negative.

BERNARD SALT, KPMG: To say that, um, employment should be fulltime I think is quite prescriptive and quite wrong, it simply does not reflect the realities of modern Australia. Ah, th- the fact of the matter is that a lot of female workers, not all, ah, by any means, but a substantial proportion of the female workforce do not want fulltime work. It's not being imposed by someone from beyond, this is what people actually want from the bottom up.

GEOFF THOMPSON: It's a demand that new companies like Airtasker are cashing in on. From an office in Sydney's CBD the web-based business connects people who need a job done with others prepared to bid for it. So far more than half a million people have used the service to create $40 million worth of work.

TIM FUNG CEO, AIRTASKER: What we're really proud of at Airtasker is that we're creating new job opportunities. Like if you wanted to find as an example someone who's really good at polishing shoes and you want to find that person how hard is it to find them. Ah if we make that easier we make it possible for someone to actually do that shoe shining job and earn some money and a transaction happens and that's a great thing um. And without these kinds of simple platforms that job simply wouldn't exist.

JIANITSA DAMARIS: At first I did anything that came up that I could do, things like waiting in queue in restaurant. Picking up parcels from post office, little courier jobs here and there.

GEOFF THOMPSON: When she lost her job as a real estate agency receptionist three years ago Jianitsa Damaris signed up with Airtasker. She likes the flexibility it offers.

JIANITSA DAMARIS: It's not locked into 9 to 5 job where I can't get around and do what I want to do, especially at this time of my life there's a lot of family, want to be around for things they need extra hand for, gives me autonomy to set my times, get out and about.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Today Jianitsa is collecting a parcel for someone too busy to do it themselves. This Airtasker job's only worth twenty five dollars, but she takes it because it's on the way to a friend she wants to visit.

JIANITSA DAMARIS: It's a bit dog eat dog, survival of the fittest, but it gives an opportunity for everyone to have a go. As far as providing income that you can forecast for, probably not. However some weeks can be far better than one other week, it averages out well if you're willing to take that risk.

TIM FUNG CEO, AIRTASKER:I think a misconception is that Airtasker is only about menial labour, that's actually not true at all um. So some of the guys who have earned ah huge money are guys doing um things like um making ah websites. And all we are is a platform for short term labour. And you can peop- find people to do anything for you in that regard.

GEOFF THOMPSON: A survey by the Australian Bureau of Statistics found that more than a quarter of part-time workers want to work more hours.

JIM STANFORD CENTRE FOR FUTURE WORK, AUSTRALIA INSTITUTE: So ah the types of very insecure day to day work that are being facilitated by these new web based platforms ah cannot be the basis ah for the prosperity of the of the whole ah community. Are they a way to make a few bucks for people maybe. But ah they're not anything like the sorts of ah permanent reliable income you need to have a healthy family and a healthy economy.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Canadian economist Jim Stanford is the founding director of the Australia Institute's Centre for Future Work, which is partly funded by trade unions.

JIM STANFORD: You know this idea that you're not going tohave a permanent job you're just going to kind of work from one short term gig to another, ah is often portrayed as a kind of amazing new development but really there's nothing new about it all that that model of work is centuries old in fact. If you look back to the early days of capitalism ah the way that early factories worked ah for example they didn't offer people a 40 hour ah a week job in a factory they would bring you in for a few hours and send you home or even even better from the employer's perspective ah they would let you take the work home, you know say in a textile factory, do the work at home and then bring it back when you were done. Funny it's that starts to sound a lot like some of these web based ah businesses ah you know around ah ah doing odd jobs where you're supposedly working but you know on an occasional basis from your own home without any guarantee at all about ah your income.

GEOFF THOMPSON: In an increasingly global competition for work, technology is overcoming geography. Another Australian company, Freelancer.com, has almost 20 million people around the world bidding for jobs that can be done over the internet.

MATT BARRIE CEO, FREELANCER.COM (2012): Chances are, any job you can think of can be done with a computer, which means anyone anytime of day on the other side of the world potentially can do it for you for a fraction of the cost

JIM STANFORD: If employers ah or even the final customers are able to you know reach out to other parts of the world where people are desperate and work for a fraction of what they do in Australia it's just another way of integrating Australia into this ah world labour market where unfortunately most people are poor and most people are much more desperate ah than they are in Australia. So the shift towards more tradable services, that is services that can be performed in one country and delivered in another country, ah I think is going to accentuate the deterioration in the quality of work.

JAN OWEN CEO, FOUNDATION FOR YOUNG AUSTRALIANS: The challenge for 4.3 million young Australians is not the person sitting next to you in school, it's actually the re- the 750 million young people in the region, um and that is actually the most challenging piece of the global story I think, is that how will we insure that we've got a generation of young people who can really compete in that environment because there is, we have literally no chance of staying this isolated island.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Jan Owen is the chief executive of the Foundation for Young Australians, which is lobbying for a complete overhaul of the way we teach our kids.

JAN OWEN: If we want to maintain our standard of living and sustain the way that we live here. Australia is right now not prepared and we're not preparing young people for that global environment either.

Is this something you've been working on for a while?

No, one week.

That's pretty good for the first week ...

So click on it and see what happens. I'm just a starter dad, yeah but somehow you came up with this ...

GEOFF THOMPSON: On Saturday afternoons in the Sydney suburb of Balmain kids come together not to play sport, but to learn to code computers to help them win the jobs of the future.

"No let's just get bananas. OK yes I think you're right actually ...

GEOFF THOMPSON: There's even a robot car they are programming to move.

"Do it like three times ..."

BEN LIQUETE, CODER DOJO: What it is is a handful of volunteers that are mentoring children to learn how to code to be able to play and experiment and learn how to write programs themselves. I believe that coding is the next layer of literacy. Wherever you go you see people using software, you see parents giving their kids iPhones, I'll go to an airport and I'll see a parent trying to fob off their child by giving them an Ipad. We shouldn't just be consuming it ad infinitum, should be writing it as well.

GEOFF THOMPSON: The parents here are learning just as much as their kids.

(Dad): Learning that computers are things that they control, that are proactive over rather than just being passive recipients. You start to realise that you control the computer, you tell the computer what to do the computer doesn't tell you what to do

(Reporter) Do you wish you were being told how to do this at school?

(Kids) Yes. Definitely.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Groups like Coder Dojo are also a reaction to parental concern that more skills like this are not being taught in Australian schools.

(Kid): They don't really teach this sort of thing

(Mum): He's teaching them.

Q: At school

A: yeah, I can see where this is going and what this is doing, I can see the need for it, I definitely think this should be taught in schools. This is what will be the future, writing these programs and applying them to their workplaces.

JAN OWEN: What we don't have in Australia is the proficiency or the numbers of young people who can make it, break it and build it. Coding is a great skill, um very soon computers are going to be able to code to each other, so again it's not actually the coding, it's what's the skillset that you're teaching underneath coding and the skillset that you're teaching underneath coding is you know, algorithms, it's problem solving, it's critical thinking.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Schools in the future might look a bit more like the Australian Science and Mathematics School which is leading a revolution in the way kids are taught. No bells ring here and students and teachers take turns bringing their dogs to school.

GLENYS THOMPSON DEPUTY PRINCIPAL, ASMS: So we don't do bells and we don't do uniforms and we don't do surnames. That's because this is more like a real life experience. You don't have bells in your workplace. You don't have closed off offices everywhere and you don't have people calling you Mr or Miss. This is a real workplace. We want to be working with the kids, we don't want them to think that we are the, the boss because by having structures like no walls, big classes, team work, no, no desks for teachers, we're actually able to really help people um and both the teachers and the students understand how we can do that in a way that is much more realistic.

GEOFF THOMPSON: ASMS is a public school within the grounds of South Australia's Flinders University. It's for senior high school students with a passion for the so-called STEM subjects - Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics - necessary for 75 per cent of the fastest-growing occupations. In most Australian high schools the study of STEM subjects has been declining for decades.

JON WILLIAMS PwC: So we need more people with those pure hard skills in science technology engineering and and maths. The second revolution is in learning how to to learn, learning how to build, learning how to design um because that can be applied throughout someone's life to solve all sorts of problems as technology change changes.

JAN OWEN CEO, FOUNDATION FOR YOUNG AUSTRALIANS: STEM is going to be part of the future, it's not the only part of the future. Fifteen-year-olds in Australia today have got um not the levels of digital proficiency, financial literacy, um and then also ability to communicate, present you know, what we call enterprising skills or transferrable skills. If they don't have those skills, they're going to find it really hard to navigate a very flexible career that has a whole heap of casual and other work going on in it.

GEOFF THOMPSON: ASMS tries to prepare students for the changing world of work with what it calls challenge-based learning. Traditional subjects like English are not taught on their own. Instead they are mixed together to solve real-life problems. Every class is a collaboration.

GLENYS THOMPSON DEPUTY PRINCIPAL, ASMS: People are going to need to be fabulous communicators. They're going to be, need to be really great team players. Not only that, they need to have some discipline and knowledge but they need to know how to learn because we don't know what it is they're going to need to learn. So when we work with the students we work really closely not only on them gaining the academic knowledge but also on gaining those dispositions and capabilities that are going to set them up to be successful in the future because without that, the students won't have choices.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Students have to invent a marketable product by the end of the semester.

JOSIAH HSI: Each group of three or four will choose an issue and they will fix it, or try to fix it with the facilities here.

PHOEBE BACHE: What we're aiming to do is have a GPS system so when the umbrella is 15 metres away it will alert you and tell you where's your umbrella. Lot of people leave umbrellas on buses and stuff ... the umbrella will tell you before you lose it.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Using 3D printers Chelsea, Phoebe and Josiah are designing an umbrella that won't blow inside out, has an inbuilt torch and tells you when it is lost.

CHELSEA ALBANESE: What other things can this umbrella do that other umbrellas can't do? I think the question we need to ask ourselves is what can't it do?

JOSIAH HSI: There will be a flashlight ... go through here, mirror that will shine light into path ...

PHOEBE BACHE: With assignments like this, at other schools we probably wouldn't have had the opportunity to explore what we wanted to do, but here we definitely get to explore what we're interested in more than other schools. The ability to put your learning into real life situations is really beneficial

We could put a picture of our cone like a big picture ... or our logo.

GEOFF THOMPSON: In a quiet corner across the open-plan room, another group is trying to solve a different yet familiar problem - why ice cream is so messy to eat.

MOLLY VOSS: So how did you make that? We 3D printed this. What we've done is we've incorporated a rim onto your normal ice-cream cone so what it does is catches drips and reduces the risk of getting sticky fingers when eating ice cream.

GEOFF THOMPSON: The jobs these kids end up doing may not have been invented yet. We can't future-proof their prospects. But re-thinking what they need to learn may be a good place to start.

JAN OWEN CEO, FOUNDATION FOR YOUNG AUSTRALIANS: We could start working with 12 year olds today, by the time they've done six years of high school and they're 18, we could genuinely have changed their trajectory if we focussed on some of these education changes that need to happen and we could genuinely set them up and then therefore Australia up for a very different future.

GEOFF THOMPSON: It's two weeks later at ASMS and the students are presenting their products to potential investors.

It's biodegradable straws, it's biodegradable plastic straws ...

This is the one-card, it's to solve the problem of having too many loyalty cards in your wallet or purse ...

We've designed it so that it can't be blow inside out, we've got flaps here that allow for wind circulation so that it can't be blown inside out ...

We've had guests and students come and look at it but hopefully an entrepreneur comes.

GEOFF THOMPSON: The drip-free ice cream cones now look ready to eat.

MOLLY VOSS: So you got the cone and we've attached a rim with lollies and you just eat the ice cream normally and it will land here and you just eat the rim as you go. And have you had much interest? Yeah we've had a lot of people coming through so it's been exciting.

GLENYS THOMPSON DEPUTY PRINCIPAL, ASMS: What we're trying to do here is really help our kids get the skills that they're going to need in the future in terms of that grit that resilience, that ability to really go out there and make opportunities for themselves.

Have you ever had trouble with your umbrella blowing inside out? I have. Don't you just hate it when you go inside and your umbrella is soaking wet? Yes! We know how you feel! Luckily we have the product for you!

GEOFF THOMPSON: The umbrella team piques the interest of an entrepreneur. In the end, the ice-cream cones win the day with the umbrella kids close behind.

SCOTT BOOCOCK, ENTREPRENEUR: There are 73 stalls here today and I've done half of them so far and I believe that there's at least two of them or three of them that are buyable right now, of which there's two of them which I would say are billion-dollar businesses if we could get it out there and sell them to the world.

GEOFF THOMPSON: These young people are re-thinking their future. Many more Australians will need to do the same.

PHOEBE BACHE: It's been great, everyone loves it because the problem it fixes everyone can relate to. And do you think that your future will be making things in this way? Yeah like I've never considered that before, I've always thought of going down the traditional paths, but after doing this I really enjoyed it and really enjoyed the marketing behind it as well, and this could definitely be like a future pathway for me.