Outback Students Train as Wool Classers to Fill Queensland's Workforce Gap

Skye Agar drove seven hours from Barbara Plains Station, near Wyandra, to spend four weeks in a classroom in Longreach, in Queensland's outback. She was there to learn how wool is sorted. Now she is one of 15 graduates who have received their wool stencil, the mark of a trained wool classer.

The group was mixed: shearers, stock agents, wool handlers and wool producers. Over the course they learnt to categorise wool by colour, strand, fineness, texture and style. It is a skill the shearing shed depends on. In the training, each student is given a 3-kilogram bag of wool containing smaller pieces, which they must sort by uniformity in micron, length and strength, while also finding any faults in the fibre.

The reason a classer matters comes down to money. Australia produces 25 per cent of the world's wool, which is sold at auction in Sydney, Melbourne and Fremantle, near Perth, and then mostly shipped overseas for processing. Different qualities fetch different prices, so someone has to grade the shorn wool. Queensland shearer David Grant put it bluntly: classing is non-negotiable, because without a person to grade the wool, it cannot be sold. After decades in the industry, Mr Grant said he took the course as a backup.

For Ms Agar, whose family won champion flock fleece at the Brisbane Ekka this year, the appeal was understanding what happens after the sheep leave the shed. She called learning about processing and pricing enlightening. As a grower, she said, the job is usually to get the sheep to the shed and then away from it, so knowing the whole process afterwards is good knowledge to have.

The course was organised by Longreach grazier Mike Pratt, who chairs the Queensland Wool Technical Advisory Group, known as WoolTAG. He said Queensland has had no wool classing pathway since 2013, and that the industry has been running on the bare minimum. If a classer gets sick, he said, finding a replacement is almost impossible. He estimated the state needs about 10 more classers. It also has only 12 shearing contractors, down from a hundred when, as he put it, wool was king. He described the outlook as pretty good, but said the workforce coming through has to be sustainable.

The industry's footing is mixed. Wool has long faced stiff competition from synthetics and cotton, and merino has historically been marketed to high-end fashion markets overseas. The market has been relatively strong lately, but prices have fallen by $2 a kilogram since the new financial year began, following a dramatic $7 rise since 2025 that reinvigorated the industry. Ms Agar remained upbeat, calling wool a brilliant and incredibly versatile fibre and saying she wishes the industry and the public would use it more.

The graduates are not quite ready to work yet. Each of the 15 must lodge accreditation with the Australian Wool Exchange before using their new skills in shearing sheds across the country. Whether this one course is enough to ease the shortage will become clearer as they start.