Page 887 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 20 April 2021
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On TIMSS, in 2019 ACT mean maths and science scores were well below the means used for assessing socio-economic advantage in both year 4 and year 8. Further, the ACT maths year 4 mean decreased, and there was a decrease in the percentage of high performers. Conversely, the means for New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia increased.
ACT, national and international assessments all point to a long-term underperformance and downward trend in the ACT on literacy, numeracy and science; but, on a number of those measures, in comparable jurisdictions in Australia and overseas, they have shown improvement, so this decline is not inevitable, and it is not irreversible.
In 2016, under the previous education minister, Shane Rattenbury, the ACT Education Directorate claimed in their policy, Great Teachers By Design, that “PISA results indicate that the ACT public school system is one of the highest performing systems in Australia”. They set themselves the goal of doing better. But in the seven years since, unfortunately, that has not proven to be the case.
Put simply, the problem is that, when comparing the ACT with similar jurisdictions, and taking socio-economic factors into account—and I quote from a Grattan Institute report:
The ACT is the worst performer. On a like-for-like basis, its students make two to three months less progress than the national average in both primary and secondary school.
The big question is: why? Why is that the case, Mr Deputy Speaker? Certainly, having regard to all of the evidence, independent reports and reviews by the Auditor-General, the Grattan Institute, the ANU, Victoria University and so on are drawing similar conclusions. Broadly, there are eight main factors impacting on students’ learning: funding and spending; teacher education and practice; curriculum issues; governance and school autonomy; school infrastructure— (Second speaking period taken.)
The others are school leadership and culture; student equity; bullying and violence. Expenditure on full-time students in the ACT is $21,299, which is above the national average, so money has not resolved the issues that we are facing here in the ACT. I note—this flies in the face of the rhetoric that we often hear—that over the period 2009 to 2019 ACT government spending on education in the ACT declined by 3.2 per cent and federal government spending increased by 26.5 per cent. So we have seen a decrease from the ACT Labor government and an increase in education funding from the federal Liberal government.
In terms of teacher education and practice, we need to make sure that we are attracting high-quality teacher candidates, that we have the salaries at the right place, that we are improving the status of teaching, and that there are attractive career pathways. There is no doubt that teachers across the board are overworked in some cases and spend too much time on paperwork, which takes them away from class times.
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