Page 1983 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 23 June 2021
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Professor Patrick Griffin is a world-leading Australian expert in student learning and assessment from the University of Melbourne Graduate School of Education. As he has explained to my office, NAPLAN is a very limited tool which cannot provide appropriate or helpful responses to either teachers in teaching students or parents in understanding their child’s individual learning needs.
Far from the comprehensive assessment that the Canberra Liberals clearly believe this testing regime reflects, NAPLAN undermines the confidence of our students and cannot possibly account for the diversity of things young people learn in our schools. Until they scrap NAPLAN, have a serious plan to increase teacher numbers in the ACT, and hold their federal coalition counterparts to account for the inequitable funding in public schools, the Canberra Liberals cannot be taken seriously on the question of public education.
The ACT Greens have a strong history of improving the transparency and accountability of governance in this city, but there is no value to systemic reviews, inquiries and reports if we do not allow and empower our public servants, our teachers and our school communities to actually do the work required to implement the strategies that come out of them.
Our education system needs to have the time and investment to reap the benefits of implementation of the inquiries and the strategies that we already have rather than begin again and engage in yet another lengthy consultation and report writing process. My amendments call on the Minister for Education and Youth Affairs to update this Assembly on the implementation of the government’s response to these inquiries in the next sitting. I commend them to the Assembly.
MS BERRY (Ginninderra—Deputy Chief Minister, Minister for Early Childhood Development, Minister for Education and Youth Affairs, Minister for Housing and Suburban Development, Minister for the Prevention of Domestic and Family Violence, Minister for Sport and Recreation and Minister for Women) (4.15): I should say at the outset that I do not support the Canberra Liberals’ call for yet another review into our education system, but I support Mr Davis’s amendment.
The ACT government is always striving to get the very best from our education system. That includes regularly seeking independent expert advice.
Nationally, in the last few years, we have had the review to achieve educational excellence in Australian schools, Gonski 2.0; the national architecture for schooling review; the review of senior secondary pathways; the national review of teacher registration; the review of the national quality framework; and two reviews into NAPLAN. We currently have an Australian curriculum review, an initial teacher education review, and the review of the early years framework.
Here in the ACT, we have had the review of the expert panel on students with complex needs and challenging behaviours; the Future of Education strategy consultations, where we heard from 5,000 Canberrans as well as independent experts; and a number of ACT Auditor-General reviews. We have also had ACT Legislative
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