Page 1500 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 1 June 2022
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Let me say that again: 70 per cent of respondents say that schools are not sufficiently resourced!
This is your mob that do this. This is Mr Gentleman’s budget that he keeps voting for, and 70 per cent of teachers say that it does not give the resources to provide the consistent quality of education that their students need to succeed. The report continues:
Almost all principal respondents … who have the widest view of both a school’s budget and its impacts on learning conditions, say that the Directorate lacks the necessary resources to meet the demands of schools.
Mr Gentleman votes for this budget that Ms Berry no doubt puts forward, supported by the Greens—they are championing it!—but 94 per cent of principals say that the directorate lacks the necessary resources to meet the demands of the schools. Shame! And you want to talk about miserable governments. Mr Barr wants to talk about miserable governments. It is a miserable government when 94 per cent of principals and over 70 per cent of teachers say, “You are not giving us the resources we need to do our job.” Talk about a miserable government!
This lack of funding is not just anecdotal; it is backed up by the Productivity Commission. The Productivity Commission’s Report on government services shows that the ACT government has in fact cut real expenditure per FTE student in public schools by 3.3 per cent during the period 2010-11 to 2019-20. With respect to that 3.3 per cent cut in real terms, Mr Gentleman voted for all of those budgets, didn’t he? I am sure you voted for a few of those, Mr Assistant Speaker Pettersson. Ms Berry no doubt put those budgets together. The Treasurer would have been championing those cuts, and that is playing out now—all supported, all aided and abetted, by their Greens mates. Those cuts are in black and white in the Productivity Commission report, with almost 95 per cent of principals saying that the directorate does not give them enough resources.
No matter how you try and spin this, and no doubt there will be a lot of spin coming from the minister and her Greens mates, we know that there have been problems with stress, workforce pressure and teacher shortages, and that leads to a whole bunch of other things. It leads to issues with occupational violence and academic results, and we have seen a degrading of facilities. We have just had an Assembly inquiry into that. At its nub, everybody is saying that we are under-resourced—the union, the principals, the teachers and the Productivity Commission.
Let me go to what the government tells us. I go to the coverage of a 2019 Assembly inquiry:
Revelations in the Canberra Times that some students were being left in harms’ way after attacks sparked calls from parents and the opposition for an expert-led inquiry into the handling of violence in schools.
Instead, the ACT government referred the matter to a joint standing committee—on the condition it seal any evidence which could identify a person or a school.
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