Page 419 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 21 February 1990
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which I have referred. For example, the establishment of the schools division, in line with the recommendations of a management review, has enabled the authority and then the department to offer enhanced services to students, schools and the community to meet the new conditions that have applied since last year. This has enabled our system to extend school based management, which is still being carried forward, as well as overall accountability. A new approach to management, which is necessitated by increased attention to careful use of our resources, a criterion for any government, was also instanced by the setting up of a financial planning and analysis unit in the system within the resources division of the department.
In the authority's academic and vocational program for students one of the significant advances in the period under consideration was the approval of the first employment, or E, courses in December 1988. This arose from the work of teachers in our secondary colleges and from the employment reference group of the authority's accrediting agency. The group comprises representatives from employer organisations, the ACT Teachers Federation, other unions, the ACT Institute of TAFE and the ACT Council of Parents and Citizens Associations Incorporated. Those students who complete E courses receive ACT employment course certificates which reflect the skills and knowledge that are directly relevant to the employment course that is cited on the certificate. The Assembly will be pleased to hear that an even wider range of E courses should be available in our colleges this year.
In the time that can be spared today it is impossible to canvass all the achievements and initiatives that are surveyed within the report before us. But I direct the Assembly's attention to the constructive activity of the working party on the provision of mathematics for years 11 and 12 students. Here, typically, much is owed to the participation of members drawn from Canberra's growing tertiary sector of education as well as from the school system.
Authority staff are also highly active in curriculum development generally, including collaboration at a national level. During the period a working party was formed to oversee a project to develop a total culture of service for the authority's and now the department's clients, a very wide term which includes students, parents and the community at large. The working party is involving parents, teachers, students, schools and departmental areas in consultations about ways of providing the best possible education service to the people of the Territory. I applauded that initiative when it was announced, and I still do so to this day, and even recommend that a similar kind of culture of service might be adopted by other departments of the Government.
Another innovation which I ask the Assembly to note is the authority's introduction of a project to increase the
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