Page 1589 - Week 06 - Thursday, 3 May 1990
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
save a great deal of money by closing schools. If we closed 20 schools, the mid point between 15 and 25, we would save $4m. It is a very high price for closing all those places of learning - $200,000 a school; that is what we are looking at.
What value do you place on a school? Two hundred thousand dollars. Think of what that school means. It is in a suburb. The way our city is designed, suburbs are generally isolated by busy roads. Think of the children who travel to that school. Think of the spirit that develops around that school. Think of all the things that work together to make a school. I probably cannot explain to you the spirit that builds up around a school within a community. I probably cannot tell you how important that is or what a fundamental part of a school's ethos that becomes. That is especially the case in Canberra. The way our suburbs were designed means that they are rather more isolated than is the general case in Australia. There is a cohesion and a loyalty, a respect and a tradition which builds within that suburb.
Mr Humphries has said that quality of education does not depend on how close you are to a school. I believe he is quite wrong. I believe this is why we have this conceptual problem of what is a school. It does depend on how close the school is because the school is an important part in binding that community.
I want to spell out some of the criteria that I want him to consider, on only one aspect, some of the criteria that help make a school work, some of the factors for excellence. There is a whole range of other criteria that I will not have time to mention today. Let us call the first factor "school and community spirit". It is not an indefinable thing; it is something that you can see and feel when you work in or around a school.
Let us talk about a second factor - tradition. Canberra is not an old city; some of our suburbs are very new, even where schools are targeted for closure. Tradition in our community, in our young schools, is nevertheless very important. When you work in a school, you know what your aims are, you develop your philosophies with the community, and it works. You have a tradition developing very rapidly.
What about access? It is important that children have access to education and access in the other sense of being close to you. Most of our children travel to the school closest to them. That is especially the case with primary school age children and particularly the case with preschool children.
What about quality? We aim for variation in this community. Not all schools are the same. They all have their differences and that is what we encourage. Along with that we encourage quality with different emphases in
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .