Page 1804 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 30 May 1990
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we have got to trim the size of our schools, particularly when they become so small as to pose a risk to the quality of education they can provide. I will come back to the question of quality in a moment. So I do not think we can say that merely closing small schools necessarily defeats or destroys the quality of education.
The suggestion has been made that the destruction of the neighbourhood school concept somehow damages education quality. That is an interesting argument. It is a suggestion which, I must say, did not come forward to me in the course of my consultation with the education community before these criteria were announced. I asked them to indicate what they felt was essentially important about the education system, what made it so good. There was very little reference to this point. The point that was made repeatedly was that there should be no increase in class sizes. It should not escape the attention of members opposite that the strategy that the Government is presently pursuing will have the effect of not increasing class sizes across the board in the Territory. That is one of the benefits of this system, which apparently they are unwilling to acknowledge.
I talked about the neighbourhood school principle and said that this was somehow important to the maintenance of educational quality in the ACT. That would surely mean that those schools in the ACT which do not operate on the neighbourhood school principle do not provide the same quality of education as those that do. The reality is that at least half of all students in the ACT do not attend government neighbourhood schools. A third of the students in the ACT do not attend government schools at all, of course; and about a quarter of those who do, do not attend the school in their own neighbourhood. They go to a school elsewhere - an out-of-area school - because they choose to do so, for various reasons. There are many reasons for that choice. Sometimes it is convenience, sometimes they prefer what is being offered at that school.
This points to the fact that we can still provide a high quality of education even where the neighbourhood school principle, as presently defined, does not apply. I, of course, think it is very important - and the Government shares this view - that we have schools that are responsive to their local communities. But all we are talking about here is how you define the neighbourhood that serves that school. Presently, "neighbourhood" means a suburb, as defined by the Territory's planners over many years, as bounded by a certain number of roads. That constitutes the "neighbourhood".
Mr Wood: A very strong part of our city's design, isn't it?
MR HUMPHRIES: I suggest that our city's design is equally responsive to other definitions of "neighbourhood". We well respond to what we call "community schools", schools
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