Page 94 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 8 April 1992
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The way to resolve the problem is to allow your professional teachers to encourage each child to develop to their own potential, to their own level. That is what our professional teachers do. They have developed programs to assist them in doing it. One of my children was involved in a reading recovery program after we found that he had a simple physical impairment with his eyes that had prevented him from learning to read. The reading recovery program brought him back onto line. It brought his level of reading up, so that it was within the standard systems that are offered in the class.
It is not that testing does not go on. There is this implication that there is no testing going on in the class. Of course it is going on. Each of those professional teachers is making a judgment about how to test and when to test, and they are making a professional judgment that takes into account the self-concept.
Mr Kaine: They obviously often fail, because people are coming out illiterate.
MR MOORE: The Leader of the Opposition interjects, "They obviously often fail, because ...". I did not hear his reason. If he looks at the statistics put out by the Australian Council for Educational Research, who have been providing statistics on this over the last 40 or 50 years, he will find that there has been an increase in literacy throughout Australia for a long time. It continues to increase because of the professionalism of our teachers, because of the calibre of our teachers. There has been an improvement.
That does not mean to say that we have gone all the way. There is still room for improvement, and we are still working to improve. That we continue to attempt to improve is important. We know that the literacy skills in the ACT, thanks to the high calibre of our teaching profession here, are higher than those in other States. That does not mean to say that we stop working towards an improvement in them. The most important factor in working to improve those, which comes through all the research, is that we lower class sizes; that we improve the ratio of the number of students to the teacher. When those ratios - - -
Mr Humphries: Where is the money coming from?
MR MOORE: We can provide stacks of research for you on that one. If you really are interested in literacy, standardised testing will in fact make things worse, not better. It is far better to spend your money on improving the ratio of class sizes. That is how you deal with literacy in schools.
Coming back to the issue at hand today, dealing with the situation once it has gone past the schools, that is what we are doing. We are trying to handle it from two sides: First of all, trying to resolve the problem as it appears in the schools, so that we do not have a later literacy problem; secondly, moving to ensure that literacy, at adult level, can be gained by adults who for some reason have missed out through our schooling system or because they have come from somewhere else.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
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