Page 384 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 13 May 1992
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There is no question of our recommending going back to an integrated years 7 to 12 system, although it may be that our system should be flexible enough to allow that to happen. Presently such a system operates only in the private, non-government, sector. If you want to experience that kind of system you have to go to a private school. I do not think that going back to that system is an answer, because clearly our secondary colleges are a major success. They are a shining example of what is possible with educational advances. We should not be threatening that experiment.
But, because of what has happened in our secondary colleges, we need to reconceptualise what happens in our high schools. I might say that it has been happening to some extent. There have been efforts made by individual high schools to achieve that. I can certainly think of a number I have listed which are deserving of accolades. I do not mind mentioning one by name - Canberra High School. I was particularly impressed about it. I felt that that school displayed a higher level of community spirit, of common purpose, of goodwill between the students and the staff. That was quite apparent and it came through when one talked to the students and the staff at the school. I have to say that other schools, which I will not name, did not display by any means the same level of cooperation and educational environment as I saw at Canberra High School. It is those sorts of schools which we have to be looking at particularly in this exercise.
There is an argument about whether we deal with the problem on a corporate basis; that is, whether we allow schools to get together and make a plan for dealing with their common problems. The secondary principals council is one way of dealing with that. It has been somewhat successful in that regard. There is also a question of whether or not we should be encouraging individual schools to choose individual solutions. One of the problems we face in that, though, is that there is real competition between schools at the present time - not so much for resources, but for the thing that generates resources in the first place, namely, students.
In some areas such as Belconnen there is a serious lack of students. The schools are, in a sense, forced to compete for those students, and I suspect that a lot of resources are put into actually maintaining that competition, maintaining that capacity to attract students. That may not be helpful. That is why the Alliance Government commissioned the Birtles report - the report entitled "Drawing Together" - on high schools in the Belconnen region in a desire to try to deal with that resources problem and also bring together some of the educational issues which have to be faced by schools in that region as a whole.
It may be that arising out of that report there is a strong case for regionalisation of high schools on a special basis which would allow them to deal with their problems on common ground. That kind of competition is obviously positive up to a point; but we reach the stage where some schools' survival depends on a level of enrolment, and when competition at that level takes place it can be destructive. Certainly that was argued to me in a paper that one person in the ACT education system, who has considerable experience with high schools, put to me when I was Minister.
I want to comment on a couple of things that have been said during the debate in addition to things I have already said. There were comments about funding in high schools and throwing some money at the problem. I think it was Ms Szuty who said that greatly increased funding was at one stage argued for, and in some quarters is still being argued for, as a way of dealing with the problem.
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