Page 428 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 24 February 1993
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For example, with only three teachers how could the school have been able to undertake a reading recovery program? A Federal Labor government report, The Literacy Challenge, has recently identified literacy as a major national problem at primary level and something in respect of which every school is in need of help, not just a school such as Griffith, which was identified as disadvantaged by a member of its P and C. How, for example, would the library have operated with only three teachers? How would the three teachers have handled playground duty and other such basic responsibilities? Indeed, would the three teachers and the non-teaching deputy have had adequate professional support on that Griffith site?
Finally, by all reasonable financial judgments, the school should have closed because the unquestionable additional resources that it would have required to remain educationally viable would have had to be diverted from other schools in the ACT government school system, and that would have been neither fair nor equitable.
Mr Kaine: It has already happened at Lyons.
MR CORNWELL: Indeed. The extra level of resources already diverted to Griffith campus, with its three teachers and a non-teaching deputy for 57 pupils, was neither fair nor equitable to other schools in the system. We already know that the deputy principal was an added extra but on a pupil-teacher class ratio, with three teachers for 57 pupils, the school had one teacher over its proper entitlement, thus giving it a class ratio of one teacher to 19 pupils - unheard of, I suggest, in ACT mainstream primary schools.
Mr Moore: Rubbish!
MR CORNWELL: Further, despite the arguments to the contrary, Mr Moore, per capita costs for pupils in the reopened Cook Primary and Lyons Primary were well above the average cost for primary schools - that is, $4,290 - as advised to me in a government response to question No. 365. Indeed, the per pupil cost at Cook and Lyons had been calculated to be at least $4,800 - that is, about $500 over the average. In fact, at one stage somebody was claiming that it was some $7,000 per pupil.
Whether this higher figure is accurate - and I concede that it has been questioned - the fact remains that there is a recognition that the reopening of Cook and Lyons primary schools did lead to increased per pupil costs. If there is an increased cost per pupil above the average with schools of 112 and 111 pupils, how much more would the per pupil cost be above the average for a school with only 57 pupils? Commonsense, therefore, as well as financial and educational arguments, dictates that, in the interests of the 57 students at the school and every other child in the ACT government school system, Griffith campus should have been closed at the beginning of the 1993 school year.
What was the Government's response? Mr Wood is quoted in the Canberra Times of 13 February as saying:
The Griffith campus of the Narrabundah-Griffith Primary School will remain open for at least the term of the current ACT Labor Government.
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