Page 784 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 24 March 1993
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MR CORNWELL: Mr Lamont may find that very amusing. I also note that year 13 continues to concern his Government. However, I note that the Government has moderated its solution to push these students into the Canberra Institute of Technology at the expense of other people. I note also that they have acknowledged that they have ample vacancies in our colleges to allow year 12s to stay on in 1993, and I think Mr Wood announced recently that some 305 students had elected to do that.
Mr Wood: I have revised figures that I will be giving you.
MR CORNWELL: Thank you. Finally, I am pleased to note, at pages 38 and 40, that the Labor Government is making cautious moves by means of trials towards the Liberal initiative of school based management, and we await the results of these trials with impatience. We are very confident, Mr Lamont, in the knowledge that our faith in the ability and competency of individual schools to run their own operations will be amply justified.
MR WOOD (Minister for Education and Training, Minister for the Arts and Minister for the Environment, Land and Planning) (5.09): Madam Speaker, let me start with a comment Mr Cornwell made about the report. He said that not all is gloom and doom, so I suspect that he really means that quite a lot of it is fairly good, and I thank him for that. He said that this report was debated in the Estimates Committee, and I take his point that it should not have come out in draft form the day before the meeting but at least a week or two before to allow ample time for perusal. That is the commitment I am on this year - to have it to you at least a week before the meeting.
Mr Cornwell made a comment, with which I disagree, about the pupil-teacher ratio on page 5, challenging the concept of the pupil-teacher ratio as a useful tool for making certain judgments, in particular about class size. He is right in one respect. Pupil-teacher ratio is very different from class size because pupil-teacher ratio takes the number of children and divides it by the number of teachers. Of course, the schools have more than just classes equated to teachers, one per class. They are quite different figures. A document was published recently of extensive education statistics on schools numbers and the like. I would expect, although I cannot recall the details, that that would have reference to class size. I expect that Mr Cornwell got that document; if not, I will see that he gets it as a matter of course.
The Australian Teachers Union recently put out, as a national study, documents on class size. This is a quite different statistic. Class sizes in the ACT are quite constant because we have a staffing formula which is established - if you like, arbitrarily established - to deliver at certain levels of schooling a particular class size. I think that both statistics are useful tools. We need each of them. Page 5 is headed "ACT Schools in Brief, Selected Indicators". We should bear that in mind. I think it is reasonable to put that there.
Turning to the police-in-schools program, I note that Mr Cornwell's comment is not the only one that gives approval to that. Like everything else, budgets are important, and that is in the province of Mr Connolly to provide. His budget has the same constraints as mine in that we are progressively receiving less revenue from the Federal Government and we have to adjust to that. I agree also that reading recovery is a good program. I read with interest the report
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