Page 785 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 24 March 1993
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Mr Cornwell quoted on literacy. We paid quite careful attention to that. It is important to attack as early as possible the problem of children who have reading difficulties. From experience I know that, the older a student with reading difficulty, the more difficult it becomes to bring about improvement in reading levels. The same goes for the learning assistance program, which is a high school program.
Perhaps the main thrust of Mr Cornwell's speech was school closures and surplus space - the crippling, to use his word, surplus space in our schools and the non-viable schools. We do not have any non-viable schools. You are welcome to go, as I am sure you do, to any of about 100 schools in our city and you will not see any that are non-viable. They are all excellent, functioning, well-run education institutions. I do not know whether I will traverse the Cook and Lyons argument, but let me say that I am not worried about the number of students at a school. There are outstanding schools in the ACT and across Australia with fewer than 100 students, and there are outstanding schools with more than 1,000 students. The quality of a school is based on criteria other than the number of students in the school. There is no question about that. You can have an awful school of 1,000 students and, a few kilometres down the track, a wonderful school with the same sorts of students and the same number of students as well. I am not going to be worried about the number of students in a school in terms of the quality of that school.
Mr Cornwell talked about the peak size of Gordon and Conder at 750. I could not tell you offhand what the peak enrolment for Cook was, but I would be prepared to take a little wager that it was at least 750 at some stage in its life. Lyons is a smaller suburb and may not have reached that, but it would have gone close to it. A great number of the schools in the ACT at their peak enrolment have had students in excess of that number. The peak number is simply a factor of the planning in the ACT, where the suburbs are developed one after another in order and you get a very rapid enrolment, peaking and then falling off. That is exacerbated today by the smaller size of families. I am not going to be concerned about the numbers of students in a school when I consider their viability.
As to the matter of a girls high school, we note that girls appear to have some particular problems in high schools; no doubt boys do too, as you indicated. Over a long period governments and education departments, here as elsewhere, have attended to those problems, and we will continue to do so into the future. We have made no decision, I have to tell you, to establish a girls high school. We are looking at ways to ensure that girls do not miss out on anything in their schools. If there is a problem for girls in our schools we have to attack that problem, and simply removing girls from that problem does not make the problem go away in other schools.
Finally, Mr Cornwell had something to say about EEO. We give very high priority to the principles of EEO; nevertheless, appointments and promotions for women, as for men, are on merit. There is no question about that. It is the case that today many more women than men seek a career in teaching. I would be delighted if there were more men coming into primary or any other schools. I have no problem with that; nor do I have a problem, might I say, with a school where there are no male teachers. I do not see that there is a problem in that either. If men are there, if they are available, they will get the jobs.
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