Page 1629 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 19 May 1993
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the public system every morning and take them up to their classroom, and what I am seeing now is not 30 in their class, but 33 and 34 and so on. My young son is reasonably slow at reading. Is there any capacity for him to have a reading recovery program? No, there is not, because there are other children who are substantially worse placed. There is only a certain amount of resource teaching time available at Red Hill. By the way, it is less than it was last year and less than it was the year before. When you really look at what is happening in the system at the moment you find that the average kids are fine, but the children who are just that little bit better or just that little bit worse are suffering because resource teaching gets cut.
Mr Wood: Nothing has changed in that area.
MRS CARNELL: Do you mean that resource teaching has always been cut? Is that what you are saying? Another point that I find interesting when comparing the public school system, as I see it from a mother's perspective, of two and three years ago with the system now is the number of things that were once available within the system but are no longer. The capacity for teachers to be available after hours for various sporting and cultural things, music and so on, is being cut.
Mr Wood: What has changed?
MRS CARNELL: Again the Minister seems to believe that that sort of approach to education is fine.
Mr Wood: The teachers are as free as ever to put in their time after school. They do it generously.
MRS CARNELL: What the teachers are saying, Mr Wood, is that they are so strapped during the day that they really have absolutely no capacity under the pressure that is being placed upon them by a system that is being cut across the board. The budget is not being managed in a way that keeps the focus on the quality of education. Quite honestly, if children in medium to large schools are going to be disadvantaged because of the Government's lack of strategic direction, I do not believe that that achieves the quality of education that the people of Canberra want, and that basically is what the Liberal Party is saying. We do not want a situation where 80 per cent of the children are disadvantaged because 20 per cent of children - it would be even less than that; it would be 10 per cent or even less - are going to schools that may be uneconomic to run. If that is what you believe is an appropriate approach to education, then the Liberal Party certainly does disagree with you.
Mr Wood commented that education is not about buildings; it is about what happens in those buildings. The Liberal Party could not agree more. It is about making sure that children are treated as individuals and that their education requirements are looked after by the system, whether they be average or not, whether they be good at sport or music or whatever, whether they really need a language program, English as a second language program, music, and all of those sorts of things that go to making, in my view, a good education.
Debate interrupted.
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