Page 4008 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 9 November 1994
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Mr Cornwell spoke about autonomy. This is a favourite theme of the Liberals: "Let us give the schools more autonomy". I have a pretty good idea what that means. Maybe they will spell it out at some stage. It means, "We are going to lump more responsibility on you and you are going to carry the cost". Our schools are, by Australian standards, remarkably autonomous. They have long led Australia in that respect. The next degree of autonomy that we can give them is for them to have complete control over funds. As you know, if you have been attending to the local community, the message from that is, "We will give you control of funds". The Liberals will give them control of funds, but there might be less and less funds each year. There are some very alarming messages in Mr Cornwell's brief response today.
Ms Szuty's second disappointment was the nature of the task, although I do not know that Ms Szuty developed that as well as she might have. I am not sure how she expected me to respond. It goes back to the question of a minority report. I can offer anything to the education community if I have enough money. I will keep everybody happy if I just spend money. It might not be very efficient. It might not be the best way to go. I take the view that money is not the solution to everything; and we do live in difficult times. I saw some figures recently - and I am relying on memory here - that we are getting of the order of $270m a year less now than we would have if we had had a continuation of the funding of some years ago. We have to adjust to that. Ms Szuty correctly makes the point that, within the ACT, we can establish our own priorities. She is absolutely correct; we can do that, so long as we do it within that constraint of the amount of money that we get. Other people - it is not mentioned in this Assembly, I am happy to say - outside the Assembly say that we have used the Grants Commission as an excuse to cut funding. I do not need to take any notice of the Grants Commission. Unfortunately, the Federal Government does; and the Federal Government has acted on recommendations of the Grants Commission and has provided less funding to the ACT. The ACT Government has to respond to that situation of less funding.
Mr Cornwell made some comments about the number of Year 6 students going into secondary schools who require learning assistance. I have to say that there is nothing unusual about this. As a practising teacher of not so long ago, I can say that there is a range of abilities in our schools; we identify students who need assistance; and, to the best of our resources, we provide that assistance. In the last year we have changed the way of delivering that assistance, both to make it better and to make it more efficient. I believe that we are tackling that problem within the resources that we have. Mr Cornwell was a bit niggardly - and well may he be - about the $300,000. That was the best that we could do within the budget that we had. It was an important gesture. I will be looking to the next budget to see what we can do to increase it. It is our clear intention to help schools more than we already do in the work that they do.
As an aside to that, I would make one point. I am always at pains to point out to teachers, because I do discern a trend these days, that they are responsible for the students in their class. Sometimes I see teachers with a student in difficulty - behavioural, academic or something - and they immediately want someone to come in and help them and do the job. That is good; and we provide assistance for that to happen. Sometimes there is a bit of an indication of wanting to pass over the responsibility. Our classes are of a good size; they are not large. I would like them to be smaller, true; but they are of a good size. Every child is the responsibility of the teacher of that class.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .