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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 9 Hansard (27 August) . . Page.. 2587 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

Perhaps achievement orientation is not always successful for some children. Maybe their outcomes are not always absolutely brilliant, but everybody progresses, everybody learns and everybody is focused on trying to achieve an outcome that is good for them. That is the depth and beauty of our education system. The Year 12 colleges offer every child an opportunity, be it in the R courses, the E courses, the vocational training courses, the accredited courses or the tertiary orientation courses. You name it - we have it for our kids. Everyone has an outcome orientation and comes out of our system with something. I really want to put a dampener on the enthusiasm of people using this new jargon. I do not think it does justice to what we are already doing.

Another claim that I find very disturbing is the claim that parents have a right to know how their children are progressing relative to other children and that the system needs to know. I find this a very strange right, particularly when you are talking about an education system. Why should you have a right to know that your Johnny is 10 marks ahead of your Elizabeth? What is the value of an inherent right to know whether you are dumb or you are smart or an inherent right to know whether your school is one that fails or another is one that succeeds? We have seen how these rights have operated in America. You know what the outcome has been: No funding for schools that fail and funding for schools that achieve; no students wanting to go to one school and other students wanting to go to another.

I cannot understand this as an inherent right. What I believe that every child has an inherent right to is an adequate education that fulfils their capacity to learn to the level that they are able to attain. What parents have as a right is that their student be given every opportunity to achieve to the level that they are able to. Whether that is better or worse than Johnny and Elizabeth is neither here nor there. What every student has a right to is to learn to the best of their capacity. I find this claim that parents have a right to know fraught with difficulty and disingenuous. Show me one student who is not assessed by their teacher and whose assessment cannot be given to the parents. Our entire system works on dialogue with parents and on accurate information on student progress. I can show you a drawer full of reports, having had three children go through the system. The children are reported on regularly and thoroughly.

There is absolutely no basis to the claim that parents need more accurate information about the progress of their children. Of course, some parents will have their vanity fed if their child can be shown to be in the top percentile of readers. Some parents will say, "I knew that little Johnny was a pest", and use his school results to further restrict and punish him if he is in the bottom percentile for reading. A right to know this information has absolutely no educational validity, and I would query the basis of the claim.

The Minister and the Education Department should not get too excited about all of this and worry too much. It is just a statistical process of analysis, after all. Rather, the Minister should make a statement to this house on how they are dealing with the real issues of literacy and numeracy. These issues are not new. The education world has been grappling with how to teach our children to read and write ever since there were mass education systems. We have endless libraries of data that show the likely markers of failure in this area. Surprise, surprise, the solutions come down to small classrooms for the beginning years. The first two years are absolutely crucial. The entire education sector has been saying this for years. Whilst we have been grappling with a difficult

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