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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 9 Hansard (27 August) . . Page.. 2588 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

budget and can quite rightly point the finger at most education authorities and say, "You have not done it", that does not mean that we should not grapple with the problem and find a solution. Once you start talking about dealing with literacy issues, you cannot avoid the issue of smaller classrooms in the first couple of years of schooling. That has been shown time and again to be a marker that makes life extremely difficult for children who are potentially slow learners in reading and writing. The problems are sometimes with the child, sometimes with the class; but invariably a smaller class size helps in those first couple of years.

The other issues are much more complex and, again, well known to most education authorities. There is a constant correlation between what we would call social justice issues and learning outcomes. If a child comes to school inadequately fed, inadequately clothed and without enough sleep, they will not learn. Never mind your three tests. You can test them every year or even every day, but the situation is not going to improve. If the child is hungry, if the child is badly clothed or if the child does not sleep properly, it will not learn. It is not the responsibility of a teacher to make a child sleep, to make a child eat or to take care of it, but it must be the responsibility of the education system to take care of these children. Over the last 20 years we have seen numerous programs - most funded by governments of both persuasions, but the most recent ones funded by Labor - at the local level to try to come to grips with this. Local council authorities have had breakfast programs, spare clothing pools and club programs to allow children to experience another environment, to learn, to be warm, to be comfortable.

In the ACT we have those problems, and no amount of testing is going to improve the children's capacity to learn to read and write. We need small classrooms. There are inherent social justice problems, in that children, through no fault of their own, come to school unprepared for learning. I do not want to be judgmental about this. It is a fact of life. The schools know these children and deal with them very humanely. It is at that level that we have to deal with literacy problems, not by buying them more books or telling them, "Go home and read a book with mummy and daddy". We should deal with the child as it presents and at least try to alleviate some of their difficulties.

The third issue, one that the school authorities are acutely aware of, is that some children have learning difficulties, whether they come from a poor home or a wealthy home, a resource-rich home or a resource-poor home. There is a series of learning difficulties that children encounter when they try to learn to read and write and to deal with school. If we are going to talk about improving literacy and improving numeracy, we must come to grips with the need for specialist teachers, for specialist support. The system already has quite a few specialist teachers, but realistically, if you listen to teachers, there are not enough. If you listen to principals, if you go into our schools, you will hear that the resource support is insufficient, mostly because in the learning difficulty area they are also trying to deal with social problems and an amalgam of kids.

Never mind all this testing. What I would like to hear from the Minister is how we are going to improve our social welfare support so that we remove some of the problems from teachers. How are we going to refine our learning assistance so that we focus more closely on the specific learning difficulties that children have? How are we going to put confidence back into what is an excellent system? We do not need tests; we do not need appraisal across Australia. The outcomes of our system are well known and well shown.

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