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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 9 Hansard (27 August) . . Page.. 2591 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

Another important issue is that we are funding up to 80 per cent of the cost of non-government schools. The Minister says that non-government schools will be invited to participate in this testing procedure. This has to be put in the context of the Minister stating:

... reporting on student outcomes enhances the achievement of the social objectives of schooling.

If that is the case and we do not have a general compliance by the non-government school sector, should we be reassessing the processes of this system? If the Government is putting in the money - it comes from the Federal Government and goes through our budget out to the private schools - should we be assessing just what it is about students right across the community that is having an impact on literacy and numeracy? I think we certainly should. The real focus should be on children. What actions can we take and how can we best spend our money in order to enhance the learning of our students? That is the issue that, as this debate continues, we have to keep as our prime focus.

MS TUCKER (12.10): I support the comments made by Mr Moore and Ms McRae. They have highlighted a lot of issues that I agree with them on. I understand from Mr Stefaniak that this reference group will be reporting at the end of September, so I wait with interest to see what they actually recommend. As Ms McRae stated very well, what is happening in schools is already known by the schools and, I would hope, also known by the government agencies. In the Social Policy Committee report on the prevention of violence in schools, we recommended mapping disadvantaged schools in the ACT, and disadvantaged communities within schools as well, not just generally across a suburb.

This sort of information possibly would be useful if it were an opt-out system rather than an opt-in system - although I am not even clear on that. If only selected people are part of this testing, you are not going to get a really good picture of the school. You will get just individual results. You could use these sorts of results, respecting privacy of course, and perhaps not making public information about particular schools if that was seen to be in some way inadvisable, and I suggest that it probably would be, because you would probably get a mass exit from any school that looked like it was not doing a terrific job. On the other hand, you could see if a school was not doing a terrific job and students at that school needed more assistance. I would stress, as other members have, that monitoring is all very well. Perhaps it is not necessary, but if you do monitor it has to be with a commitment to resource appropriately schools or individual students shown to be falling behind.

Mapping of disadvantaged schools, as recommended by the Social Policy Committee, is another tool that the Government could use to try to address the inequality or inequity in schooling in the ACT. I went to an interesting seminar that the Australian Education Union ran recently on equity in education. There were academics there showing very clear maps of the connection between socioeconomic disadvantage and outcomes of all kinds. I also support what other members have said about outcomes being very narrowly defined in the area of numeracy and literacy. Obviously, numeracy and literacy are very important, but there are so many other indicators that need to be looked at in measuring the so-called success of the education system.

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