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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 10 Hansard (5 September) . . Page.. 3121 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

life skills programs, especially for students under 15, the Government supported this in principle and noted that they have a range of strategies operating in schools already. But what happens to those at the adolescent day program for whom integration is not an option, and what specific counselling programs are available now from the guidance and counselling service?

The fifth recommendation was that the Government ensure that all teachers participate in courses relating to behaviour management and refresher training. The Government agreed but does not appear to plan to do anything differently. It was quite clear from evidence given to the committee that teachers do not have adequate access to training for behaviour management and that they do not have enough opportunity for refresher courses. If you are talking about the part professional assault response training, it is quite clear that, hopefully, this is not needed by teachers very often in their working lives. The difficulty is that if they have done a course once it will not necessarily mean that they do not need refreshers. In fact, they do. It was quite clear in the evidence that if teachers are not using this all the time, and hopefully they would not be, they do need access to refresher courses so that on those occasions when they need them they have the skills. There also seems to be quite an amount of difficulty in accessing those courses. Of course, professional assault response training is just one aspect. Peer mediation and other sorts of skills for assisting students to develop non-violent ways of responding to frustration, abuse, or whatever, have to be critical in fostering a non-violent culture in our school system. We think that could be focused on much more.

We suggested or recommended that the youth connection program be evaluated after one year, and the Government agreed to that, which is good. We also asked for a research study to identify needs of disadvantaged school communities. The Government stated that they have already identified a study for term 4. That was interesting to the committee. We would like to know when you identified it, what the study is, and when the results will be known. The Government responded to the recommendation that it establish a fund to assist students whose parents cannot participate in activities. That is the schools equity fund response, of course, which I dealt with initially. We are concerned that that is the sort of stated response for the very complex issues around equity in our society and in the school system particularly. The school system is often seen to be the one place, hopefully, where you will have equal access. Once you have left school it is pretty obvious that that is not the case. That will apply more and more, of course, with the current Federal Government.

As for the equity implications of school-based management, the Government disagreed that there were any, which is extremely interesting, and we are asking for an explanation of how they can make that statement. If they do not think there are any, I do not see why they did not respond positively to that recommendation, explain their proposals for school-based management and show us quite clearly why there are no equity implications in it. Of course, we made a recommendation on corporal punishment, which, as I have already stated, is quite out of line with current thinking and is of concern to a lot of people in our community. I have covered the guidelines for reporting incidents to the police. We were happy to see the Government respond to that in a positive manner.

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