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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (20 November) . . Page.. 3843 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

There are some quite genuine concerns about those responsibilities. If people are feeling uneasy or unready to take them on, the Minister should give them a bit more time to be sure, so that, once they take on this full range of extensive responsibilities under the school-based management scheme, they are doing it in the full confidence that they are not going to foolishly make mistakes or fall into a level of liability that they had never intended.

In particular, the range of responsibilities to do with occupational health and safety has always been there; it has never been made clear. I know of many schools where some of the school staff are uncomfortable about the measures being taken to promote occupational health and safety. With this new layer of responsibility at the school level, there are some people who are very concerned that the full range of occupational health and safety issues will be dealt with almost in an improper way, or certainly in a way that makes them uncomfortable, because of the increased pressure on the funds that the schools will have to manage. There may be some issues which are overlooked and which should, in fact, be better supported.

Some schools, of course, are still not comfortable with the guarantees about funding. Again, it is not through the lack of information that is being provided. I think it is more to do with the rush and the feeling that there is insufficient time to follow through in detail and get the guarantees that schools feel they must have before these new responsibilities are taken on. In particular, of course, the P and C council has picked up the issue of guarantees not being given to grant increases at least in line with the CPI or inflation rates. Whilst that is not the only issue that people are asking for a slowdown on, it is one of the many that are bothering people. The slowdown has been asked for by schools with very small staff numbers and a lot of pressure to train very quickly. I am hearing from a variety of sources that, overall, schools are still not certain what the educational outcomes of all these changes are to be. Whilst these will be spelt out in time and better understood, again one of the real concerns that some school communities have is that they are taking on something that they are not quite ready for and they are not sure what the outcomes for their students are to be.

To sum up, this is not a motion asking for the extended school-based management process to stop; it is not a condemnatory motion. I am accepting that all efforts have been made and an extensive consultative process has been undertaken, albeit a truncated one because of the dispute that has been ongoing all year. I will not make accusatory statements about who is at fault in all of that; but it is a fact of life which meant that, instead of a full year of preparation, there has been only three or four months. It is a reiteration of the differences that exist within our school communities, meaning that some schools do not have the resources or the confidence to take these on. It asks for reasonableness on the Minister's part to allow a bit of flexibility so that, when the extended school-based management procedures are in place, we are all confident we are carrying everybody towards these new measures; rather than having some schools feeling that something is being imposed on them that perhaps they are uncertain about or unable to deal with and that they may then end up inadvertently making errors that are far more serious in consequence than the levels of responsibility they have had to carry thus far.

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