Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 5 Hansard (13 May) . . Page.. 1306 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

Finally, Mr Speaker, I would hark back to those surveys. Those satisfaction ratings - I do not think any were below about 85 per cent - quite clearly indicate a significant level of satisfaction with our school system in one of the most important areas possible. That, of course, is the parents and indeed the students themselves. From those figures, I think, if anything, the students' satisfaction was slightly higher than even the parents' satisfaction.

Some of the improvements that have come on board are the enhanced school-based management; the finetuning now, I suppose, Ms McRae, which is going on in relation to parental contributions; the emphasis and the efforts being made in terms of literacy and numeracy; and the review in terms of how best that can be further advanced once we start getting those results in, because the results by themselves are no good if you do not act on them. I think all of those things point to an education department that not only is in good hands but also quite clearly has the support of a government committed to high-quality education for all of our students.

MS TUCKER (4.09): I will speak briefly to this matter of public importance. I would like to support a number of the concerns that Ms McRae raised in the discussion this afternoon. I would also like to make a comment on some of the points Mr Stefaniak made. He assured us that the alternative program at Dickson is going well. However, we see that there was no additional funding for alternative education programs put into the budget. This is not what we were informed during the Social Policy Committee's inquiry into the School Without Walls. We were assured that there would be discrete resourcing for such programs.

The committee was also informed about the demise of the other two alternative programs. They were not so much alternative programs as behavioural programs, which is quite different from what SWOW was doing, obviously. However, both of those programs, called off-line programs, folded due to teacher burnout and resource problems. So, it is very alarming to see this Government make commitments to the provision of alternative education options in the ACT and then make no acknowledgment of the resource needs of such programs. It does not augur well for the future of alternative education in the ACT.

We see increased pressure on schools to rely on the community to support their financial commitments. The equity issues around that have been discussed in this place on many occasions, and no doubt will be discussed again. We saw the absurd process where disadvantaged schools money was given out and an assessment was made of disadvantaged schools that did not include newer areas of Canberra. We were glad to see the Minister actually change his mind on that one and make an allocation to those schools in suburbs which had missed out. But, once again, it does not inspire one with confidence about how this Department of Education is being led by the Minister.

In the budget, while we saw an increase in funding - an actual injection of funds - for numeracy testing, we did not see any acknowledgment of the Social Policy Committee's report on violence in schools or the report on the School Without Walls inquiry, where we said that there does really need to be a very strong commitment to dealing with the issue of students in school who have behavioural or emotional problems,

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .