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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 5 Hansard (13 May) . . Page.. 1319 ..

MS REILLY (continuing):

They spoke of the time period, which was concertinaed into three weeks or less, and the difficulties in contacting the education officials who were responsible for the review. I think they visited the school for a very short time, were not there when some of the pupils were expecting to speak to them and were very difficult to contact by phone. The parents of the SWOW students also found them difficult to contact by phone.

One would wonder why, if the Education Department and the Minister had been committed to a review, the officials were so reluctant to talk to the people who were involved in the school community. One would have thought that, if they were having an open review that was actually looking at the so-called terms of reference of the review, they would be glad to make themselves available to speak to the students and the school community. But there seemed to be a failure to communicate what was going on to the SWOW students, the parents of the SWOW students and the SWOW school board. When you consider that at this point they were talking about a school closure, you would think there would have been a great effort made to get everybody involved in the whole process. But, instead, it was almost done in a dark corner, without letting anybody put any light on it because that might have defined what the real issues were.

What we ended up with was a situation where we were talking about school closure, without any viable alternative being available. I know that there has been a lot of discussion about whether the school was moving or whether it was closing, but I think this is just a matter of semantics. Maybe "moving" is a softer word than "closure"; but, without a doubt, this Liberal Government has closed another school in the ACT education system. In relation to SWOW, we are not merely talking about the physical location of the school; we are also talking about the autonomy with which the school was able to manage for the number of years it existed, the importance of that autonomy and the way in which the school management was handled. That is no longer the case.

I was glad to hear the Minister say that he looked at some alternative locations for SWOW. It would have been interesting to have had more information on that previously, because there was concern about the move to Dickson College. There was concern about the areas within Dickson College, which the Social Policy Committee visited, about what impact it would have and about how you could run a separate enclave in an area that was open to every other student within the Dickson College area. It must be recognised that Dickson College is a large school. A number of the people who had gone to SWOW - this was raised during the inquiry by the Social Policy Committee - had run into difficulties in managing being part of a large school. One of the benefits of being at SWOW was the opportunity to operate within a school community to deal with some of the issues that a number of these students had to deal with.

We were also talking about a situation - which does not happen within the government system in the ACT - where you had high school students in with college students, and a large number of college students at that. This again failed to recognise the problems that some students at SWOW had in relation to being bullied or being the subject of violence within a larger school. But these needs were ignored, in the same way as the needs of students were ignored in relation to the stress that was put on the school community by this review. While that continued, they were wondering what on earth the Education Department was going to do with their school. You wonder about the duty of care of an education department and a Minister to provide good quality education to all

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