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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 5 Hansard (13 May) . . Page.. 1320 ..

MS REILLY (continuing):

students, when they continued to put such an amount of stress upon those students about what their futures were going to be. Have we looked at the impact on the education outcomes after the students were put through that distress last year? They were left with that uncertainty, left wondering what was going to happen to their school in the future.

One other thing comes out quite clearly both in our review and in the Ombudsman's report. There was a process to review - in other words, to close - the school; but there did not seem to be any process or strategy to look at resolving the problems that appear to have arisen within SWOW. There seemed to be little or no attempt to make changes. Mr Stefaniak has raised, in a number of instances, the appointment of a level 2 teacher. I would be interested to know what the processes were to resolve some of the issues that arose with that. The reports of it suggest that everybody took to the barricades and there was no effort by the Department of Education, which has responsibility for education, to resolve some of the issues.

The Minister has also raised the fact that there are enrolments now at Dickson College. It is not surprising. There is nothing else available. The alternative education sites within high schools in the ACT education system have closed down already. Even though some of them were fairly new, they closed down last year because there were insufficient resources to deal with those students who needed additional assistance. One of the concerns that come out of this review and the Ombudsman's report is that it appears that, if there is a problem, the Minister's response is to close down the problem. There do not seem to be methods for looking at how to resolve it. The idea is that you have a quick review and then you close the school, or whatever is the issue. I suppose that we can be glad that the Minister is not the Health Minister, or we may not have a hospital system in the ACT. But what we have - what has resulted from this review and closure of SWOW - is no alternative education system in the ACT in a way that has operated and developed for 23 years. It was unique in Australia in terms of alternative education, but it is no more.

I return to the process that was undertaken to support the decision to close SWOW. I think we can see from both the Ombudsman's report and the Social Policy Committee's inquiry last year that there were no open and transparent processes in this inquiry. It was an inquiry that was undertaken with a decision made before it started. It would have been good and it would have saved a lot of stress, heartache and hurt for a number of students in the ACT school system if the Minister had been honest at the beginning and had said that he wished to close the school, rather than go through a farce of a consultative process that hurt a number of people.

MR HIRD (5.00): I rise today to speak against this censure motion moved by Ms Tucker against the Minister for Education. It is about time the real truth about SWOW was made public. SWOW was not a school for handicapped students. It was originally set up in 1974 to cater for senior high school students who had difficulty coping in the normal education environment, that is, mainstream schools.

Debate interrupted.

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