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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 7 Hansard (26 June) . . Page.. 2235 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

However, I do support the principle where it does work. It does not work if the support is not there; it does not work if you are actually just increasing the load on the other teachers. No-one will benefit from that at all.

We have seen also from the Government a great passion for testing and monitoring. I can see a function and a use for testing and monitoring, of course, as well; but, if that is not followed up by adequate resourcing of the results of that monitoring and we do not resource appropriately what comes out of that testing so that we can actually change the results, then what is the point? We just keep measuring. I would even suggest that we do not need to measure as much as we do, because I think it is pretty clear to most teachers which students in their class and, indeed, in their school are the ones who need the extra help. They know what sort of help they need. They want it, but they are not getting it. We are just getting more measurements.

This came up in the violence in schools inquiry very clearly in terms of the understanding that teachers have of the complexity of the problems that some of their students have and that they really are not able to deal with those sorts of problems. They have a full class of children to look after. That task is made much more difficult by the presence of one or two students who have particular issues or problems that need support. Basically, the whole class - the child with the special needs and the mainstream class - will suffer as a result and, of course, the teacher can become very stressed. I have been visited by a couple of teachers who have actually left the service because of that stress.

We had the Government committing an additional $90,000 per year to assist with the literacy programs, but I was disturbed to find out yesterday that last year's allocation still had not been spent. Once again, Mr Stefaniak was claiming that he had to work out how best to spend it. I think that speaks very poorly for the Education Department, basically, because, if they did not know already how to spend that money, then they did not have a really good hold of what was going on in their schools. Teachers have been telling them that they need help for a long time, ever since I have been in this place. It is a pity that the people concerned did not get together with those teachers and find out pretty quickly exactly where this money should go and how to spend it. I did notice - and I made it clear in the question - Mrs Carnell's justification for that money coming from that source. One of the advantages or reasons that Mrs Carnell gave was, "These kids need it now. We are going to get this money to these kids now, when the need is". That was also particularly ironic, when we find out that we are still working out what on earth we can do with it because we apparently do not know.

Of course, there has also been the issue of alternative education in the ACT and the appalling performance by this Government in that area, even leading to the point where we had an Ombudsman's report claiming that, basically, the issue of consultation had been mismanaged absolutely. We now see an alternative education program at Dickson College and a proposed one on the south side. We see no extra resources being allocated to this. Once again, it seems as though these sorts of programs are apparently seen to be not needing extra resources and able to be managed just as a normal allocation of funding, which is not the experience of the previous programs in the ACT, two of which have collapsed due to resource problems and teacher burnout. The students at the middle of the School Without Walls issue, of course, and the parents of the community are the ones whom I feel most sad for.

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