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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 10 Hansard (24 September) . . Page.. 3246 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

Members will remember that the paper from the Department of Education came out at about the same time as the paper from the P and C Council on home-school partnership in literacy development came out. Both of these papers appeared in pretty much the same week as the first figures emerged from the literacy testing that has been undertaken in both the ACT and the whole of Australia. What the literacy testing showed was pretty much what we expected - that the ACT in general does extremely well, but that, both Australia-wide and locally, we have a small but significant problem with children's capacity to acquire literacy skills.

When I first read the paper Literacy, Preschool-Year 10: A Discussion Paper - and this was the first paper that I read when they both came out - I was a little horrified by that one very simple but very glaring error, in that the paper, all the way through, referred to children and their parents. For many people, this might seem just a little trivial; but the mere fact that quite a few children do not live with their parents but live with a foster carer or a relative, or live in different circumstances from the ones that are expected, is of extreme importance. As we have seen from the debates, as we have seen from the P and C paper and as we have learnt from experience with literacy and literacy teaching around Australia, it is that connection between the home circumstances and the efforts being made in the school that most frequently leads to success in terms of the acquisition of literacy skills.

I thought it was fairly important also to make my amendment, because I do not want to imply in any way that, if children live with carers, with a guardian or in circumstances different from those of children who live with parents, they are naturally in the category of not being able to acquire literacy skills. I do not want to imply in any way that any carers other than parents are a problem for children. What is the problem is the language that is being used to describe the home-community-school-based relationship and the assumptions that underlie it. So, that is my first point, and that is why it is so important to look at the definition of parents and expand it to always include guardians and/or carers and then separate that out from the whole body of children who are probably of most interest to us - those who fit into the category where the home circumstances make it difficult for children to acquire literacy skills.

What we see in the literacy paper is all the efforts that the teachers actually make and that the department makes and the strategies that they have beyond the school for children to actually acquire literacy skills, for our students to actually learn to read and write. What we do not see in the Literacy, Preschool-Year 10 paper is what is done for that home-school dissonance that can create problems, that is discussed in the P and C paper and that does show just where the problems start to emerge. There is a myriad of reasons why these problems emerge. Just having a fully literate and supporting household does not always lead to good literacy as well.

So, there is a range of complex problems. I do not want to belittle what the department is doing. I do not want to belittle what the ACT is doing. I just want to raise, by way of this debate, some of the very serious issues that should be considered and that, I think, are not present in the discussion paper and should be added to the discussion paper to further amplify the debate. So, my first point is that the language that is used is

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