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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 10 Hansard (24 September) . . Page.. 3258 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

It was a compensatory program. This is not a new debate. That is why this paper is even more depressing. For 30 years in education circles we have been grappling with how to deal with home-school dissonance. I think the schools have a responsibility to pick up that area and to compensate within the school, without this constant pressure to put it back on parents and assume that parents can do it.

One area that has to be considered is what the school's role is when it is absolutely clear that the home is not offering what seems to be the right sort of support, and I did not find it anywhere in this paper. The constant theme in this paper is how to establish that home-school link. It is not even a constant thing. Where it is mentioned it is acknowledged that good parent support will lead to a good literacy outcome. Okay; but what if the good parent support is not there? What if the child wants to hide the home circumstances? What if they do not want to take their book home to read to their aunty; they have to live with aunty because mummy and daddy are terribly sick, and aunty is too busy, and the school is putting all this pressure on the home to provide the background?

It is that element that is missing from the paper and, without some further thought in that area about what role educators have in dealing with those deficiencies, all we are doing is maintaining a model that says that only kids with the right sorts of homes are going to have the right sorts of outcomes. It perpetuates a particular notion of literacy, a particular notion of the home-school partnership, a particular set of outcomes for children, built on an expectation of how everything should work. We know that for 90 per cent that is right, but I am very worried about what the schools do for those 10 per cent where it is not. Is it their fault that they are living in home circumstances that do not support them? Is it their fault that they cannot take anything home for anybody to read to them? Is it their fault that nobody cares? No. Where does this paper say anything about that?

The P and C forum gave us some good insight as to what needs to be done and how delicately that needs to be dealt with. What do we get on how to deal with the P and C? Give them some money to write a publication. Well, heaven help us! How is a publication going to help with an illiterate home, to begin with? How is a publication going to deal with the 40 or so different languages that are spoken at home? How is a publication going to help with the parents who are reluctant to come into the school? Even that element of this discussion paper does not take seriously the complexity of that home-school partnership, and it does not take into account at all the fact that in some cases, no matter what anybody does - look at Sesame Street, which has been operating for 30 years - the majority model does not apply to every child.

I think it is important that in this paper there should be some sort of indication, some better outline, some discussion, of the Education Department's responsibility to ensure that children learn to read and write, whatever goes on at home. It is none of the department's business if the home is not working. What is absolutely crucial is that, no matter what circumstances the home background offers, every effort is made to make a proper link with them but, if that fails, that the child is not made to feel that somehow

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