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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 5 Hansard (11 May) . . Page.. 1492 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

The school development report 1999 highlights a valuable range of parent, student and teacher attitudes to schooling in Canberra. As I will outline shortly in more detail, it is clear the vast majority of those surveys have a high opinion of the standard of education in the territory.

So how was this report compiled? The 1999 report was based largely on school development questionnaires completed by 3,883 parents, 3,197 students, 474 teachers and 160 administration staff. As I mentioned, 11 primary, three high and four special schools took part in the feedback exercise. The survey results were compiled by the schools themselves, so each is fully aware of its individual community responses. Those results were then submitted to the department to form the basis of this report. So what do parents, students and staff think about schools? This report paints a generally favourable picture of our government schooling, but importantly it also indicates areas needing further attention.

Let me turn to the report in detail. It is clear from the questionnaires referred to the department that parents, students and teachers across the school system expressed high satisfaction with the education provided by our government schools. Moreover, there were overall improvements in the level of satisfaction in both primary and high mainstream sectors, when we compare results with the data collected the year before in 1998. Needless to say, that is an encouraging trend and one the government can take an amount of pride in. The government can take this reported level of satisfaction as an endorsement that we are getting the provision of education right in the territory.

As you know, Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, the Carnell government has placed an extremely high priority on creating the best resourced education system in Australia, and to that end we have maintained funding above the level of inflation for six years. That level of commitment was recently confirmed by leading independent accounting firm KPMG.

The ACT's parents, students and staff have spoken through this report and their message, loud and clear, is that we are getting it right. Moving to the specific figures, in the primary school sector, 93 per cent of parents expressed satisfaction with the education provided compared with 92 the year before; 95 per cent of students were satisfied compared with 92 the previous year; and 96 per cent of teachers expressed a high level of satisfaction compared with 95 per cent the previous year. I think those figures represent an overwhelming endorsement of the quality of our education system and, indeed, teachers, parents and students can take credit for the effort they put in as a result of that.

In the high school sector, 89 per cent of parents expressed satisfaction compared with 87 per cent the previous year; 87 per cent of students compared with 77 per cent the previous year, an increase of 10 per cent in the number of high school students expressing satisfaction with their school; and 93 per cent of teachers compared with 86 per cent the previous year-another significant increase in the high school sector's perceived performance. Hopefully, we might be starting to see some of the benefits of affirming the high school years, although perhaps it is a little early to tell as we are only one year into that program.

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