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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 6 Hansard (24 May) . . Page.. 1680 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

It is acknowledged nationally that major gaps still exist in educational outcomes for indigenous and non-indigenous students. No-one in this place and no educationalist would deny that. That is something Assembly members should be concerning themselves with. The department, in close partnership with Commonwealth officials, is working to close the gaps.

Feedback I am receiving from the indigenous community is very supportive of policy corrections when set. They are pleased with what we are trying to do. I hope Mr Berry is not minded to use this issue as a political football. To do so would not be very helpful. If he tried to do that, I doubt whether he would receive a great deal of support from the indigenous community.

Ask any teacher or ask the union. There will be a real concern if Mr Berry-for all the right reasons, I would suspect-wants us to do quarterly reports. If anything were to be gained from quarterly reports, or indeed from monthly reports, I would be delighted to use them, but the fact is that nothing can be gained from them. Any educationalist will tell you that it is not the way to assess programs and how people are treated. It puts far too much emphasis on collecting data for the sake of it and not fixing up problems.

Mr Berry has given a few members some documents which relate to the progress report and to an annual process. Our literacy and numeracy testing is done on an annual basis. Everything to do with education is done, for very good educational reasons, on an annual basis. We report nationally against agreed profiles. Our testing program for literacy and numeracy takes place in August. That is the same in every other state and territory. Whilst I suppose quarterly reports could be done, some of those reports would not be of much use or show much progress.

I would hope that members would want to ensure that the material that is issued publicly can be critically assessed, that assessed needs can be properly addressed, that action can be taken and the following year an assessment can be made to see whether in fact improvement has occurred. That is crucially important. Our three years of testing in literacy and numeracy indicates that it normally takes a student 18 to 24 months to progress from one profile level to the next. Accordingly, it would be meaningless to report every 12 weeks on student literacy and numeracy outcomes, even if that were possible.

The government is working towards monitoring performance of all students, including indigenous students. This development began in 1997 with the assessment of year 3 and year 5 literacy. The annual report on literacy and numeracy includes data on the performance of special groups. This year we have seen it for indigenous students. Having seen that, I want that to improve. Most of the data-such as attendance, years 3, 5, 7 and 9 assessment, employment figures, et cetera-is collected annually and is valuable for negotiating targets or examining trends for the year. That is the verdict from Commonwealth officials and our officials. That process-next month or the month after they will start assessing the data from last year-will lead to us being able to report, I would hope, in August. I would be aiming at being able to bring in a report in the

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