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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 9 Hansard (7 September) . . Page.. 3009 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

The establishment of these groups is complemented by Aboriginal student support and parent awareness committees, which are now active in 80 per cent of government schools. I am pleased to advise members that the feedback received from the indigenous community is supportive of the policies and directions we have set.

I do not wish to take up members' time unnecessarily by going through the report in great detail at this time, but some aspects deserve mentioning today. Much was made in the media and in this place earlier this year of the lack of available data on outcomes for indigenous students. The report I present today notes that a new and better data collection mechanism has been established in my department, along with improved procedures to report this data. That was a step that was well in hand when we debated the issue in this place in May this year, and we now have better procedures well in place.

In addition, as members can see for themselves by reading the report, we have implemented strategies across the department to provide outcomes for indigenous students. In education programs we have upgraded the position of the leader of the indigenous unit to deputy principal level, reflecting an appropriately enhanced emphasis on this important role, and appointed an indigenous person to this position.

The work of this unit with schools and the indigenous community-I think the Aboriginal education consultative group has also played a role here-has resulted, amongst other things, in a decrease in absentee days for indigenous students from an average of 30.7 per student per year in 1998 to 6.7 per student per term in 1999. Before anyone jumps in and says that that is a huge decrease, I did say "per term". On a per annum basis it is 26.8 per cent per student. However, that is still about a 12 per cent decrease in the figure for the previous year.

On that point, I propose to provide future reports on a per student per term basis because of the six monthly nature of the reports to the Assembly, whilst reports to the Commonwealth will be on a per student per annum basis. The decrease there in the number of absentee days is a pleasing result.

We have required the indigenous unit and the literacy and numeracy team to work with schools to include an explicit commitment in each school literacy plan to improving the literacy of indigenous students. We have also worked to increase activity to raise the proportion of schools offering indigenous studies. That has worked, as members will see from the report. In 1999, more than 75 per cent of our schools offered indigenous studies, compared with about a third of the schools doing so in 1997. More importantly, it is now an assessable part of the school development process to ensure that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives are included across the curriculum-in all eight key learning areas.

In human resource management we have increased the number of indigenous staff in education. For instance, we have nominated three identified indigenous teacher positions for this year and included a statement in all recruitment advertising encouraging indigenous applicants. We have briefed teacher recruitment panel members about the importance of determining indigenous cultural awareness in prospective teachers.

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