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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 11 Hansard (29 November) . . Page.. 3386 ..

MR STEFANIAK: I will answer some of Ms Tucker's dot point questions first. They were about parents shopping around for schools, schools in one way or another promoting their performance and how you stop the media. I think it would be very difficult for the media to construct accurate league tables. Unlike some of the superficial league tables we see coming out of New South Wales, we have a very complex assessment structure. We have five strands in literacy and three strands in numeracy. For any one school for years 3 and 5 or years 7 and 9, you are going to have 16 or so different strands.

Parents do shop around schools at present, and schools, funnily enough, promote their performances in other ways. As you know, Ms Tucker-you are chair of the education committee-we have some excellent schools here. All of them have degrees of excellence in certain areas which impress some parents. That is why parent want their children to go to particular schools. A lot of parents take their children to schools out of their area; a lot take them to schools in their area. There is a lot of shopping around at present. I do not see how this is going to accentuate that.

Ms Tucker: I take a point of order. I am trying to be helpful. I do not think the minister has understood my question. He is not answering it. The question was: how did the minister resolve concerns around the use of this material? I listed the concerns. I am not interested in knowing whether or not people shop around. I am asking how you resolved this list of concerns.

MR STEFANIAK: Thank you, Ms Tucker. I do not know whether that is your supplementary question, but we will take it as such. We have had a lot of consultation. We invited people to make written comments, and there were 138 written submissions.

Ms Tucker: That was not the question.

MR STEFANIAK: Yes, it was. There was also a phone survey. We listened to the community. It is quite clear that the community do not want league tables published. That comes through quite clearly. However, a significant percentage of parents, some 76 per cent of those who participated in the phone survey, want to find out how their child goes against the system average, how their child goes against their class average and how their school performs against the system average. We listened to the community and have come out with a way of ensuring that individual school communities and parents have that information but that the necessary protections are in place so that the thing they do not want to see happen-the publication of meaningless league tables-does not occur.

MS TUCKER: I ask a supplementary question. How is this information different from that information that is produced in league tables? In other words, what are the protections that you say are in place to prevent this material from being used as league tables would be used?

MR STEFANIAK: For a start, Ms Tucker, they are not consolidated. They go to individual parents of individual schools. They do not compare school A with schools B, C, D and E, which is what a league table does. They are done in such a way that the necessary safeguards are made to protect students and so students cannot be identified, and I think that is something everyone absolutely agrees on.

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