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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 6 Hansard (14 June) . . Page.. 1769 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

These, again, are very interesting results. Interestingly also, 59 per cent of parents who are teachers were interested in information which compared schools. Parents who were members of a P&C or school board also recorded lower than average interest in this type of information.

It is very interesting to see those results. Basically, 76 per cent want information so they can compare the schools; 76 per cent want information showing how their child stands in terms of the rest of the year group at school and how their child stands in terms of the rest of the year group on a system-wide average.

What did we do as a result of that? Because we do have some sympathy with the more sane points that Mr Berry raised in respect of how league tables can be misused, we are ensuring that students and parents are given information to indicate how their school is performing in terms of the system mean for those strands. That is useful information for a parent or a student. This does not lead to league tables. I think that, with the protocols that are put in place, it would be very difficult indeed for that to happen.

As someone who has grown up in Canberra and has been through our public school system, and as someone who knows, I would hope, the way in which people tend to operate, I think it would be almost impossible for someone to get results from parents in every one of our 68 primary schools and knock this information together. We need to remember that a lot of parents have only one kid at a time going through a certain level. We tested children in year 3 and year 5 and then we tested those in year 7 and year 9. As I said, I would think it would be very difficult to put this information together.

Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, I think it is important that parents have information showing that, for example, their child's school was just a bit above the line in one year in terms of the system average for a couple of strands and the next year it was a bit below. They might like asking a few questions. They might ask, "Okay, what's going on here? Is there something that can be improved?"

The department has all that information. In fact, the department, and indeed the cabinet, get things that you could almost call league tables. The information goes through cabinet, and this is part of the 1997 protocols that were discussed with the P&C and other groups. But we think that at least parents need to know how their school is going against a system average, and that, Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, ain't a league table by any stretch of the imagination.

We think it is important that parents know-and they want to know-where their student stands in their cohort group at the school in respect of each strand and against the cohort group ACT-wide. A vast majority of parents-76 to 77 per cent are pretty impressive figures-wanted that information. Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, I table the report which I believe I tabled last year. I present the following paper:

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