Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 6 Hansard (14 June) . . Page.. 1779 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

I do not believe it is a mistake; it seems to me that the government alone has driven an agenda of increased comparative reporting of students' literacy and numeracy outcomes. It is very much the agenda of government that school results be reported against the system average. The government appears hell-bent on facilitating an inaccurate and misleading comparison of schools in a manner that will disadvantage and reflect unfairly on schools performing the most valuable educational services in our communities.

Mr Stefaniak interjects that there was a survey. What is interesting about this survey is that to the open response question, 16 per cent of parents said they would like information that compared their child's results to students in the same year at all ACT government schools. However, when asked directly, 76 per cent said-as we are hearing from the government over and over again-that this type of information would be useful. This is going to the whole question of how you ask people questions.

It reminds me of the CIR debate we have had here and the question of CIR and deliberative polling. Mr Moore has made much of the fact that, if people are given full information, that is an important aspect. That is obviously an important aspect in any serious questioning of people. There was not, in the open question, nearly so big a response as there was to the more leading question, which was specifically giving them the answer.

The point is that, if full information is going to be given, going by the arguments we are hearing from the majority of members of this place, at least nine members of this place-I am not sure about Mr Kaine-have been convinced, through their consultation with the education sector and other people interested in equity in our society, that it is not such a simple question at all.

It is the schools that support and include students with the greatest social and educational needs who come from the widest range of backgrounds and maybe have the most issues to deal with in their lives that may not fare so well. Schools that not only deliver education of the highest quality in the areas of literacy and numeracy but also provide pastoral care for those in most need in their community are the schools that would suffer from such comparisons.

In addition, if they are relatively small schools, their results can easily be skewed away from the system average. I cannot imagine that the government and its staff are not aware of these implications. I can only presume there is an intention to undermine the viability of community schools and to sell the disadvantaged and the different down the tube.

There is another side to this government's obsession with a facile interpretation of freedom of choice. In this case, the government, despite protestations to the contrary, is doing all it can to allow parents, students and schools, when it suits, to interpret educational outcomes in an extraordinarily simplistic manner. It is encouraging them-with free school buses to boot-to shop around for schools that do best in reading and writing. It will further encourage the shift of middle-class, high achieving, academically focused students to private schools, which are in essence selective, and to those government schools that market themselves to the community in a similar way.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .