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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 6 Hansard (14 June) . . Page.. 1783 ..

MR SMYTH (continuing):

was chronicled quite clearly-because there was an outcry that it had been allowed to sink so low. It was not until the facts-not the anecdotal evidence floating around in the ether-were revealed that something was done about a school like Mount Druitt High.

Mr Berry's motion talks about league tables. No-one in the government wants to release league tables. These are not league tables. This is what you get when you talk from a position of ignorance, when you do not understand what the data actually shows. It tracks these classes across the years and across the schools. You can actually see where classes are failing and where some schools do well in some years and poorly in other years. It highlights a problem and, if you know that you have a problem, you can go out and fix it.

But they do not want to fix it. They want to leave it quiet; they want to leave it secret. They want to allow students not to get the sort of education they want. They called us blinkered and ideological. It is those over there who are blinkered and do not want to show up. It is those over there who are blinkered and take a simplistic approach. On every occasion they twist, they misrepresent, they assert and they weave little stories. But they will not face the facts. For a start, they have not seen these results in toto. Let's make it quite clear that no private detail is ever released. It is given to the parents and no one else gets it. There is no individual detail; individual privacy is respected.

Mr Rugendyke thought it was illogical to release this information about where your school might be. Can I say that, yes, you might be happy with your school because you think you are getting a good service. But until you have got something to compare it with, how do you know you are getting the best service that you can get for your child in terms of education? Surely that is what this is about: trying to achieve the best education we can give our students. They deserve it.

There was this fear raised that it might affect the small schools. It is really curious: when you look at the charts across the years and across the schools, the small schools do well in some cases and poorly in others. Schools in middle-class or well-off areas do well in some cases and less well in others. So you have to look at the individual schools to make sure you are getting it right, and this data provides that opportunity.

What we have from Mr Berry is half the case. He did not tell you what happened after those facts became clear. You have to look at what happens here in the ACT. The year 12 rankings have been released, and it has not led to the wholesale wiping out of colleges that Mr Berry would have us believe might happen. That is what you get when you have a simplistic approach to this issue. That is when you take vital and informed data, create a simplistic emotion and call it league tables. We have never called it league tables. Those are their words. They are driving an agenda here; they are political; they are ideological.

Mr Stanhope: Everybody calls them league tables, you goose!

MR SMYTH: We have never called them league tables.

MR TEMPORARY DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The minister will resume his seat. The house will come to order. The Leader of the Opposition was warned today by the Speaker.

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