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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 8 Hansard (7 August) . . Page.. 2427 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

would not have been there before the common youth allowance system came into play. That needs to be acknowledged in terms of how colleges are managing their students.

We have recommendations related to discriminations in schools. There were witnesses who spoke of discrimination on the basis of race, the indigenous community and other communities. Discrimination on the grounds of sexuality also came out. So there are challenges there for the school community. Clearly, the schools cannot be asked to change the world. What happens in our schools is a reflection of the broader community. However, once again the committee saw it as an opportunity to work in a creative and positive way with these social issues, because if we can address them in schools we might be able to break the cycle a bit in terms of what children leave school with in terms of attitudes and approaches to people who are different in any way.

The question of how we accept difference in our society came up not only in terms of race and sexuality. It came up also for a large group of children who for different reasons are different. There are a lot of children in our school system who are carers for someone they love who is sick or has some kind of issue. Those children have huge adult responsibilities. They are not necessarily going to identify to the schools as having those responsibilities because they do feel concerned that they would therefore look different and that that is not going to work in their peer group. That was another group that came out.

Children who are in foster families obviously have special issues. Schools need to be able to support those families as well. Issues of substance abuse also came up in the committee, as did the question of how well we are supporting families who have a member of that family with a mental illness. Whether it is the student or it is a family member also came up in the inquiry.

We made recommendations regarding behaviour management. We have asked that there be a close look at the effectiveness of suspension and exclusion as a behaviour management tool. The committee is concerned about the rates of suspensions and exclusion still in our public system. We also ask that there be a review of the alternative programs that exist in Canberra at the moment. There needs to be a policy framework developed for alternative programs before we establish any new alternative programs.

There needs to be a serious commitment to progressing the recommendations of the reviews that have occurred of existing programs such as DCAP because there are some really serious issues in those programs relating to staffing. Once again this committee made a recommendation about the need for collaborative inter-agency approaches. That has come up, I think, in just about every committee I have chaired or worked in in terms of social services. It is obviously a challenge for governments around Australia, not just the ACT. It is a challenge that has to be taken on very seriously because it is critical to ensuring that the services that we have are effectively used. I note that there is even a proposal for a referendum on the question of seamless services. I would see it as a fundamental responsibility to be committed to ensuring services were as seamless as possible, so the committee has recommended that.

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