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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 5 Hansard (8 May) . . Page.. 1340 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

these figures are a couple of years down the track, reflecting the position under the stewardship of the current government. I would hope that they would still be high.

Ms Tucker talked at length of retention. Because of a number of factors, students do not all stay at school till the end of year 12. However, in the ACT the vast majority do. We have incredibly high retention rates. They are invariably over 100 per cent, because so many students from the non-government sector, when they finish year 10, come over to the government sector. Whereas 43 or 44 per cent of year 7 to 10 students are in the non-government sector and about 56 or 57 per cent in the government sector, only 29 per cent of year 11 and 12 students are in the non-government sector and 71 per cent are in the government sector. That is because of the quality of our college education system. Students also come from New South Wales to our excellent college system.

I point out to Ms Tucker-she may have forgotten, and Mr Corbell should be aware of it now he is minister-that when some concerns were expressed about students falling through the cracks and leaving school early I said to the department, "Let us do some work and find out why."

Canberra is a small enough community-a city state-to allow us to find out why students leave. All the colleges were asked to provide information on why students left. That information should be available to the new government and to the new minister. I hope it will be useful in ensuring that something is done to help students who do not leave for a valid reason-such as leaving town, family reasons, or deciding to go into the work force and perhaps take up an apprenticeship or a traineeship-but just drop out. That was the point of the work done by the education department in conjunction with the colleges.

Mr Pratt's motion "notes the pleasing results demonstrating national leadership in the recently published literacy and numeracy tests". I was delighted to see those results. They refer to 2001. They were due out in about November. There was some glitch, and the minister changed our decision on what information parents should get. I am uncertain what he is giving them now, but I hope he does not water that down too much, because it is crucially important that parents receive information on how their child is going. I do not see any great drama if they have some idea of how their school is going against a system average. I have never believed that that information should be sprayed across the press, so do not say that I support a league table-far from it.

You need to continue testing. That is essential. That was a highlight of the previous government. We introduced testing. It is now in place right across Australia. We now have national benchmarking. It is absolutely fantastic to see how well our students go. That is a validation of the work done by our students, our teachers, our system.

Ms Tucker said that for socioeconomic reasons Canberra was obviously going to do better than other areas. Ms Tucker might think some areas are more disadvantaged than others. None of the schools in those areas would be necessarily last or towards the bottom in all the various strands of literacy and numeracy assessed. The whole idea of the testing

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