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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 5 Hansard (8 May) . . Page.. 1341 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

was to ensure that areas where schools were not performing as well as in other areas received extra resources and extra assistance, perhaps in different ways of teaching.

It is pleasing to see the always high, but increasingly high, percentage of students attaining the benchmark, or indeed exceeding it. The whole point of testing was to raise literacy and numeracy standards across the nation and here in the territory to ensure that kids who were missing out did not. Some students in high schools still miss out, because the results for them are not as good as they should be. I hope that is something the current government will continue to address, because there is still more work it can do. The national averages are very pleasing. Those results are across the board.

Class sizes help. I think we will see further improvements in literacy and numeracy as a result of the initiative we took as a government to ensure that class sizes were not more than 21 for kindergarten to year 2. This year all class sizes should be no more than 25, and that will go down to 21. The current government, if it lives up to its election promise, will extend that to year 3. We will see what happens. Small classes in kindergarten to year 2, those most crucial early years, will assist in raising standards. Those standards will then continue to show up as those students and those cohorts move into high school.

The Chief Minister, when he was in China, rightly said he was proud of our excellent ACT school system. He did not speak of the doom and gloom Labor came up with in the lead-up to the election. While overseas, he talked up our education system, as he should, contrary to talking it down as he did last year.

It is an excellent system and always has been. The innovative college system makes us somewhat unique amongst states and territories. The system not only leads the nation but has produced individual who have attained top-class results in competitions with other students across the world. Quite often Canberra students come first, second or third in competition with students from around the world.

Validation of our system can be found in the fact that 40 per cent of our students who leave year 12 go on to a tertiary degree and, of the remaining 60 per cent, nearly all end up with good, satisfying jobs. Quality institutions such as the Canberra Institute of Technology assist students. (Extension of time granted.) At that level, we see diplomas leading to degrees. Institutions like the CIT, in conjunction with Canberra University, put us at top of the scale. That is validation of the very fine system in the ACT.

The third part of Mr Pratt's motion, expressing confidence in our school system leading the nation, is something we should support fully. Nothing is ever perfect. There are always problems. There are always people who fall through the cracks, and we need to do the best we can to ensure that we help those people and minimise the number of people who fall through the cracks. We should seek and constantly attempt ways of further improving the quality of our system. Literacy and numeracy testing has quite clearly done that.

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