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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 12 Hansard (20 November) . . Page.. 4391 ..

MR PRATT (continuing):

The Services to Indigenous People action plan for 2002-04, launched on 4 July last year, follows in the spirit of earlier programs. In conceptual terms, at least, we are pleased to see that in place. How well that is working is not easy to tell-granted, it is early days. The next report, to the end of August 2003, will be the marker that will tell this place about the performance of that program in terms of program relevance and program efficiencies, as well as student outcomes.

The report outlines some interesting and pleasing examples of where achievements have been made. The most impressive statistic is that 75 Aboriginal student support and parent awareness groups, ASSPAs, which are funded by the Commonwealth, have been established in ACT schools. This simple statistic tells the community that awareness of the need for schools to engage formally with their own and/or national indigenous students and groups is very high. I congratulate the government and the department for generating this interest. I have seen a couple of these at work at school fetes, for example, and the mutual respect between the ASSPA and the general school body is there to be seen. That is very pleasing.

Because I think the ASSPAs are vital to this country's reconciliation program, I would have liked to see this report go into a lot more detail about how well the ASSPA program has established itself, how it has settled down and whether it has been generally well accepted by the broader student bodies. Yes, the report goes into some detail describing the role of ASSPAs, and it points out the impressive example of Melba High School ASSPA, which I congratulate for its initiatives and creative forays into their school programs. This is only one example.

While we might not expect to see a statistical breakdown of outcomes across the board, I believe the community and this place have a right to know how this initiative is proceeding. Even a broad and bold statement by a departmental officer accepting responsibility for their area and putting their hand on their heart to report on the progress of the ASSPA program might be sufficient.

Referring to this mild criticism of the lack of reporting on schools and committees on page 7, I must say this reflects a general criticism I have about the whole report. I recently made the same criticism of the education annual report to the director at the recent annual report hearings: it is a report that is chock-a-block full of stats, graphs and, I must say, some grandiose statements, but it skates thinly over many issues and challenges facing the ACT education community. I am referring to the annual report. While this report is not in the same league as that one, I worry that it might go that way, and I would ask the minister to guard against that.

The report on page 8 describes indigenous cultural awareness training for executives and managers and reports clearly on some results. But, while it quantifies total trainees as 67, it does not describe what proportion of schools' executives and managers, who need this training, have completed the training or when the remainder of that cohort group are going to be trained. The report rightly gives prominence to this activity, which is essential to the reconciliation process, but it fails to tell us how successfully it is being taken up, and/or it fails to tell us what action to rectify needs to be taken by the department and government, if any.

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