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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 04 Hansard (Tuesday, 30 March 2004) . . Page.. 1256 ..

an exercise he did on a computer that he had come on in leaps and bounds, whereas he would have been floundering in a school. I express my appreciation to that young fellow.

The committee also thanks the witnesses who appeared before the inquiry for their frankness and their commitment to our young people. That there were different views does not denigrate from the commitment by any involved in the welfare of these marginalised young people. Mr Speaker, I want to underscore that. Just because people have different views on how we should tackle a problem is not reason for us to say that they are less concerned about the young people. In fact, the commonality is that they need to provide services for the young people and they are just competing on how to go about it.

I thank my colleagues for their input, their wisdom and their obvious commitment to young people and I thank the committee’s secretary, Jane Carmody, for her assistance and support. I commend this report to the Assembly and recommend its contents to the government.

MS DUNDAS (11.29): One of the important things to note about this report of the Standing Committee on Community Services and Social Equity is that it is another report that focuses on the welfare of young people and it is of another inquiry that went out and spoke to young people themselves. We have seen a number of reports tabled over the term of this Assembly that have included reference to the voices of young people.

I think that it is very important that the Assembly continue to follow this trend. It meant that the committee was actually able to hear from the people directly affected by the discussions we were having. We were able to hear straight from them how the programs at the ADU were supporting them and how they were coping in their environment.

Talking to the young people at the unit was one of the most productive things the committee could have done in relation to an inquiry into the Adolescent Day Unit. Over a number of years, I think over the last four years, there have been at least four specific inquiries that have focused on the Adolescent Day Unit. They have been literature reviews for discussions about good models for alternative education—Mr Hargreaves has touched on some of those points—but not all of them actually spent the time to sit down and work with the young people about the issues affecting them and why they found the ADU to be a place that was working for them.

I think we have to keep in mind that we do need to focus on what is currently happening to work with and support young people who are not fitting into mainstream education—which services they are able to access and how they are helping them not only to get an education but also to gain the social skills they need to be part of the wider community.

As is noted in the report, the core goal of the ADU is to support young people who are at risk of not completing their formal school education, but these young people are at risk socially in terms of poor psychosocial skills and have a consequent lack of capacity to engage successfully with the wider community. It is not so much a learning difficulty that they have—it is a social difficulty—and we need to address their issues slightly differently from the way that we would do so for another group of students.

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