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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Wednesday, 30 June 2004) . . Page.. 3093 ..

participate in the community. Our schools, which are doing those things particularly well in quite difficult circumstances, should be supported for and cheered on in their endeavours rather than being torn down by this insulting motion.

MS TUCKER (6.21): The Greens do not support this motion. Having listened to the contribution of Mr Pratt I am aware that we share some concerns, but those concerns are not new. Has Mr Pratt read the various committee reports that have been prepared in this place? In 2001 I prepared a report entitled “Adolescence: Some young adults at risks of not achieving satisfactory education and training outcomes.” More recently I prepared a report entitled “Looking at healthy school-aged children in the ACT.” I know that Mr Pratt was around for that report and he most probably was around for the earlier one.

In 1997 I prepared reports entitled Violence in school and Closure of School without Walls. So in the time that I have been a member, and before that time, members of the Legislative Assembly have addressed those issues in some detail. I have a report in my office Young people with behavioural disturbance—a report prepared by a committee of the Assembly before I was a member of parliament. I think we can all agree that we are concerned about the wellbeing of children. As Ms Dundas said earlier, Mr Pratt’s focus on core values was interesting because at no time did he articulate what he thought those core values were.

As Ms Dundas said, diversity, acceptance and respect for the world in which we live seem to be some of the basic values. Public schooling is about providing everyone with an education and some clear values are implied in that. I would like to remind Mr Pratt about some of this work. I ask him to read these reports because it does not appear to me as though he has been informed of the significant work that has been done and the research that has been referred to in them. Mr Pratt referred earlier to the fact that “Discipline needs to be obvious” and “We need to go back”. What are we talking about?

Let me inform Mr Pratt of the contemporary understanding of schools that are modelling values—something that he says he wants to achieve. I like that part of Mr Pratt’s motion that states that schools should model, implement and set values and that they should have value-centred environments for students. Referring to the question of discipline, to taking a firm hand and to setting core values, Mr Pratt spoke about kids at risk who were dropping out of school and who were not completing their education. I quote from a statement made by Galilee school, which is as follows:

There is a strong connection between the structure and functioning of the school and early school leaving. Students are leaving school because of alienating practices, structures and rules.

The Department of Education and Training has established how to provide an environment that does not alienate students—an environment in which they might even feel happy. That is what core values should be about. I refer Mr Pratt to some of the comments in my report Looking at healthy school-aged children in the ACT in which I made recommendations about the Gateway program.

Basically, that report states that school connectivity has been identified as protecting young people from a range of adverse health and educational outcomes. The Gateway project has identified three priority action areas: first, building a sense of security and

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