Page 1946 - Week 06 - Thursday, 8 June 2006
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The federal Liberal government’s WorkChoices and welfare-to-work regimes have already begun to bite the poorest and most vulnerable in the ACT community. Of course, the territory should not have to pick up the pieces for the social destruction caused by the federal government, but it should at least build on its own essential programs and services.
The government’s excuse for large cuts in education is that we already have a highly educated population, but what about the people who are not well educated and what about the children who grow up in households facing significant disadvantage? Instead of building on the strengths of the ACT people, a social capital approach, this government is squandering them.
It is easier to talk about education than other areas of this budget because at least here the government’s ideas have been made clear. Over the past several months, a number of people must have been beavering away on a plan for government schools. The Towards 2020 report was mentioned in passing in the budget speech, but it is in fact a hard-nosed blueprint for remaking and repackaging ACT government schools.
It appears to me that it is a response to the challenge of a growing cohort of parents bewildered by how best to advantage their children in a globalising world. They are doing this by seeking out a social set for their children, using the rhetoric of choice. Many of them are choosing non-government schools, which is threatening to make the provision of top-quality public education for remaining students a potential difficulty.
Unfortunately, the approach this government has taken has been high-handed and imperious, demonstrating no respect for communities, no preparedness to listen, no interest in working with others and no research base for making the proposed changes on a grand scale. There has been no attempt to bring others into the planning or decision-making process. Thus far, this exercise has treated people who are not a part of the government, such as parents, teachers, kids and school board members, with disdain.
It is interesting that this reorganisation and recasting of the ACT school system will not actually save much money. Of course, having fewer principals should save a bit, and fewer teachers, though, judging by AEU comments recently, that is not dependent on closing schools, and cutting staff from the central office and cutting superannuation for the new teachers while they will pick up more face-to-face hours, with less professional development and more demoralisation.
The actual plans for school closures and refocusing are, in my view, a mixed-lollies approach. There will be a few early childhood schools from preschool to year 3 and then a middle school somewhere else for years 5 to 8, before a high school and then a college maybe. Oh, yes, and perhaps a special year 4 school which the 2020 plan must have forgotten or failed to mention, and parents zapping all over Canberra trying to get their kids to the best school before work.
With 40 fewer schools, there are now going to be eight different models, giving a choice to everyone with the time, the interest and the enthusiasm to search it out. It would seem that everyone around the whiteboard got overexcited with the idea of being able to plan a new educational system without having to talk to the parents, the P&Cs, the AEU or the
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