Page 2263 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 16 August 2006
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It is also true that the pay is less for principals at smaller schools and that principals have an economic benefit as a school gets larger. That could be one of the reasons why we have seen the changes to the government schools over the past years. It might reflect weaknesses in the school-based management system. The school-based management system has not always delivered better education to the wide range of students.
Nonetheless, I would like to argue in favour of diversity within the system. The minister for education seems to have noticed that the cooperative school in O’Connor is a highly successful early childhood school with an extensive waiting list. But has he noticed that its success is not simply a product of the age of the students, that it reflects the scale of the school—it is small—and the high degree of parental involvement? Ironically, the 2020 plan for the O’Connor cooperative school might erode this very strength which is very much because of parents’ involvement and commitment. Another form of gloss in the Towards 2020 proposal is that it uses the co-op school’s success to make much of its plan to establish early education centres out of other existing schools but does not support the scale or the management model of the co-op school which contributes so much to that success.
One of the key areas of contention for school communities is the notion of empty desks and the method by which excess capacity is being calculated. This is significant because the public description of schools being at 23 or 45 per cent capacity is a powerful way to suggest that the community and its school are bludging off the rest of the community. It was a deliberate, considered strategy to assess the capacity of those schools in the firing line along a 1970s formula of students per square metre. It was an easy way of whipping up some numbers in a hurry that could be compared but it is, and it was, inaccurate, unhelpful, upsetting and unfair.
Similarly, the average cost of educating students—$18,000 per annum in a small school, when $12,000 is a more accurate figure; and the average cost of a student at a larger school of $8,000 rather than $9,000—is part of a campaign to falsely represent the cost to the community and to unfairly attack small schools, their communities and their students. It is a mean, personalised attack. When you look at where those schools are that are under attack, who the students are that go there and who the families are that are part of those school communities, it is an attack on some of Canberra’s poorest, most marginalised people.
The schools plan is unfair and inequitable, and Labor Party members should be ashamed of it. Indeed, many of them are. We know from the estimates process that there was no attempt to assess the risks of choosing this shock-and-awe approach. By nominating a number of schools and preschools for shutting down while at the same time promising a consultation process that gave the people a sense that their school might not be closed, the government has sown uncertainty and doubt into the minds of staff, students and parents. The time for enrolling for students, for parents and for schools is not after 9 December, when the government hands down its decisions; it is in July, August and September.
Those schools for the axe are already losing enrolments due to the threat. I must say, in light of this, Dickson college’s increased enrolment of 200 indicates the strength of that school, though they believe, from their surveys, they have lost 50 or 60 enrolments. For
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