Page 2578 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 23 August 2006
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MR PRATT (Brindabella) (5.15): The opposition stands—it always has and it always will—for a strong and robust public education system. No matter what trends there may be in the drift from government to non-government schools we must put in place a strong system to ensure that every child in our society is well and professionally educated. I thank Mr Stefaniak for moving this motion and for his rather visionary model of inquiry into the ACT education system. I thank Mrs Dunne for helping to engineer that inquiry. It is about time we had some vision regarding education, as we are not seeing it from members on the other side of the chamber.
This Assembly’s mission is to determine why there has been a constant drift from public schools to non-government schools. The government does not have a clue why there is such a drift. We have asked government ministers repeatedly in question time and in estimates committees, “Where is your evidence? Where is your data? What information do you have that establishes why there has been a constant drift?” We cannot get an answer. Instead we have this government’s 2020 plan, a last minute, panicky knee-jerk reaction, all wrapped up in the machinations of the Costello review to close schools. The government’s 2020 plan is not a vision about where we should be taking education. The government did not consult properly with the community in regard to its 2020 plan; it is a fait accompli.
Proper consultation on school closures in 2007 should have commenced in early 2005. If the government is to commence shutting 39 schools from Christmas this year onwards, that consultation process should have commenced in early 2005, and it should have involved a couple of phases. The first phase in 2005 should have involved the department and the government talking to schools and to school communities, discussing possible closures and asking, “How do you think you stand? What shape do you think you are in?” Once that decision had been made the government and the department should have given families in the schools that were to be closed a minimum of 14 months notice so they could go through the preparations required to get their families ready for what was going to occur.
In a time of changing needs and demographics it is time to re-examine how the ACT stacks up in relation to its educational and academic standards. The opposition is proposing an inquiry because nothing has emanated from the other side of the chamber. We must determine the need before we can make any dramatic decisions, which is what this government is trying to do at the moment in a hit and miss way. What about our education standards? Over the past four or five years the minister, his predecessor and her predecessor have stood up in the chamber and talked about education standards and how we rate against the OECD average.
The standard comparison mark has suddenly been placed into question. To be fair to the minister, Australian schools more broadly were subject to the TIMSS system, or the trends in mathematics and science study. Under TIMSS the first study was conducted in December 2004. Other comparative studies indicated that ACT schools and a lot of other Australian schools rated in the top echelon of schools. In December 2004 TIMSS showed—of course, TIMSS is mathematics and science based—that 15 countries beat our year 4 maths students and 13 countries outperformed our year 8 students.
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