Page 2788 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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the 90-odd schools in the ACT will be unaffected by this, and even those schools, Mr Speaker, will be affected.
The sheer enormity of the proposals put forward in Towards 2020 has not really dawned on the breadth of the ACT education community. That is because at the moment everyone is preoccupied with the issues of school closures and the other broader, perhaps even more far-reaching, proposals in relation to the reconfiguring of schools, the introduction of new age-group combinations and things like that, some of which are experimental and some of which are unprecedented in the ACT, have not really been explored by the ACT community.
This goes to the heart of the ACT Liberal party’s objection to the Towards 2020 policy. There are some problems. Ms Porter says that the place is in the doldrums and parents are abandoning the school system as though it were a sinking ship. There are undoubtedly some problems that need to be addressed. We must do something about the education system in the ACT, we must do something about the drift from the government education system to the non-government education system, and Towards 2020 is something, therefore we must do this.
I think the community is quite open to the discussion about the future of education in the ACT. The previous minister for education got it just about right when, on 13 April this year, she signed off on the education 2010 proposal and annotated, “I like education 2010; it’s great.” Education 2010 would have gone part of the way to mapping out a future for the people in the ACT, until Michael Costello came along and threw a grenade into the process. It was an all right effort. The proposal put forward by Mr Stefaniak for a wide-ranging commission of inquiry like we saw back in the 1970s is preferable. But the approach taken by Ms Gallagher was an all right approach and it may have led to further community discussion about the best way forward.
We see some remaining elements of the education 2010 proposal in the series of public lectures and seminars that have commenced, discreetly hidden away in a nice building off the public transport routes in Stirling. It is a nicely refurbished part of Stirling college which is nicely painted and carpeted and heated, while the young mothers and their children and CCCares are on vinyl tiles with no carpet and not very much painting out the back of Stirling college. The education bureaucrats have got the centre for teaching and learning up the front, and that is where these seminars are taking place. I hope that they are well attended. I did not have an opportunity to go to the one last Thursday night but I will make every effort to attend as many as possible. I am still waiting for the paper that was delivered last week so that I can keep up to date with what is going on.
We see the semblance, a few remaining tatters, of Education 2010, but superimposed over that are the most radical and un-discussed changes that this education system has ever seen. It is not that I am afraid of change but I am concerned, as is everyone else in this community, except for Andrew Barr and a few people across the way here, about the ramifications and the fact that we are going into this with our eyes closed.
Andrew Barr has taken over the reins of the education system and decided he is going to change the whole lot in the first week. That is potentially a disaster for the territory, which is why we are opposed to the Towards 2020 proposal as outlined in the budget. There are things that hang off this. The huge number of staff cuts to the education
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