Page 2793 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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people is falling, the number of older people must be growing. The new generation of older people already are much more affluent, active, and longer-lived than their predecessors. So this ageing boom will not only change the demographics but also change the activities in our suburbs. In the meantime we should bear in mind that, while the neighbourhood of the 1960s and 1970s has gone, the suburbs we are talking about are not deserted. They are still the daytime domain of some parents, mostly mothers, of people who work from home part or full-time and of people who do not have jobs at all. People living with illness and disability mostly stay close to home, and people like to age in place and get the support they need brought in.
As I have said already today, other parts of the world are returning to neighbourhood planning models. We should not abandon that plan now without considering what the future, what the real 2020, might bring. But those were not, it seems, even in part the considerations of the team in the education department charged with developing this project on the orders of Treasury and the functional review. More is the pity. Even within the education department’s own domain the expanded use of some of these facilities ought to have been considered.
Hall is becoming an agricultural science and environment school. Rivett, as we know, is a fantastic integrated centre for kids of various abilities, with circus incorporated into the school program. The Giralang school is designed as an education centre. It could also co-house a languages program for middle school or upper primary. It could over time become home for an indigenous education centre. And somewhere in Canberra shouldn’t we have an education centre for home-schooled kids where they can access resources and some educational and social interaction? Kambah high, as I have said, could become a selective high school and take on Radford, if that is the direction the ACT government wanted to pursue, or become a partner with CIT, or both.
Rather than only looking at the cost, perhaps the ACT government ought to also look at the opportunities. It is no good thinking the challenge is to stop the drift. The challenge is to change the direction of the shift. The biggest weakness of this plan is that it is totally devoid of creativity in planning. It is simply an exercise in freeing-up money by closing some schools in order to refurbish some others. As a 2020 vision it is the wrong goal and the wrong metaphor.
I would like to remind the Assembly of some of the work that was conducted by the ACT education department in exploring the growth and strengthening of the ACT public education system, work which I believe is being compromised in the pursuit of this misnamed 2020 plan and the accompanying budget cuts. As the budget documents remind us, ACT school systems are about to implement a new curriculum framework that identifies the essential learning achievements across four bands of development, ranging from early childhood to later adolescence. That is quite a shift from the existing approach, particularly for government schools, where there has been a historically greater responsibility on individual teachers to construct their own programs. This new structure appears to be fairly well received by teachers today, which is not surprising given that there has been a lot of involvement by them in its development.
One limitation in the draft framework, which might be a reflection of that process to date, is the 26 essential learning achievements of left-out languages other than English and culture. I trust that some adjustments will be made if and when the department ever
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