Page 2800 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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the estimates process. I hear the CEO of the department say, “No, we do not have a uniform instrument that captures the data about why people are exiting the public education system in the ACT.” Without any of that information we are going to shut down 39 schools.
It reminds me of somebody who runs a business and says, “Custom is falling off in our business; so what we will do is reduce our product range, we will get rid of some of our staff, we will shorten our trading hours and that should fix everything.” No-one in their right mind goes into tackling a problem where they are losing the confidence of their market by saying, “Close, burn, destroy, shut down.” The first thing you ask is, “Why are we losing market share?” Obviously, the product—in this case public education—is falling short of the expectations of this community.
The people of Canberra are not a group of people who are an ignorant mass that does not understanding education. It is the most highly educated community in the nation. It has the highest level of affluence in the nation. I do not accept the view that because people are better off they say, “Let’s go into the private schools,” because not all the private schools are necessarily that spectacular. There are a number of them that I would not enrol a child at because I am not particularly impressed. So it is not a simple equation—if you have money you jump into the private system or the Catholic system and if you have not got any money you go into the public system.
I believe that we need to get to the bottom of these issues and they should form the basis of the whole decision-making process that leads to reforms within the education system. We are making the changes in the education system and we are doing it without the benefit of reliable data. I am not talking about the arguments I have heard such as at Campbell a few months ago. People said, “We are not happy with the figures and we think we have more capacity.” You can have those semantic arguments and they do not actually carry an enormous amount of weight with me because it gets into an exercise at the fringe. That is not the issue.
The issue here is that this territory government is up-ending the ACT education system. It has prevailed in the media every day now since the ACT budget was presented—going on now for something like nearly eight weeks—and the reason it is all supposedly happening is because of a drift. They have not identified the cause of that drift. I would have thought that the very first thing this minister should have done after being appointed to office was to say, “Let us tackle that issue. Let us find out the real factors. Let us do in-depth research.” Do not just send out a survey form and say, “Why did you take Johnny or Mary out of the school?” He should have commissioned properly, soundly-based research and then present it to the ACT community saying, “This is how I am going to tackle these issues.”
There will be only one measure of success and that is a reversal of the drift of people out of the public system. The education CEO gave me little confidence in her evidence. She said:
And just the matter of parents making a choice, so making a judgment about their child and what they feel best suits the needs of their particular child at a particular time during the continuum of schooling.
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