Page 4078 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 13 December 2006
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MS GALLAGHER: Mr Speaker, as Mrs Burke has said, the ACT Disability Advisory Council has released the first report—I imagine the first of many—of a citizen’s jury process on disability services across the ACT. This report card was given to the community, to government and to the business sector as a way of measuring some of the progress in terms of inclusion, essentially, for people with a disability in our community. I attended the citizen’s jury process. This is the first time that this has been done.
To be honest about the process, it relies on people to appear as witnesses and tell their story and then for people who have been selected by the jury to channel that information. I and a number of parents of children with a disability who attend school were witnesses. The department of education was not a witness. I did not get involved in providing information in the first round because I did not want to be seen to be defensive of what the government was doing, but this process did rely on people’s experiences or perceptions. It did not reflect what is actually going on. As I said, parents or interested community members could appear and say what was their experience and they could have had a less than satisfactory experience, but I think that to take that and then say that that is the experience of all people who deal with the department of education is very unfair.
In fact, if you look at the parent satisfaction surveys that the department does every year in education, you will see that for parents with children with a disability there are extremely high satisfaction ratings for the department. I think that they are higher than those for any other group. They certainly were in my time as the minister. Well over 90 per cent were satisfied with the work being done in the education department in terms of inclusion in school. I think that, to a very great degree, the department of education does a fantastic job with students with disabilities. We have, I think, 1,400 students with disabilities in mainstream settings and several hundred, probably 300, in our special schools, so you can see the effort that has been made over recent years to make sure that children with a disability are included in mainstream schools.
Each child has an individual plan. We have gone into special resourcing for children with disabilities. In terms of the money that has gone to the education department in recent budgets, we have increased the budgets based on the resourcing tool that we use to measure a child’s needs by millions of dollars. I cannot remember the exact figure, but it was well over $4 million, I think, in a number of budgets to improve the support for children with disabilities at school. I did feel when we got this report that to judge the department on those figures based on the representations of a couple of parents was unfair, but that is what you get when you go to a citizen’s jury process: you get a whole range of people on a jury having to reflect the evidence given, and the evidence was given over one day by a handful of people who, more often than not for those that appear in such forums, have had some problem.
I do not want to discount the report card because this is the first time that this has been done and it is an important way of keeping us focused on what we are trying to do in disability services—not just the government, but the business community and the community sector as a whole—to make sure that we are constantly thinking about these things, but if you were to ask me to say honestly whether I thought that that was
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