Page 1611 - Week 06 - Thursday, 7 June 2007
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
minority safety net provider of education for those people who cannot afford the private system.
He keeps saying this, but there is nothing in this budget or in the Towards 2020 proposal that address the drift. We do not know why people are passing by, passing up the free service and paying royally for the service. Mr Barr thinks that the solution is to build things. He thinks that the solution lies solely in bricks and mortar. The point is that, in addressing bricks and mortar, we are not addressing the needs of people in the education system.
It was interesting to see the commentators in the community commenting on the education budget this year and to find everyone singing from the one hymn sheet. Clive Haggar from the Australian Education Union and Trevor Cobbold from Save our Schools are talking about the fact that, yes, there are a lot of bricks and mortar in this budget, but there is nothing for the people.
The Stanhope government reneged on its 2004 commitment to increase expenditure on high schools by over $12 million and to employ an extra two teachers in every high school. To the contrary, the ACT government, as a result of its EBA, cut 60 teachers out of secondary education in the ACT—35 out of the high schools and 25 out of colleges. These cuts have been disastrous for the schools, the students and the teachers.
Lots of parents talk to me about how they cannot get their children into non-government schools, especially high schools, and Mr Barr keeps saying that he wants to address the drift. Actually, the drift would be much worse if the unmet demand in the ACT were able to be fulfilled by non-government high schools. There is not a non-government high school in this place that does not have a substantial year 7 waiting list. If all the children who applied to get into non-government high schools in year 7 last year actually got into them, we would have a system where the government school system had become the minority system. We would have met our past already.
Instead of just building buildings, priority should be given to improving government high school outcomes, especially the high level of parent and student dissatisfaction with the curriculum, the teaching practices and student-staff relationships. While the ACT has high average outcomes by international standards—and so it should; we have the most highly educated population in the country—we also have a very large gap in outcomes between our highest and lowest achieving students.
The history of underachievement in the ACT is long and is not improving. I remember sitting in this place probably three or four years ago and listening to Mr Pratt make this exact point, and the situation has not changed since then. In addition, there is a large gap in outcomes between students from low and high income families.
Let us turn to non-government schools. The Stanhope government has neglected the 41 per cent of children who attend non-government schools by virtually ignoring them. We must keep in mind the background to this ignoring of government schools. We must remember the motion that you, Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, supported at the last ALP state conference. It stated:
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .