Page 3158 - Week 10 - Thursday, 18 October 2007
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will not, on its own, lift educational standards. We do not want to give national testing the weight of responsibility it cannot or should not carry.
Our focus, as I have mentioned before, is on continuous assessment. Continuous assessment reduces the stress that many students feel when preparing for and sitting end-of-course, content-based external examinations. It generally provides a more natural assessment environment, closer to the situations students will experience later, including university studies. Given the excellent outcomes achieved in the ACT under the continuous assessment model, the argument should not be whether the ACT should change its very successful system to fall in line with the rest of the country; it should be whether there may be merit in the ACT’s model being implemented elsewhere.
Mr Speaker, they are just some examples of effective education models which make the ACT system one of the best in the world. The federal government has shown time and time again that it rejects the need for jurisdictional flexibility and will seek to impose its style of education on the states and territories by using funding threats. Let us look at their style of education in regard to history. I will refer to the minister’s recent speech.
The importance of history is widely acknowledged and, through the development of the new curriculum framework that will be rolled out across the schools from next year, history has a prominent position. The curriculum of the ACT has two essential learning achievements which explicitly address the teaching of history. The curriculum framework allows teachers and school communities to recognise their local needs and provide units of work appropriate to their school.
The alternative approach of the Prime Minister, which was announced to us last week, has not involved any consultation with current teachers since April this year. It proposes 10 periods and 70 milestone events and biographies to be covered, ranging from the 18th century botanist Sir Joseph Banks—one of my favourites, by the way—to former Prime Minister Bob Hawke, another of my favourites. This constitutes such a content-heavy history teaching load that a student might well be in his or her old age by the time all that the Prime Minister wants is covered. For this reason, we must trust the teachers in our schools. Teachers know their subject matter. They work in teams. They are professional, they know their students and they understand the complexity of all demands and expectations of the curriculum.
The ACT government has a draft curriculum framework in place that addresses all the learning requirements of all students in all the compulsory years of schooling. We recognise that the teaching of history must be delivered in such a way that it considers the nature of the school’s demographic, the particular school’s historical place and the teacher’s own knowledge and expertise.
Mr Speaker, here in Canberra we are very privileged to have ready access to institutions of national, cultural and historic significance such as the War Memorial, the National Museum, and Old Parliament House. Schools students frequent these as part of their learning of Australian history. Remember that these ACT and national cultural and scientific institutions also provide educators who run educational programs from those institutions.
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