Page 774 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 1 April 2008
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Let us make this clear: would I love to be able to plough millions and millions of dollars into every area? Yes, of course I would, but we have to undertake our investment in education in a strategic manner. It means having the guts to take difficult decisions to reprioritise expenditure. That is what we did in 2006. We backed it with $350 million of new investment, new money—money that those opposite continue to denigrate and continue to describe as throwing good money after bad. It is about doing a little bit of forward thinking about where our education system is going to be over the next five, 10 or 15 years. It is about investing in new school infrastructure in growth areas, in Gungahlin, but it is also about investing in infrastructure renewal in areas like west Belconnen and Tuggeranong. It is about investing across the board to raise the quality of our education system. That means investing in a variety of different programs and in ensuring that our students are able, across the board, to achieve their potential.
It was interesting that the PISA data showed that, across all socioeconomic groupings, students in the ACT performed better than their socioeconomic equivalents in every other Australian jurisdiction. So our performance is above that of every other jurisdiction. That is something to be pleased about. Have I ever said that that means there is nothing else to do in education? No. I said there were a variety of other areas in which we need to improve our performance. Of course we do. There will always be constant attention and constant striving to improve the quality of teaching and learning in our school system.
But the key thing here is to have ideas and to invest—to invest in early childhood education, to invest in new programs to promote arts, languages, physical education and a range of important activities, to invest in quality teaching. We know, absolutely, that the biggest single impact on learning outcomes is quality teaching. That is why ACT teachers are equal to or the best paid in Australia, and that is why we continue to work in partnership with the commonwealth government around a range of new initiatives in early childhood education, trades training centres for our high schools to improve our vocational education and training performance, investment in information and communications technology. We need to ensure that our students have access to the latest ICT. That is why the government, two years ago, invested $20 million in providing a state-of-the-art broadband network for all of our public schools.
That is why the government has provided additional support for the non-government system to invest in their ICT, to invest in a range of other pastoral care programs in the non-government sector and also to invest in additional support for students with a disability. We know from the most recent census that the government system accommodates and provides education for the vast majority of students with a disability in the ACT. But we do recognise that non-government schools are increasingly providing education to students with a disability. The government has increased the levels of assistance that we provide to students with a disability, regardless of which education sector they are in. That is an important investment in ensuring that no-one is left behind.
If there is an area of concern within the PISA data, it is the performance across the ACT education system as a whole of our high achievers. It is clear from that data that
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