Page 820 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 2 April 2008
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to attribute what was said by individuals, but from my discussions with them and with parents who have made the decision, it is not for the obvious reasons. It is not what the former education minister implied when she suggested that it was about better marketing of government schools.
I do not think parents make those decisions for trivial reasons. I think all parents make the decision where to send their child to school based on what they see as the best interests of their child, of course taking into account their financial circumstances if they choose to send their child to a non-government school. I do not think they decide to send their child to a non-government school for status reasons or for trivial reasons, as has been suggested in the past, certainly by the previous education minister.
Some of the issues that are raised with me are around the support that is given to teachers. I will come to our community education forum in a little bit, but that was one of the themes that came through there very strongly. Look at the issue of violence in schools. Unfortunately, violence does exist in all schools from time to time, both government and non-government. There was feedback to us at that forum and there has been feedback to me at shopping centres that it is about teachers actually having the ability to deal with the problem students, to have the support that they need and to have the resources that they need to deal with them properly, so that they do not disrupt the class and so that there can be a better learning environment. That has been one of the concerns.
People talk broadly about the issue of discipline. I do not want to harp on about discipline too much, except to say that that is one of the areas of feedback that parents give me. But it is a broader issue and government schools vary, as do non-government schools, in their approach to these issues.
The other piece of feedback is the sense of community that is established in each of the schools. That is where the Towards 2020 program, the school closures program, has really had a serious impact. One of the great things about some of our smaller government schools has been that very real and very genuine sense of community that is created in having the local school in the neighbourhood. When we move towards a model of having larger and larger government schools it does become increasingly difficult to maintain that sense of community. It does not mean that it is impossible, but it will become increasingly difficult. We know that in the transition program many communities have seen their school taken away and the heart ripped out of their community.
When we talk about what people are looking for when they send their children to non-government schools we come back to that sense of community. It does exist in many government schools, but the Towards 2020 program, by closing some of these very effective school communities, will have a negative impact and will continue to have a negative impact on people’s impressions. It is certainly our contention that the school closure program will not help stem the drift; rather, that we will see a continuing drift if the government does not get serious about some of these issues.
We saw the process in relation to school closures. Before the election we were told that there would be no school closures and then we saw the great betrayal that we
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