Page 1339 - Week 04 - Thursday, 10 April 2008
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school behaviour introduced by the Queensland department of education and the arts. This code defines the responsibility that all members of the school community are expected to uphold. Each parent discusses and signs a responsible behavioural plan for their young person attending any individual school. It is pleasing to note that the ACT education department’s code of conduct has been instituted. It outlines the responsibilities of community members, departmental staff and students to promote appropriate and positive conduct and to prevent or minimise non-compliant and aggressive behaviour.
The committee learned that Education Queensland has an online professional development professional and a professional development kit which can be implemented in-house called “Essential skills in classroom management”. The committee regarded these as an excellent resource.
The committee heard from the Australian Education Union that it is funding a similar program. The committee recommended that teacher mobility be reviewed, given the need to devote considerable resources to the training and development of teachers and the need for a whole-of-school culture to be developed in order to support the practice.
The committee was pleased to receive the results of the review of the Calwell cluster and the recommendations attached to that. The committee learned of practices to counter bullying in Victoria and Queensland and for teacher training and classroom coaching in Western Australia.
My brief references cannot do justice to this inquiry and this report. I thank those who gave the committee their time and their expertise and those who made submissions and appeared before the committee. I would particularly like to thank those who shared their personal experiences of the process and to thank the teachers, staff and students of the many schools we visited. I have mentioned that I give my thanks to Dr Lilburn and to my fellow committee members. I must also thank Magistrate Madden and Magistrate Dingwall, who managed to find time to meet with the committee last month despite their very busy schedule. Finally, I thank the Committee Office for the support they gave this inquiry and this report.
I will finish by quoting from Alexander Maconochie. First of all, I will read from the fly leaf of a book detailing his time on Norfolk Island:
In 1840, Alexander Maconochie, a privileged retired naval captain, became at his own request superintendent of two thousand twice-convicted prisoners on Norfolk Island, a thousand miles off the coast of Australia. In four years, Maconochie transformed what was one of the most brutal convict settlements in history into a controlled, stable, and productive environment that achieved such success that upon release his prisoners came to be called “Maconochie’s Gentlemen”.
To quote Maconochie:
My experience leads me to say that there is no man utterly incorrigible. Treat him as a man, not as a dog. You cannot recover a man except by doing justice to the manly qualities which he may have and giving him an interest in developing them. I conceive that none are incorrigible where there is sanity; there may be some proportion, but very small.
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