Page 2930 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 6 August 2008
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ability to think critically that the bulk of our students develop in the ACT school systems. ACT students in all our education systems are near the top in the world. Talking down their standards and achievements is both misguided and destructive to them and to our community in general. Rubbishing the ACT’s new curriculum framework, which could yet happen in the education debate in the lead-up to this election, would be ill-informed and miss the point.
As discussed here before, while the ACT has good education systems, there is a growing gap in achievement between those who are falling behind and the majority who are doing very well. This is true across all education systems in the ACT. Indeed, in the ACT, we are slipping from being classed as a high achievement, high equity jurisdiction to one which is high achievement and low equity. That should be of real concern to all of us in the Assembly. It certainly is to the Greens. Any forward-looking education strategy needs to take that challenge on.
It is also an unarguable fact that government schools take on a larger proportion of students with high needs at school—including but not limited to students with a disability, those from relatively low socioeconomic backgrounds and children from some particular cultural and ethnic groups—than do schools from the Catholic or the independent sectors. This is really an issue of resources, and it is specifically about resources available to schools and teaches in the public education system. The evidence, as Trevor Cobbold has argued quite clearly, is that reducing class sizes after about second or third year is not necessarily the issue, particularly in terms of bringing classes down from 25 to 21, for example, when 20 seems to be the cut-off point for effective class size reductions.
The job of teachers is to keep students on task and engaged. These are necessary preconditions for learning. A class full of kids from fairly affluent, well-educated families with no special needs or capacities is, of course, challenging in today’s world where children often see themselves and their families as a cut above their teachers. But a class with a high degree of children with difficult behaviours, learning problems and special needs requires greater resources. We will all agree on that. Rather than losing three or four kids from the ordinary classes, we would do better to look at ways of better supporting teachers and kids who need more support in the classroom. Here are some ways that we could do that.
Bringing experts—not necessarily teachers, but people who can engage with young people and children—into the classroom would be an effective response. Remember, the teacher would be there as well. This might mean arts training and support for primary school teachers, expert languages tuition, special resources targeted to groups and individuals where needed and flexibility for school and teachers to address the needs of students at both ends of the spectrum, especially environment and science-intensive classes. The list is endless of what we could provide our children.
I do not think the big issue is going to be just primary schools either. We need to address that area of our schooling where we know the biggest problems are—that is, our secondary schools. We have put this off for the whole four years I have been here. It is the area of our schools where it is hurting; it is probably the area where we are losing most teachers. We need to increase the interface between school and work, and CIT could do a lot more here.
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