Page 3116 - Week 08 - Thursday, 25 June 2009
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Recreation) (12.05 am): This budget invests very heavily in education. It is because it is a budget for the times, a budget for tough economic times, and in those tough economic times it is appropriate to invest heavily in education. Our investment is in building new schools and refurbishing old schools. It brings together short-term and long-term goals. New construction supports jobs during difficult economic times now; better facilities improve education for the years ahead. It is good economic policy and it is even better social policy. It is a modern, progressive Labor education budget.
As previous speakers have identified, the centrepiece of this budget is a $28 million commitment over four years to lower average class sizes across the education system. It is a commitment that is targeted at high schools, primary schools and colleges. It goes to provide flexibility for schools to have classes significantly smaller than 21 where it is appropriate. We leave it in the hands of our professional educators, our school leaders, our principals and deputy principals, to make those resource allocations at an individual school level. It is about investing in quality education outcomes. We believe that those quality education outcomes are achieved through investment in quality teaching, investment in quality facilities, investment in a quality curriculum and ensuring that those three factors work together to improve education outcomes across the board.
We have provided an additional $6.4 million towards specialist teachers in literacy and numeracy. They will work to implement the government’s new literacy and numeracy strategy. Combined with the school improvement framework and the transparency and accountability agenda, it is a fundamental reform of the way education is delivered in the territory. It aligns with the range of national partnerships that the ACT has entered into with the commonwealth in relation to teacher quality, to assist students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and to improve literacy and numeracy outcomes.
The ACT performs very well in the national and international context, but there is no doubt that the great risk for the ACT education system is that we become lazy and complacent with our performance and that we do not continue to strive for improvement. That is why we have put in place the school improvement framework, a process where schools will deliver on their school plans. They will be assessed annually against those plans and at the end of the four-year cycle they will be evaluated by an independent expert. There will be feedback for parents—much more information than has been provided in the past—and that will be very important as we move forward to progress this education agenda.
As previous speakers have alluded, there are a number of other important commitments in this year’s budget that go to the heart of Labor’s election commitments from 2008, most particularly around support for gifted and talented students through the in pursuit of excellence program; support to increase the number of Indigenous teachers and teachers’ assistants; more support for staff to assist students who have English as a second language; funding to improve language education in the territory by building closer relationships with embassies and cultural institutions to support language delivery in our schools; and meeting our commitment to the non-government school sector around creating a non-government schools equity fund.
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