Page 533 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 23 February 2010
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here. I could raise—and I have earlier in my speech—a counterargument that not every jurisdiction has 20 days. In fact, Victoria has turned it around from 10 days to five days. Again, that is just not in my view a strong enough argument.
As I said, I will be keeping an eye on how suspensions are going in the ACT. I know there is concern about the number of suspensions, and that is about looking at and reviewing behaviour management systems in schools to ensure that we have got the right levers, the right mechanisms, processes and so forth in place, and also ensuring that those workers, those teachers and other professionals who are working in our student services areas and also in this student suspension team pilot are well supported to do their job.
We will not be voting for this today. The ACT Greens believe that this is the cart before the horse. We have got a great innovative pilot, and I do look forward to seeing how that is rolled out. I do hope that the learnings from that pilot are shared with all school principals while it is underway and that we do not wait for the 12 months to then go into an evaluation to see where we go, because there will be learnings along the way. I think that in order to have a rich learning environment across schools, to be able to share information, to be able to share strategies, to be able to share new programs, is very much part of keeping the ACT education system at the forefront of innovation in this country. We have been, over many, many years, a very innovative jurisdiction in this area, and I hope we continue to be that.
Just in closing, as I said, we will not be able to support it today, but we will look forward to seeing the outcome of the pilot and I will be keeping a very close eye on the statistics around suspensions. I am also looking forward to updates and briefings on the outcome of not just this pilot but other programs that are being put in place across the territory.
MR BARR (Molonglo—Minister for Education and Training, Minister for Planning, Minister for Tourism, Sport and Recreation and Minister for Gaming and Racing) (5.15): Just briefly, the government will support these amendments. They do represent the Labor and Liberal parties meeting half way in relation to this issue. I think I have observed in this place before that the adage in an old Rolling Stone’s song from 1969, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you just might find you get what you need”, is applicable in this instance.
I thank Mr Doszpot for his generosity in approaching the government to seek a resolution on this matter, and I was pleased to be able to reach that agreement. I think it is important that we do make some progress in relation to this issue, but I am equally conscious that, in addition to the powers that we extend to principals in this legislative change, the other side of that equation also is the range of the support services that need to be in place.
I did neglect to mention earlier in my very long list of initiatives that the government has funded that the initiative that placed pastoral care coordinators in each government high school was also matched by a team of 17 who have multidisciplinary skills and who work in a central unit within the education department. So, it is from that team of 17 that we have been able to draw some of the specialist skills to support the pilot project. There is capacity within the existing departmental allocation through
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