Page 904 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 16 March 2010
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and recognises that parents and guardians play a critical role in the education of their children.
Moving on from that, I will speak briefly of my own personal experiences. When I lived in Nimbin in my younger years, I was involved in establishing both a preschool and a primary school. We lived in a community that was a reasonable distance away from the town of Nimbin. There was not, in fact, even a school bus. It was a very arduous task to take our kids to school. We, being an energetic lot of people, I guess, decided that we who had just built a community would build a preschool and a primary school. Both of them have been very successful and they are both still there and flourishing. In fact, they are receiving children from outside our immediate community.
I guess the point I am making with this is that schools are really important to parents. We as parents were a group who were prepared to set up schools. That is how Catholic school education started. It started because Catholic parents felt that Catholic schools were really important to their children. They were part of setting up the Catholic school system.
Schools are an important part of local communities and it is important to recognise the respective roles that government and non-government schools play, be they Catholic, other denomination or other independent schools. We need to support all schools so that parents and kids can find good local choices. We need to allow for diversity within schools so that all children, Catholic and non-Catholic, can fulfil their potential.
In recognising the roles that Catholic schools play in education of children and young adults in the ACT, I would like to emphasise the importance of diversity in education. Life is a broad church and it is important that a quality education is available from diverse schools of thought. On diversity, I would like to make the point that we have a tremendous range of schools in the ACT. Muslim schools, special needs schools and other schools such as Montessori, Blue Gum and Steiner, which I mentioned earlier, all play an important role in delivering educational opportunities for all children in the ACT.
The Greens believe that all schools are important and that we should focus equally or equitably on different schools and not single out particular groups of schools. We are fortunate to live in a diverse community. It is important that our schools represent this diversity rather than focus on a particular group, potentially at the expense of educational outcomes for all.
As Mr Barr said, we should be primarily focused on educational outcomes and support an environment where parents and students have a diversity of quality educational institutions to choose from. In saying this, we do recognise the significant contribution that the Catholic schools and all non-government schools make to the education of young Canberrans.
Given that it is Catholic Schools Week, I would again like to take the opportunity in the last seconds I have to recognise the positive achievements made by Catholic schools throughout the ACT. In fact I would like to take this opportunity to pay
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