Page 3162 - Week 07 - Thursday, 1 July 2010
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ACT’s first teacher quality institute. The institute will register all teachers across all sectors in the ACT. It will accredit preservice education programs and certify teacher’s skills and knowledge against the national teachers standards. Extensive community consultation in 2008 showed strong support for an independent teacher registration body. We listened and we are delivering.
In the area of school-based management, I strongly believe that school principals must have the power to hire, develop and manage classroom teachers. Principals must have the power to create high performing teaching teams where one teacher’s strengths are complemented by another’s. Principals must be able to choose who teaches in their schools, and that is why I am proud to report to the Assembly that, starting in the coming school year, the ACT will introduce a new system of principal autonomy.
Within the framework of the current enterprise bargaining agreement and the Fair Work Act, principals will be able to interview and hire their own staff. This is a very significant change to the traditional centralised model. In conjunction with work under the improving teacher quality national partnership, we will also gradually devolve a number of human resources functions to schools. This reform is as a result of a key recommendation of the Allen Consulting Group’s review of school-based management in the territory.
The report recommended that principals of high performing schools should be given the opportunity to opt in to gain greater autonomy. Our newest schools—Gungahlin college and the Kambah P-10—will be the first ACT schools whose principals will have these new powers. At least three other schools will also be included from 2011 onwards. These new principals will take responsibility for the performance of their staff who, in turn, take responsibility for student learning. The budget commits $600,000 over the next two years to support this reform.
School principals also need more flexibility to create innovative school administrative structures and less red tape. The budget invests $14.4 million over four years for innovative staffing structures at our newest schools—the Kambah P-10, Harrison high school and Gungahlin college. We need less red tape for principals, and that is why the budget invests $360,000 over four years for an automated online enrolment system for students seeking a place in an ACT public school. This will allow parents to fill out the online enrolment form and to send it in online. That will cut red tape for schools, ending hours of data entry by school administrative staff.
In addition to this, $656,000 over four years will establish a school staffing integrated management system—SIMS. This will provide principals with direct access to school staffing information, cutting red tape as they use one line budgets to manage staff. The government is listening, investing and then delivering.
In the area of training, we are listening to what students want and delivering the skills that industry needs. The ACT government is investing over $9 million over the next three years in the productivity places program—a program I note the federal Liberals want to cut, a program I hope the local Liberals will want to fight for. In 2009, 1,625 workers and 948 job seekers in Canberra commenced training in the ACT under the productivity places program in certificate II to advanced diploma qualifications. This year we will be focusing our productivity places placements on skilling workers
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