Page 3411 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 17 August 2010
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report and 24 recommendations. The government has agreed, agreed in part or noted every one of those recommendations. Whilst I will not go through them all this afternoon, I will briefly talk to some of them.
I would like to thank the committee for their recommendations, a number of which indicate growing agreement in this place with the education policies of the ACT and federal Labor governments. Recommendation 1 is a case in point. I think the most important reform is ensuring that we continue to have the best teachers at the front of our classes, to ensure we measure how effectively our education system meets the needs of students.
The department already provides professional development for teachers in interpreting NAPLAN standardised testing through the use of the school measurement assessment and reporting toolkit or SMART. SMART is the database that stores NAPLAN results for access by schools. A team of three school improvement officers provides professional learning sessions for teachers. They work directly with school leaders and teachers to assist in the interpretation of class and school-level data.
I should point out that the ACT government does not have direct responsibility for providing pre-service teacher training. However, under the improving teacher quality national partnership, to which the ACT is a signatory, the ACT Teacher Education Committee and the Professional Experience Committee have been established. The University of Canberra, the Australian Catholic University and the department are represented on these committees.
The committees will oversee the implementation of reforms to improve pre-service and in-service teacher education, and departmental representatives will promote the inclusion of training on the interpretation of standardised testing results in pre-service and in-service courses. This will also complement the work of our Teacher Quality Institute.
We are also working with the federal government to give parents the information they want on the progress of their kids at school. We are making everyone in education more accountable through the My School website. This information means we can move beyond the poker machine approach to education policy. It is no longer good enough to simply insert a dollar and hope for the best, especially for kids who are struggling at school. We need to know that we are getting the best educational outcomes we can for every student.
That is why I am pleased to see recommendation 3. This recommendation calls on the government to provide the Assembly with an analysis of ACT NAPLAN results using comparable 2008 and 2009 NAPLAN data from New South Wales and Victorian urban schools. ACT NAPLAN results are already analysed comparing ACT schools with New South Wales and Victorian schools and indeed with other schools around Australia. However, whilst it is true that the ACT’s student population is only metropolitan, this does not make it directly comparable with New South Wales and Victorian metropolitan school populations. Currently, the best form of comparison available is that based on the information collected by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority—ACARA—and reported on the My School website.
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