Page 1540 - Week 04 - Thursday, 7 April 2011
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in this coming budget. It is quite clear that there are cost pressures within the education system. This has come about for a number of reasons, some of which are listed in the report. That is around an increasing number of students who are coming into our education system who have disabilities and an increasing complexity of those disabilities. We need to push the government to ensure that there are funds allocated in this coming budget to address many of these recommendations, and particularly when we go to those recommendations from the report that have been agreed to by the government in their response to the report.
Some of the issues obviously were not new; they have been around for quite some time. Parents have been very frustrated, and so have advocates, because issues they have been raising for some years have not necessarily been responded to. So, in reading the standing committee’s report, I was not terribly surprised by those issues.
Some of it was around the overall allocation of funds in this area—parents feeling that they were not being listened to, their children were not being properly supported through allocation of resources. Some of this came back to the SCAN process. I know, from being at an election forum back in 2008, that a big frustration for parents was that they went through the SCAN process but they then could not see how that was assisting their children in that there was not a transparent process around how their needs were assessed and then resources and money flowing to ensure that their educational needs were being met.
I recognise that in the report, of course, these issues were raised. As I said, I am not surprised as it has been a real bugbear for many parents. It was also raised by the council of parents and citizens, the P&C, who talked about the fact that the student-centred appraisal of need, the SCAN process, is supposed to be used to determine the need for additional resources so that these can be allocated in an equitable, transparent and consistent manner. And this does not appear to be the case.
The committee put in a recommendation around this. In fact, there were several recommendations, as you go through the report, related to SCAN. One of those was around a schematic representation of the definition and funding model used to allocate funds to be provided to parents so that they could clearly see how that works.
Recommendation 11 was around the need for greater transparency in the allocation of those funds. That one has been agreed to in part by the government. I would urge them to really take that one on board. It is important that there be some transparency around these processes so that you do not have some parents feeling that those who jump up and down—the squeakier wheels—are going to get an allocation that others are not. That is why it needs to be accountable. That is why it needs to be transparent.
This led to recommendation 15. Again, this was only noted by government. This recommendation was around, as I said, the need for greater transparency and that maybe school-based management was an issue here. We were not clearly seeing that it was laid out somewhere—the allocation given to each school and how that allocation was made.
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