Page 671 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 22 February 2012
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cohorts that attend non-government—that is, independent or Catholic—schools, albeit in smaller numbers. As Gonski clearly states, funding needs to follow students no matter what their school setting is. There is a clear and present need to do more to ensure equity of outcomes for our children and young people. Importantly, the issue of funding outlined in the report focuses squarely on this need.
As I said publicly on Monday, it is vital that the recommendations from the review are progressed. There need to be achievable time frames set out and an action plan developed to implement the recommendations. What we do not need is another two years of sitting idle while too many of our children and young people fall behind and our schools remain billions of dollars underfunded.
We have a comprehensive report that outlines a way to address many of the issues that have been negatively affecting the students of Australia for years. We have the beginnings of a model of funding that, while it may have its flaws, shows the right direction in terms of making the system a more accountable and publicly understandable one in terms of funding decisions. We have recommendations that, if acted on, will see the creation of an independent and expert national schools resourcing body whose role it will be to begin the finer-detail work of establishing the schools resource standard and start the work of developing collaborative partnerships between the states and territories and the federal government, and the Catholic and independent and public school sectors. We do have great partnerships between those sectors in the ACT already.
What we have is an opportunity to act now to make a better schooling system for our children and young people, in particular those in our community who are experiencing disadvantage, and to start making the kind of investment in our nation’s future that will have long-reaching and deeply positive impacts in the future. Yet what we are hearing from the Australian government and the federal opposition is that we as a society are willing to accept a lower ranking than many other OECD countries in terms of educational outcomes.
I support the government’s amendments to this motion, as they refocus the motion back onto the most important players here—that is, the children and young people, the students. The Gonski report, while describing new ways of funding schools, is at its heart all about these students. For this debate to resort to pre-emptive defensiveness, calling the recommendations an attack on non-government schools, is to completely miss the point and shows a complete lack of understanding about the day-to-day realities that parents, carers, teachers and the students in our community are facing.
Although it is early days, I have not yet heard any major complaints about the recommendations from front-line teachers working in our schools, other than the view that the extra funding cannot come soon enough. I have not heard any major concerns from parents and citizens associations other than disappointment about the lack of concrete time lines. And I have heard very few negative responses from the thousands of families for whom these recommendations represent a welcome and much-needed increase in support for their children, particularly when their child has a disability.
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