Page 659 - Week 02 - Thursday, 20 March 2014
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recommendations aimed at creating better opportunities for collaborating and sharing resources. Gonski was and is about increasing educational outcomes, reducing the achievement gap for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, supporting teacher improvement and creating a level playing field.
From a Greens’ perspective, I stand by our policy platform and our principles on education that include the belief that the government and non-government schools funding policy must ensure equity of educational outcomes. It must allow for diverse approaches and it must be based on need.
The ACT Greens are committed to the ACT government’s component funding being sustainable and matching the actual needs of educating a child. We look forward to maintaining the positive dialogue we have with the Catholic Education Office, the Independent Schools Association and the Australian Education Union. Although recent disappointing moves in the federal funding space have once again created division where there was once some hard-won unity, the Greens will continue to work in a mature and productive way with all stakeholders as we fight to deliver the best education outcomes possible for all the students in the territory.
MR DOSZPOT (Molonglo) (4.10): I thank Mrs Jones for bringing on this MPI today because it provides an opportunity to correct a few misconceptions, to recognise some of the positive things happening in education and also to talk about the challenges we face into the future.
As Mrs Jones pointed out, we have an array of schools, schooling options and curriculum choices. We know it is not just about money. Claims by Labor members yesterday that we on this side of the chamber do not care if schools are funded or not are demonstrably wrong. But we are honest enough to realise that a dying Labor government was never likely to be in a position to honour any agreement, whether it was for four years or six years. And where there is any discussion about schools and funding, there is much confusion and deliberate misinterpretation in the media and among some commentators.
Commentary on comparisons between schools based on ICSEA ratings is misleading, and its value is debatable, because there is too much conjecture about its application and too high an error rate to pay much attention to whether a school is marginally ahead of or behind other similar schools elsewhere. Suffice to say, Canberra is not a place that makes like-for-like comparisons with other jurisdictions easy if you are to base such comparisons solely on ICSEA ratings, especially when you start to mix up ICSEA funding and educational outcomes, as papers like the Canberra Times do. Other media just play the public versus private divide. In commenting on recent results, the Age headlined with “NAPLAN results show public versus private gulf”. The Courier Mail led with “Elite private schools trounced by similar-background state schools in Queensland NAPLAN results”.
As I said, there is much fanfare about how well Canberra schools are doing, but there are some harsh home truths in those tables. If we take the latest results, and it applies equally to testing from any of the other years, we have far too many schools, over too many years and in all subjects, that fall below the national minimum standard.
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