Page 3892 - Week 12 - Thursday, 30 October 2014
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the minister said she was very supportive of it and suggested the principals she met with were also supportive, as was the directorate. So when the directorate says that the ACT’s 86 public schools have always had a very empowered, autonomous environment and that our principals have always had a great deal of decision making, you have to ask where the two principals attending that conference came from and whether it is the directorate or the ACT AEU and the P&C associations that are offside with the majority view.
In September of this year, the ACT government signed up to the federal government’s $70 million independent public schools initiative. Minister Pyne said at the time:
The Australian Government’s Independent Public Schools initiative will encourage greater autonomy in all 86 ACT schools by empowering local decision making …
This funding will provide professional development and training for school governing bodies, principals and school leadership teams to assist them to make decisions in partnership with their own school community …
Having the freedom to operate more independently will allow ACT government schools to better meet the needs of their students.
The funding is over four years and the ACT will receive close to $1 million. Minister Pyne went on to say that the four pillars of this federal independent public schools initiative are teacher quality, school autonomy, parental engagement and strengthening the curriculum. However, the Canberra Times wrote it up under a headline “ACT takes cash but shuns autonomy pact”. The article went on to say that the ACT has signed up to the federal government push for more school autonomy without committing to independent public schools. The unions claimed it was a win for them, having long campaigned against increased school autonomy.
So while we have Ms Burch claiming she has a school community totally supportive of school autonomy, clearly it needs to be a union-sanitised version of autonomy—“school autonomy lite”, for want of a better name. She might like to consider the individual school, and how seriously and how far she wants each of our public schools to be controllers of their own destiny.
I think a rational, reasoned debate about school autonomy, engaging our school communities at both the teacher and parental level, would be useful in strengthening our ACT public schools. We know we have many ACT public schools that are bursting at the seams, while others just down the road are not. Why is that so? Do we know what makes a good school so good and so popular? We know all of the four pillars in the federal IPSI, teacher quality, school autonomy, parental engagement and strong curriculum, play a part, but what is the balance?
I know that those on the other side of the chamber get hung up on labels like “independent” when linked to public schools, believing that the term implies some sort of elitism, when it does not, and that is demonstrated in those states that have ventured down this path. But we need to understand where autonomy does start and finish. If, as the minister insists, she is supportive of autonomy, when schools seek
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