Page 3895 - Week 12 - Thursday, 30 October 2014
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The other comment he made was about independent schools. Here in the ACT we have 86 schools. We did not want, as the commonwealth first proposed to us, to identify 25 per cent of our schools as independent schools. With such a relatively small cohort of schools, compared to the larger jurisdictions, it seemed unreasonable to me, given that we are on the journey of empowerment, to only identify 25 per cent of our schools—20 of our schools or thereabouts—to be labelled independent public schools when we were already on the journey.
The commonwealth, for this agreement, saw sense in that. That is why—and this is a public document—I encourage Mr Doszpot to have a look at it. It very clearly states that we have signed up to empower local decision-making in ACT government schools and recognise that 86 of our schools will be involved in this. It goes over four reporting periods. The first reporting period has commenced and will end in March next year. We will undertake a baseline scan of the capability of our schools, test the level of local governance and accountability, develop a strategy that includes the delivery of the capability improvement program with an appropriate level of certification, and implement or trial this capability improvement strategy so that we have an uplift of all our schools and decision-making across all our 86 schools.
Appropriately, we will recognise the school-based leadership teams that meet the outcomes of this program and continue to implement the capability improvement strategy, including training and professional development across our schools. As I have said publicly many times, the people who know their school community the best are the parents of that school, the leadership of that school. They are the ones best placed to make decisions in regard to their schools.
Mr Doszpot, towards the end of his comments, again underlined the importance of local decision-making and went to the commonwealth focus, which is on local governance, increased accountability to local community and local management of school facilities, and certainly to look at increased delegation over staffing for local schools. But I think the underlying premise of what he was saying was that schools should have the autonomy to do local decision-making.
Whilst we were able to achieve this in this national agreement with the commonwealth, we were not able to achieve that in the agreement on the chaplaincy program. I find it difficult to comprehend that the plea to the federal minister, who espouses such clear words around local decision-making and empowering local schools, when he was presented with letters from the head of the Catholic Education Office and the head of the Independent Schools Association in the ACT seeking and pleading in many ways to be able to keep their secular worker or chaplain—the plea was to allow local schools to make the decision on that program—fell on deaf ears. Whilst they say they are all for school autonomy and local decision-making, it is not always the case. (Time expired.)
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (4.14): I am pleased to speak to this matter of public importance introduced by Ms Berry today. Parental engagement became something of a buzzword during the last ACT election and it was also trendy nationally, as they say, but there is a lot of substance behind the term. I know that my
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