Page 2238 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 3 August 2016
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… the definition of school capacity has been expanded to ensure that all learning and teaching spaces, including curriculum flexibility spaces and special education spaces such as learning support units, have been included.
We have had an odd debate since that time. I was very transparent in coming in here and saying it in the Assembly. There was all this stuff about the various comments that people made in the press. I saw them. They have the right to say those things, I suppose. But we have a situation where Mr Doszpot and the Canberra Times think it was somehow inappropriate to include things such as our learning support units in our count of spaces in our schools. I genuinely struggle to understand that approach.
In an era in which parents and advocacy groups are asking for a more inclusive approach, in which we see more and more students with special needs and behavioural issues being supported in our schools, there seems to be a suggestion, from Mr Doszpot in particular, that those students should not be counted and the spaces they are taught in should not be counted in the way we measure our schools. That is how I see this. We saw Mr Doszpot describe this as an outrageous manipulation of data. The approach I have taken, which is to include learning support units in our calculation of spaces available in schools, in Mr Doszpot’s words is an outrageous manipulation of data. I just do not accept that.
There are at least 74 learning support centre units and autism support units operating across the ACT’s public schools. These contain six to eight students each but were historically excluded from capacity figures. That is what the Canberra Times says. That matches my understanding of the situation.
I have taken the decision to allow them to be included in our counting. Somehow that is seen by Mr Doszpot as an “outrageous manipulation of data”. I find that an extraordinary position for Mr Doszpot to take, and I do not accept it. I do not accept the analysis. Later in the article, he is quoted as saying:
I can tell you, there is nothing wrong with the previous definition, but there is something very wrong with schools increasing their sizes without adequate planning.
I think there was something wrong with the previous definition. I think it is quite appropriate to include those things. The Canberra Times goes on to say in this article:
The previous 2013 Act Public School Enrolment Projections calculated capacity for “mainstream students only”.
Again, that is not where education is going.
I do not consider this an endeavour to introduce some new or sudden change or some particular agenda, as Mr Doszpot seems hell-bent on assuming. In fact, it is interesting to look at the time frame given what he just alluded to in his remarks. He suggested that the reason it took a while to get the figures back to the chamber was that this new definition was being worked up.
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