Page 2658 - Week 07 - Thursday, 2 August 2018
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programs to expand and upgrade schools in all regions. $47 million has been allocated to construct a new P-6 school in Molonglo, and planning will begin for a new year 7 to 10 campus, so that families in this community can have the confidence that high quality public education in modern learning facilities will be available.
In Gungahlin, one of the fastest growing regions in Australia, over $60 million has been invested or will be invested in school expansions in the area, such as at Gold Creek, Neville Bonner, Harrison, Franklin, as well as other schools, before counting investment in a new school at Taylor. The government is doing the work and making the investments required so that every school provides a great choice to parents.
Even in wealthy communities like the ACT, children start life in vastly different places, with different backgrounds and circumstances affecting their opportunity for a decent life. Education has an incredible power to level all of this out. Education allows all children to reach their potential, and a child’s potential is not determined by the things they have going on, even if these things create barriers to opportunity. The ACT government believes that every child deserves a great education and the life chances that flow from it, and it will do this by providing equity and by responding to the needs of each individual. School is not a race where some students come first and some come last, even if some want to see this as a competition.
The problem with current reporting based on My School is that it ignores all of this and lines children and schools up like participants in a competition. It can also lead to behaviour that compounds disadvantage as people seek out supposedly “better” schools. I have heard a growing number of people in our community—students, parents, teachers, principals and experts—voice similar concerns. And as I have watched my own children and their peers in this journey through school, I have also come to share these concerns.
It is important that when we are talking about ACT schools and school education more broadly, we do talk about NAPLAN. These performance measures should be understood by anybody interpreting them, and they should be appropriately used. Unfortunately, this is not the case for NAPLAN and My School as the situation currently stands. That is why I have initiated, and the ACT is now leading, a review of NAPLAN reporting, to look at whether it is really going to do more harm than good.
When we admit that some schools and students have started behind, noticing that some schools and students are not achieving to expected levels becomes more significant. It gives teachers, school leaders and system administrators cause to take a look a little closer, understand the context and work out how best to support, encourage and direct resources. But it also highlights why information like NAPLAN is not appropriate or particularly useful for informing parent choice.
My encouragement to parents when making a decision about a school for their children is, first off, to get a firsthand view, visit their local school, talk to the principal, teachers and support staff, and be informed about the community that they have the opportunity to join.
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