Page 219 - Week 01 - Thursday, 14 February 2019
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The government will continue to invest in teachers and the teaching profession through extension of the initiatives I have already outlined. Also prominent will be a focus on improving the capability of teachers to use data to inform the learning needs of individual children and providing teachers with the right skills and tools to obtain the data that they need through, for example, formative assessment.
It is also important that there is a teaching workforce available to offer the range of high quality learning opportunities that students need and expect. The government will devise a workforce plan that will look, at an industry level, at making sure there are teachers available to meet our needs. The government, in its management of the public system, will also prepare a complementary workforce plan for government schools.
One option being explored in the public system is the sharing of specialist teachers across schools to make sure that all schools have equal access to the skills needed for high quality specialist programs like languages and music. In a similar way, the government’s future skills academy is being developed as a hub of expertise and resources that schools across the city can access so that student learning opportunities do not depend on the local school alone. This is emerging as an effective, efficient way of genuinely putting every student at the centre of their learning.
Building on this, and in response to the Assembly resolution about language education, I can inform members that the Education Directorate is scoping a review of language programs in government schools, the outcomes of which will lead to an action plan. As I highlighted in debate on the motion, there are diverse offerings of language education in ACT schools as part of delivering the Australian curriculum. Delivery of language education in a systematic, meaningful way that provides a quality learning opportunity for students relies on a curriculum and on quality teaching delivered by qualified teachers.
Important in this review will be to look at the recruitment and retention of specialist language teachers—the primary challenge for providing language programs—as well as the student language pathways from primary school to college. This will rely on initiatives like the sharing of these teachers across schools and a greater coordination across schools than currently exists in our system of school autonomy, which, members should note, is part of the framework for the operation of government schools, rooted in longstanding law and policy. And through the review the government will consider and engage with the community languages network, which is chaired by the Education Directorate.
There is an opportunity to expand the available languages on offer because of more recently available language curriculums and teaching resources. And, as I have previously raised, I am committed to ensuring that students have the opportunity to learn Indigenous languages of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations that first inhabited this region. But it would be naive to suggest that, even after this work, a student will always have access to any language of their choosing. The opposition seem to think that they can deliver that, but it is an empty promise. It is simply impractical to resource the delivery of P-12 programs in every of the more than 40 languages represented in the community languages network.
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