Page 2791 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 13 August 2019
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education advisory council is yet to have any reports made public. So we have all this apparent activity but is it just wheel spinning? We have a nation-leading workplace health and safety policy but we still have record numbers of injuries in the workplace. Is that more papering over the cracks?
When questions were asked about how well equipped learning support assistants, or LSAs, were to cope in the classroom, we were assured that they will be offered a cert IV in disability. For LSAs working in learning support units for autism, there is no specific training offered and it is not a requirement. Does that not suggest a problem and a possible explanation for the number of incidents we see in classrooms from students with complex needs?
But it is not the minister’s fault. We are told that that sort of detail is not held centrally and that schools deal on an individual basis with such issues. While there is so much going on that the directorate cannot collate data centrally on so many education measures, they decide it is imperative that the cleaning contractors become public servants and centralised in the Education Directorate.
The discussion about internalising the cleaning staff currently in schools was frankly not convincing. We are told that this move will cost an additional—that is, over and above what the previous contracts were—$5.2 million over four years. There is also money set aside—an additional $1.6 million—to gear schools up with the right equipment. It is a significant amount of extra investment by taxpayers for the same outcome.
The reason for bringing them inside the directorate was claimed at one point to be to ensure high cleaning standards, while at another time, the move was to provide good employment opportunities for, “a particularly vulnerable cohort of people”. Given that a number of currently employed cleaners are on visas that would potentially have precluded them from accepting work with the government, that removes the vulnerable cohort worker argument.
To suggest that these workers were not doing the job properly now, but will magically improve when they are public service employees, is insulting. To suggest that someone who has cleaned a school for 10 years would only feel pride in their work and achieve dignity if they became public servants is ridiculous, but that is what the minister is suggesting.
On questions about maintenance, we learnt little other than that the $6 million budget for maintenance provided directly to schools was already fully committed in May. So tough luck to any school that had an emergency, vandal attack or similar between May and the start of the new financial year. Had it not been for a local Catholic school, Turner primary and Lyneham primary may well have been needing emergency maintenance repair funding after repeated vandalism at both schools.
The Catholic school had CCTV installed. That in turn helped ascertain who the perpetrators were. Turner Primary School had been requesting permission to install CCTVs in the playgrounds and perimeter for after-hours surveillance but I am told that that had been denied by the directorate.
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