Page 998 - Week 04 - Thursday, 7 May 2020
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emergency and the COVID-19 pandemic. It has been a matter of fierce and passionate debate amongst parents, carers, grandparents and education staff, as well as politicians of course. It has seen the national consensus threatened and driven the most political discussions we have probably seen over the past month. Picking up the Chief Minister’s recent comments, I think that, amongst all of the political efforts to have consensus on this, this has been the one place that has seemed to be the closest to fracturing.
The bottom line is that it is simply a really important issue in the lives of our city’s children and young people. Having previously been an education minister and spent a lot of time with students across the year groups, there is no question that they will be having discussions about this themselves. And I am getting a lot of feedback from parents, who are saying that their kids have really strong views on this. We know that this is a real topic of conversation in our community.
The questions raised by Ms Lee’s motion are representative of the great challenge that has been presented to Minister Berry and the Education Directorate to provide something for every child, every student, in a time of uncertainty, when every day brings new information and new expert advice. To be clear, I believe Ms Lee’s motion has turned out to be timely. It is certainly relevant to the concerns of many parents and carers in the ACT and is focused on perhaps the most difficult aspect of the government’s response. It is also representative of the, frankly, unenviable complexity of seeking to work with commonwealth-funded agencies in a local government context, and pulling together internal and external agencies and stakeholders in a single cause when each is individually struggling to find a new normal.
That is why the ACT Greens are very supportive of the overall approach the minister has taken. In our view, that approach has been to provide a baseline of care and learning to all students and, beyond that, to offer a new and innovative approach to teaching and learning wherever possible.
The Education Directorate needs to be congratulated for its efforts. My office has heard of some issues and concerns, which I will come back to, but the overwhelming feedback has been in support of teachers, learning support assistants, administrators and officials, who have clearly done their absolute best to respond to the community’s expectations and students’ diverse needs. Even on the issues of concern, such as the hub and feeder model, many are still talking about the engagement with education as positive, of teachers and principals doing their best to answer the questions and concerns at a local level even when it has been hard to understand the broader policy for some. I think it is fair to say that the hub and feeder model, whilst designed in a pragmatic sense as the best thing that was available at the time, has been very challenging for all concerned.
There have been the issues of out of hours school care; the broader difficulties of engaging with commonwealth-funded early childhood care and education providers; and the issues around school transport, which were not really the responsibility of the Education Directorate but were obviously part of the story. We have had feedback on all of these things as being really challenging.
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