Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to join this debate and, obviously given my history, welcome any debate in this place about national education. I welcome the member for Bass's interest in education and I wonder where the Minister for Education is tonight while we are having this debate. I wonder because I am really interested in what he has to say about this, given that this report basically existed in 2011. Attached to the report is the AITSL Accreditation of initial teacher education programs in Australia 105-page report that was released in April 2011. It is not a surprise that the minister is reissuing things that already exist, work that has already been done, like he is doing with the curriculum review this week. We had an exhaustive, extensive curriculum review. We had consultations across this country in every state with educators and researchers and we came up with a national curriculum. This minister has politicised that national curriculum once again.

I remind the House of what former Prime Minister John Howard had to say about it being so important for history to be taught as a stand-alone subject. This is something that our national review found and something that was in the national curriculum that this Minister for Education and his handpicked panel members have decided to scrap without consultation. Prime Minister Howard said that it is quite shameful that in some parts of Australia and in some schools the teaching of Australian history is no longer a stand-alone subject.

Well here we are again with the minister from the Liberal Party completely showing disregard for the subject of history in our classrooms. It is not surprising that Minister Pyne has clearly forgotten his history. In bringing this motion forward the member for Bass has demonstrated that he does not know his history—or he would understand the work that has been done in education at a national level across the last decade. But not in this chamber and not on this day. We are going backwards.

Let us look at why we are talking about this. Why are we talking about it? We are talking about education because the differences between teacher performance and student outcomes are as variable between classrooms in the same school as they are between schools. We are talking about education across this decade because we have had to address that, we have had to look at it. We had the review and we have got the answers and now we are redoing the work—claiming work done previously. The notion of increasing the potential of teachers going into the profession is an important one, but the work has already been done. Of course we need to ensure that we have national standards—that work has been done before. Of course we need rigor.

I welcome that the report sees teaching—and this is critical—not just as academic achievement but also as personal attributes. Too often the debate about teacher performance and teacher education gets boiled down to a lack of subject knowledge. This is simplistic and misleading. Teaching is complex: it requires high intelligence, high subject knowledge, high emotional intelligence, the ability to collaborate, the ability to reflect, creativity, scientific thinking and scientific method. It is just as important that a teacher understands how a variety of people learn particular subject matter as it is that they know about the subject matter. Teachers know this and they are waiting for this government to figure it out.

One of the most important things going forward in teacher education that I would like to put on the table in this chamber is not just preservice education but the ongoing education of our teachers in our schools. Improving teacher performance is about purposeful schools, purposeful classrooms and purposeful systems. It is about teachers having scientific method in the classroom reflecting on their performance, reflecting on their student outcomes and getting better and better at the work they do.

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