Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) notes that:

(a) all students, including students with disability, deserve to be recognised as learners and supported to achieve their best;

(b) research by Children with Disability Australia shows that as many as one in four children with disability have been denied school enrolment, almost one in five only attend school part time, and 68 per cent of parents believe their children do not receive adequate support at school; and

(c) the Senate Education and Employment References Committee inquiry into the education of students with disability is underway, giving parents, teachers, students and others with experience and expertise, the opportunity to highlight problems in our school system and identify best practice for the future;

(2) acknowledges the:

(a) hard work and dedication of teachers, parents, schools and carers across Australia; and

(b) many programs and services helping students to achieve their best every day; and

(3) calls upon the Government to:

(a) keep its promises on funding and support for students with disability;

(b) continue working with the states and territories to complete the Nationally Consistent Collection of Data on School Students with Disability program, and implement the Gonski disability loading;

(c) reverse its cuts to education, including the termination of the More Support for Students with Disabilities program; and

(d) recognise that supporting students with disability is a long term investment that pays dividends for students and Australia.

I know I am not the only Australian and not the only person in this chamber who has been shaken by stories that we have read in newspapers over the past year about how our school system is struggling to deal with students with disability. We have read reports about widespread incidents of bullying against students with disability. We have heard from teachers who are really struggling without the training and support that they need to deal with students with special needs. There was one absolutely awful incident at the margins of this debate of a young autistic student here in the ACT who was being kept at some points during their education in a cage in one of their classrooms.

These are shocking stories and I raise them in the parliament not to condemn the various incidents that I have mentioned in particular but because these incidents, according to Children with Disability Australia, which is the peak body that represents children with disability and their families, are growing in number. The stories of these children are important for many reasons. They are important because they highlight that there are individuals in our community whose human rights are not being respected, but they also highlight that there is a crisis in our system in how we are providing educational opportunities for students with disabilities. The examples that I have put forward are some extreme examples within this problem. It is incredibly important context that there are some students with disability who are getting a great education in our system, and we should not ignore that. But in a submission to the Senate inquiry that is currently underway on this subject Children with Disability Australia wrote that amongst these families:

A quality education experience for a student with disability is still likened to winning the lottery.

I know from speaking with my colleagues that this is the feedback we as members of parliament get from lots of the families in our communities who are managing this problem.

In recent months, Labor has established a Senate inquiry into this incredibly important issue, and I want to raise some of the issues that we are hearing and that are coming up in that inquiry. Reading some of the submissions that have been made to the inquiry is frankly incredibly gruelling, especially for the many in this chamber who are parents of children themselves. What we have learned so far in the inquiry is that children with disability are regularly plagued by high rates of bullying, exclusion and abuse. Parents talk about a culture of low expectation, where the education system is not treating these students as though they have the capacity to learn, to grow and to develop. We hear in particular about patchy and insufficient funding for these students, many of whom need special support. One of the really disappointing consequences we are finding is that, because of the lack of discussion about this subject and because of the lack of conversation within schools, students who are exhibiting difficult behaviour are being labelled as 'naughty' and treated as though they were doing something wrong, when in fact they are not getting the support that they need.

Perhaps not surprisingly, hearing these facts, the outcomes for these students are not nearly where they ought to be given the prosperous country that we live in today A third of young people with disability do not ever finish school. It is an absolutely gut-wrenching fact that one in four students with disability in Australia has been refused school entry at some point during their school career. We know that seven in 10 parents of students with disability say that their students are not getting the support that they need. I believe this is a really urgent national problem.

We heard some good rhetoric from the government before the election and, I have to say, I really hope that we see some good bipartisanship on the issue of disability. That is certainly the talk that we hear. There are some specific proposals in the Gonski school reforms that relate to students with special need and students with disability, and I am a bit frustrated that the undertakings that were made before the election by the Abbott government have not been fulfilled to date. I call on the government to fulfil the election commitments that they made in relation to specific funding for students with disability. This is a really urgent and important task, especially when we consider what is a very surprisingly high number of young people in this country who struggle with disability. What people in the disability community often talk about is frustration that people with disability sometimes feel they are to be hidden from the broader community. There are 200,000 Australians of school age who have a disability. On average, there should be a child with disability in every Australian classroom, but that is not what we tend to see. We are in the middle of a really important shift in our community in thinking about people with disability, from focusing on what people cannot do to what they can do. Education is the next frontier of this debate and I encourage the parliament to tackle this issue head-on.

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