Sue Lines (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to move a motion in relation to the response by the Minister for Education to a Senate resolution.

Leave granted.

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

I had a look at the response from the Minister for Education, Mr Pyne, and I have to say it is a bitter disappointment—particularly from the party that, before the election, committed to Australian students, and indeed Australian parents and the Australian community, that it was on a unity ticket on Gonski.

We know that Gonski is about providing equal opportunity in our schools. It is a new funding model which, for the first time in Australia's history, will address disadvantage and will address different outcomes. As a modern society, as a society that prides itself on education, we cannot allow postcodes to keep determining student outcomes in Australia—that is the wrong approach. And judging by Minister Pyne's response this evening, I would have to say it seems it will continue along that way. All of what Minister Pyne wants to focus on—teacher quality, principal autonomy, engaging parents in education and strengthening the curriculum—has been revisited before, and the opportunity to really address the funding inequities in our school system across all sectors of schools, public and private, seems to have disappeared. That unity ticket on Gonski is a shadow of its former self, and who knows what we might expect in the budget that is going to be announced in a couple of hours?

And it is not as if we do not know what is happening with education in Australia. The pointers are there. We have the Australian Early Development Index, an index that goes across five-year-olds. It looks at five domains to see how ready our five-year-olds are for learning: it looks at their physical health and wellbeing, their social competence, their language development and their communication skills. And guess what? Most Australian students are doing reasonably well on those measures. But when you use those measures to look at the children who are developmentally delayed, 22 per cent of our five-year-olds—these are children who are just starting school: they are ready; they are eager to learn; they are the students we should be focused on—in Australia are developmentally vulnerable on one or more of those domains, and more than 10 per cent of Australia's children are developmentally vulnerable on two or more of those domains. These are five-year-old children at the start of their formal school-based learning. And when we look at Aboriginal children, they are twice as likely to be developmentally vulnerable on those indexes.

What Gonski was designed to do was address that inequality right at the beginning of our children's schooling. We know all the academic research tells us that brain development is done in the early years—five is, quite frankly, a little late, but not beyond fixing—and yet we now have a government, sadly, that is not funding, that is not even focusing on trying to address that sort of inequality. Gonski told us that a significant number of 15-year-olds are leaving school barely able to read, not literate enough to be able to effectively operate in our community. And no wonder when we look at that index for five-year-olds! We have five-year-olds we can measure and we know they are already failing before they start in the school system. Gonski would have addressed that.

But, no, the government wants to commit itself to independent schools, basing it on a Western Australian model. I can tell you, as a Western Australian senator, there is no academic research that tells us that independent schools do any better than any other school, and yet this is a plank the Abbott government is hanging its hat on. The life of our school students should not be something that is gambled on. We have quality research that tells us we need to do more for our five-year-olds. We have Gonski, which tells us that postcodes are defining academic outcomes. And yet this government is completely ignoring that, trying to reinvent schooling all over again, but all it is doing is committing significant number of another generation of Australian students to failure.

By the time children are 10, they know if they are failing in our system. We have an index that tells us five-year-olds are missing out. By the time they are 10 they know they are missing out. And we know from Gonski that we have 15-year-olds who are not literate. That is a shame. It is a disgrace. And all of us, no matter which political party we come from, should be wanting to do something about that. But, no, the Abbott government is going to focus on making schools independent, but there is no proven academic research that tells us that does any good for our students. So it is very disappointing to see the response from Minister Pyne. It is very disappointing, and quite frankly dishonest, that he committed to a unity ticket on Gonski to the Australian public, which has found that it is now gone. Goodness knows what our budget is going to do. I implore in this chamber that it would be a travesty to follow the Western Australian model of education. Western Australia is not a leader in education by any stretch of the imagination, and it is a shame that Minister Pyne's response does not address equity at all.

Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak to the same minister's response to the notice of motion agreed to on 22 March 2014. I find it quite curious, as we gather here tonight to address the budget misfortune that this government was left with by the former government, that Senator Lines has the cheek to criticise—and it is a bit pre-emptive, Senator Lines—when the Senate Select Committee on School Funding does not actually deliver its report for another couple of months.

Senator Lines interjecting—

You will have your chance to address your issues with the way this government is approaching education in this country. One thing that we are doing, Senator Lines, is making very, very clear who is going to be the centre of our education policy, and it is students—students first. The motion we are speaking to was agreed on 22 March and the Labor Party agreed to it, so I do find it quite curious that Senator Lines is here tonight not backing the vote that she was very happy to have in putting students first on 26 March of this year. The motion before the Senate at that time was not talking about early childhood education or Gonski funding. It was talking about something we can all agree on—putting students first.

It is about recognising what the international research says around the quality of teachers in the classroom, the quality of the curriculum, the freedom for school principals and school communities to decide what is important for their school to be doing and what is important for their community—the types of skills and knowledge that need to be developed in their students, what sort of education the parents of that community and that school want their children to be receiving and giving principals the power and the autonomy to make those decisions at a very local level. That is about empowering schools, Senator Lines, empowering teachers, instead of being beholden to the command and control from central office—you will get X, you will get Y and we will try generically to make you all come out the same. Education is just not like that.

Kids come into our classroom from all different levels. They start at different places. They have good teachers and they have bad teachers. They have great resources and they have less than great resources. Across the spectrum, whether we want to value them by PISA results—which the former Labor government wants to hold up as the epitome of educational success—or we want something else, we want to put students first. I think the notions of educational success for all children are a lot broader than how they do on an international standardised testing regime, but we will leave that debate for another day.

I am rapt that the minister has gone down the pathway he has after the Labor government's track record in education—and who can forget Building the Education Revolution, with its rip-offs and rorts to the tune of $6 billion to $8 billion? That is a lot of schools, that is a lot of teachers, that is a lot of research going on in terms of educational outcomes. But they do not worry about that. They do not worry about the debt and deficit they left for us. We are paying $1 billion a month on interest. The resources we could actually put into early childhood education and higher education, skills and training on an interest bill of $1 billion a month—Senator Lines, rock on! We could do some really great work, but we cannot do it because of the mess you left. It is time to take responsibility for that.

Senator Lines interjecting—

It is very nice to be carping from the sidelines, Senator Lines, carping loud and clear for all to hear. It is time to take responsibility. You would not do it, so we are having to do it, and it starts tonight and everybody is going to have to bear their share of that pain.

In the final year, Labor announced cuts to higher education funding, including an efficiency dividend applying to university grants, changes to student loans and scholarships, a cap on tax deductibility of self-education expenses. So if we want to roll out a track record on who is supporting education—how, why and when—I am happy to have that debate, Senator Lines, any time of the day. But do not come after you have supported a motion and critique the very things that this motion went to the heart of in terms of supporting professional development for our educators and ensuring that our teachers in our schools right across this nation are the highest trained and best equipped to make sure that our young Australians, the 660,000 young Australians in regional Australia that attend public schools, have access to a very high-quality education.

$1.2 billion of funding was ripped out from states that did not sign up to the Gonski plan. Let us be honest: there was no Gonski plan. By the time we got to putting signatures on the line it did not bear any resemblance to the research document that came out. I am really looking forward to the day when we bring down the report of the Select Committee into School Funding after listening to Henry Ergas's testimony in Sydney a couple of weeks ago critiquing the economic modelling on which assumptions were based. I am very, very keen to get that out of the closet and into the public domain so we can talk about what matters, which is putting students and their education first in this nation.

Obviously this is going to be a debate to continue. I congratulate the minister for his very strong start and the amount of reviewing he has been doing to make sure that the policy we develop as a government around education is of the highest quality, is well informed and actually ensures stakeholders are consulted appropriately and that they are not having policy designed on a notepad and brought into the chamber the next day—as was the case with that doomed self-education funding debacle where so many people using that setting to further their education to ensure that they were more employable and fit for work within our economy had the rug pulled out from under them without so much as a day's notice. Well done, Labor! You have got a poor track record. We are looking forward to restoring some integrity.

I would also like to remind senators that school education, Senator Lines, is a state issue. I look forward to your communication with state education ministers rather than bringing what is very much a state issue into this chamber. I look forward to your further support on further notices of motion around education that actually put students front and centre, motions that are based on well-researched arguments and policy settings that ensure that our education system for the 21st century takes our nation forward and does not make the federal government in charge of things that should rightfully be the responsibility of parents, of local schools and principals, and state governments.

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I do not want to take the time of the chamber, because I am conscious that other senators want to speak on other matters, but I simply want to congratulate Senator McKenzie. It is such a refreshing change to have someone speak in this chamber on education matters who actually knows what they are talking about. I am aware of Senator McKenzie's distinguished career in the education system.

From listening to Senator Lines, you would not be aware that the motion was about teacher quality, but I am pleased that Senator McKenzie was able to demonstrate that education is about what parents need, what the children need and not what the teachers union wants. You can be assured that Senator Lines's speech drew heavily on the work of the teachers union, who seem to be more interested in their own positions in the union movement than in the quality of education that Australian children are getting.

I will not take the matter further except to say how pleasing it is to have a contribution from someone like Senator McKenzie, who clearly knows what she is talking about when it comes to education.

If nobody else wants to speak on this, I seek leave to continue my remarks.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.