Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

but he is genuinely concerned, too, about the long-term future of Tasmania and of the Australian economy, because we cannot be a high-skill, high-wage economy in the future if our schools slip behind the standards of the world. That is why I am very determined that we engage in a national plan for school improvement and we deliver more resources to schools so that our schools are in the top five in the world—that is, our kids are getting a world-class education today so we can be the strongest and most prosperous economy tomorrow.

Today it was my very great pleasure, on what is a good day for Australian education, to launch this year's edition of My School. My School has now come out for the fifth time, and every time more information is added so that parents, teachers and the Australian community can have more information about the performance of Australian schools than ever before. As education minister, I set our nation on this journey because I was disgusted, when I first became minister for education, to find out that there was nowhere you could go in the Australian nation to get a list of the most disadvantaged schools in the country. There was nowhere you could go to get a list of the highest performing schools. No-one under the former government had ever paid any regard to the quality of education or bothered to ask themselves the questions: 'Who needs the most help? What is going on in Australian schools?' That never happened—not once. Wilful neglect and cuts were the Liberal legacy in education.

We have changed that. And what we can show today with My School is not only more information for parents than ever before; we can show the performance of our national partnerships and our new resources for school education. We can show that they are making a difference. We can show, for example, that the schools in our National Partnership on Literacy and Numeracy are improving at a faster rate than other schools. Seventy-one per cent reduced the number of students below minimum standards in year 3, and 70 per cent reduced the number of students below minimum standards in year 5 numeracy. That is a better education for kids, a better opportunity for life. That is the Labor way when it comes to giving children access to a great education, because we want all of them in the future to share in the life of our nation, and we do not want to see any child left behind.

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