Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

This motion is full of self-congratulation and not about improving education. The reality is we are looking at an education system today under increasing pressure. Families, teachers and principals tell me the reality they're living with every day: standards are slipping, classrooms are harder to manage, teacher workloads are exploding and too many Australians are being left behind. This is a central failure of the Albanese government in education: announcements and slogans, amidst declining outcomes. It's what I hear every day from parents, and it's what's reflected in the data. Children increasingly can't read confidently at the age they're supposed to. Foundational learning's not being prioritised in the curriculum. STEM subjects are being increasingly taught by teachers who don't specialise in areas like maths and physics. Teachers are, unfortunately, increasingly having to be focused on behavioural management, distracting them from teaching.

This motion is about intergovernmental school funding. It's not about education outcomes. And, when you look at those outcomes, too many Australian students are going backwards. The statistics are terrible. Roughly one in three Australian school students are not mastering the reading skills they need. For a child to have a successful education, that starts with the ability to read; without it, they struggle to comprehend other areas of the curriculum and cannot fully participate in the opportunities that school is meant to provide. A University of South Australia study of students aged 11 to 14 found that the share who never read for fun jumped from 11 per cent in 2019 to 53 per cent in 2022. That's an extraordinary collapse in recreational reading in just a few years. If children aren't reading, they're not building vocabulary, fluency, comprehension and the background knowledge that makes every other subject easier. This motion doesn't talk about that.

It also doesn't talk about an issue that's ignored far too often, and that's boys' education. The data is clear and consistent. Boys trail girls in every NAPLAN literacy assessment—reading, writing, spelling, grammar, punctuation—in every age group. Average achievement for boys falls short of girls' in every NAPLAN domain except numeracy. Boys are twice as likely to score the lowest performance bands in literacy.

And this isn't a boys-versus-girls argument. We want every child to succeed. In the last two decades, we've made extraordinary strides in the education of women and girls, and those achievements must be celebrated. But there is clear data and a growing sense that the education system is letting too many of our boys fall behind. And we need to do better.

The most recent NAPLAN tests show that, by year 9, in writing, there's a 35-point gap between boys and girls—roughly one to two years of learning. That's an educational deficit that compounds year after year, and we see the consequences later in schooling pathways. The ABS reports that, in 2024, the year 10 to 12 apparent retention rate was 83½ per cent for women but only 76.4 per cent for male students. This motion doesn't talk about that—and it's a shame, because, rather than giving the government a pat on the back, we should be asking how we can lift these outcomes. Do we need more explicit teaching, a better and more knowledge-rich curriculum, better classroom management, less focus on screens in the early years?

This motion also speaks about teacher shortages. We all hear it from principals and parents, and we see it in hard-to-staff regions and subjects. When you look further into this, though, there's a second serious problem, and that's an expertise shortage, particularly in maths and science. The fastest-growing jobs in Australia need a strong grounding in maths and science, but the most recent data shows that almost 40 per cent of maths teachers and technology teachers were teaching out of field. Let me say that again: more than a third of those teaching maths aren't maths teachers. Subject knowledge matters. To teach advanced maths, you need strong maths expertise. To teach physics, you need to be able to confidently understand physics. I'm not having a crack at those teachers who are working out of field; that's not a problem they've created. But it's disappointing that, rather than talking about these issues, the government wants the parliament just to give it a pat on the back.

Let me turn to another concern parents raise with me regularly: schools and classrooms drifting away from education and into activism. Let me be clear. Classrooms must be a place of learning. Teachers hold a position of authority, and the teachers I know do a magnificent job. Parents send their kids to school to learn reading, writing, maths, science and all the other subjects; they don't send their kids to school to learn politics. Let's keep politics out of the classroom. Bluey is about dads and their kids, and it shouldn't be hijacked by pro-Hamas activists to be used in school as a propaganda tool aimed at children.

The priorities right now should be obvious. Teach the fundamentals well. Teach them explicitly. And ensure every student has the chance to succeed.

Finally, the government wants Australians to applaud its investment. But families are under pressure and costs are going up. Education costs rose 5.4 per cent in the last year and, over Labor's term in office, they rose 17 per cent. This motion doesn't recognise this. If funding goes up while outcomes go down, that's not success. If disruptions rise while learning slips, that's not reform.

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