Chris Bowen (Prospect, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last week, the Minister for Education, Science and Training made a well-publicised speech calling for the introduction of a national curriculum in this country. In the written version, she cast several ill-judged aspersions on people who sit on the boards of studies of various states. They were withdrawn, presumably under instruction. If we are going to have a debate in this country about the centralisation of educational bureaucracy, why don’t we also have a debate about the decentralisation of some control over our schools? If you visit any school in Australia, you are very likely to find a principal who believes passionately in their job and who approaches it with energy and commitment. You will find teachers who are energetic and talented, and you will find students who make the average adult shake their head in disbelief at their talent in courses most of us would never have thought of, such as Indonesian, hospitality or events management. We need to find more ways to unleash this dedication and commitment and to reduce the bureaucratic controls on principals and teachers—whether they be imposed from Canberra or from state capitals.

The findings of a recent New South Wales Department of Education and Training study, which showed that parents want more say over the direction of their schools and less of a ‘one size fits all’ approach, is patently unsurprising. We need to have a debate on an appropriate model to give principals, parents and teachers more say in the running of their schools.

In the United States, charter schools have achieved some remarkable results. In Washington DC, one-third of students attend charter schools. A charter school in Washington DC is one where the major decisions on the running of the school are made by the principal and the school council, with very minimal interference from central bureaucracies. In the charter schools, 54.4 per cent of students are proficient in maths as opposed to 44 per cent of students in traditional schools. These figures are more impressive when you consider that students in charter schools traditionally come from lower socioeconomic areas. Of the 15,000 students in charter schools in Washington DC, 98 per cent are Afro-American or Hispanic and 74 per cent come from low-income families.

I am not suggesting that each school should be allowed to determine their own curricula, but I am suggesting that charter schools should be able to make more decisions on their own. Here is one example: what is wrong with a public school principal, in consultation with a school council, deciding that senior students at that school should be allowed to study the international baccalaureate? Some students choose the IB to make it easier to study overseas. Others choose it because it is regarded as more rigorous than the HSC or the VCE. Regardless of the merits of the latter view, which I do not necessarily share, what is wrong with giving a school, parents and students the opportunity to make that choice?

Charter schools would reinvigorate parent involvement in schools. Some schools have good parent involvement, others are more patchy, and in some that I have been to P&Cs and school councils have folded because parents do not have the time to be involved. But if parents realised they had a real chance to make a contribution to the running of the school, rather than just fundraising, they would be more likely to give up their valuable time.

In the 10 years to 2004, the number of students attending public schools in Australia increased by 1.6 per cent. The number of students attending non-government schools increased by 22.4 per cent. It is important that parents and students have a choice as to which type of school they attend. We need a well-funded, vigorous and rigorous public education sector as well as, of course, a private education sector. In this case, everybody wins. We need less point-scoring on education from the government, fewer shrill attacks, fewer references to long-dead overseas dictators, fewer undergraduate debating points from the minister and more of a constructive contribution to the debate about the future of education in this country.

I do not suggest that charter schools are a panacea. I do not suggest that they would fix all problems. I do recognise that there are challenges, particularly in staffing, and that in some ways charter schools would provide challenges such as finding teachers for difficult-to-staff schools. But just because there are challenges does not mean that the challenges should not be grasped. If this government really cared about the future of public education, they would be having a full and proper debate—not undergraduate debating points raised in question time every day. (Time expired)