Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise this afternoon to speak on behalf of a school in my electorate. It is a great school and it does some really wonderful work with its students. It is a school which this government has chosen to ignore when it comes to its flagship funding program for schools, the Investing in Our Schools program. The school in question, located at Westmead Children’s Hospital, is known simply as the Hospital School. When it comes to this school, the government has put bureaucracy over reason and the neatness of its rules over the fairness of its outcomes. As honourable members will know, Westmead Children’s Hospital is a world-class facility that my community is immensely proud of. The work they do is amazing. Children come from all over the country to be treated there. Unfortunately, in some cases the recovery process can be a very long, slow and arduous one.

The Hospital School caters exclusively for these ill and recovering children. It allows them to keep up to date with their schoolwork and to keep their minds occupied during the treatment and recovery ordeal. Margaret Allan, the principal, and her dedicated team of seven teachers do a great job under very difficult circumstances. The school averages around 55 to 60 students a week in five classrooms. A further 30 or so on the wards are too sick to be able to attend in person, so the teachers go to them. Sometimes there are a few more children. In good weeks there are a few less. This is one of the few schools we would like to see go out of business because of a lack of students but, unfortunately, there are always children at the school. The faces may change but the numbers do not. The school caters for children from kindergarten to year 12 and with every condition imaginable, from a broken leg to cancer. These children face unique challenges. They go to the school in wheelchairs, they take their drip poles behind them, they go in orbital frames, sometimes their whole beds are manoeuvred into the classroom and, in some cases, the teachers go to them. Students stay a day, a week, 12 months or more, so the school has to work extra hard to keep continuity going for the individual students who will be returning to their own schools, hopefully soon.

The Hospital School has to be so much more flexible than others. One wonders why then the Howard government would leave this fine school out in the cold. The federal government does have a funding program. Finally embarrassed into loosening the purse strings on funding for public education, the Howard government created the Investing in Our Schools program. The program allows for $700 million over three years for public schools and $300 million for private schools for capital upgrades and new equipment. To quote the website:

Grants are available to help repair, replace or install new items critical to a school’s needs. This includes improvements to classrooms, library resources, computer facilities, play equipment, air conditioning and heating, outdoor shade structures, music facilities and instruments, or playing fields and sporting infrastructure.

Yet not a single cent is allowed to be given to the Hospital School at Westmead. In fact they are not even permitted to apply for funding under this program. Why would such a school be prevented from even applying for a grant to improve their facilities and the learning environment for their students? The answer can be found in a letter signed by the member for Macarthur as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Education, Science and Training. The letter attempts to explain the government’s reasoning as to why they will not help these children in need—and it is an extraordinary example of bureaucratic reasoning at that! Paragraph 2 of the letter begins:

While the Australian Government appreciates the situation of the children in hospital schools, I must confirm that IOSP funding is not available to schools with transient student populations.

I, like all of us, would hope that the students at the Hospital School at Westmead are transient—that is the point. The children remain permanently enrolled at their regular school but attend the Hospital School for short periods of time or anywhere up to three years. But you have to ask yourself how the government defines ‘transient’. What is transient—a year, three years?—and why is that an issue when it comes to this funding program? In fact, the school wanted funding to ease the transient nature of the school. They want to upgrade their technology program that links their computers with the students’ home schools for a more seamless learning environment, a program that effectively would allow the children to keep their connections with their local school to which they will ultimately return. But the Howard government has just said no. In fact, worse than that, they have said, ‘No chance.’

I do not believe that the government deliberately excluded hospital schools. Surely this was not what they intended when they designed the program. I believe it is an unintended consequence but they refuse to do anything to rectify the problem. The letter from the parliamentary secretary simply dismisses the concerns and reinforces the inequity. That is where the real crime lies here—the inaction of this government. When faced with an outrageous and obviously unintended consequence of a set of regulations in relation to a particular piece of legislation—a problem that is easily fixed—this government simply shrugs its shoulders and relies on some rather spurious bureaucratic reasoning. ‘Funding is not available to schools with transient populations’. Make no mistake—this rationale does not stand up to scrutiny. In explaining why schools with transient populations are ineligible to apply the parliamentary secretary’s letter said:

IOSP funds are allocated according to the number of enrolled students in each State and Territory. Students in hospital schools are permanently enrolled in other schools and have been included in the student populations of those schools. They cannot be counted again as this would distort the proportion of IOSP funds available to that State.

Nobody is asking that the students be counted twice—they cannot be counted twice, because they are permanently enrolled at another school and they are not permanently enrolled at Westmead Hospital School. Therefore, they would be counted only once, whether or not this school could apply for funding. IOSP funds are based on a child-by-child calculation for the state as a whole, not as a grant given to each school. The number of schools does not determine the amount of funds available for New South Wales; it is the number of permanently enrolled students across the state. So in the grand census of New South Wales school students to determine how much money New South Wales will get as a whole state, it does not make any difference whatsoever whether you include the Westmead Hospital School in that calculation. They are enrolled once, not twice. They would be counted once, not twice. Just because you have no permanently enrolled students does not mean that you are not a school—the Hospital School is a school—and it does not mean that you do not need the same sorts of capital upgrades that schools with permanent students receive. It is a ridiculous argument. I have no doubt whatsoever that I would be hard pressed to find any parent out there who would begrudge the Hospital School a small slice of funding to buy technology to link their students back to their permanent schools—to improve their capacity to move past their illness and get back to regular life as quickly and as easily as possible.

Allowing the Hospital School to apply for grants under this program could not possibly distort the amount of funds available to New South Wales as a whole. It would affect the amount available to each school in New South Wales but by a very small amount. The parliamentary secretary’s shonky reasoning does not stop there though. He goes on to make an even more spurious argument as to why this school should not be funded, and this argument makes even less sense than the preceding argument:

It is important to bear in mind that students attending hospital schools do not miss out entirely on the benefits of IOSP funding. They will benefit at the schools at which they are permanently enrolled upon their return.

Then he goes on to state that funding the Hospital School would effectively be double dipping for those students. Yet, when you look at the bigger picture, while funding to New South Wales as a whole is calculated on the number of children, this program is not administered on a child-by-child basis at the school level. In fact, it is a competitive grants program. If one school gets two grants totalling $130,000, that is not considered double dipping, even if another school does not get any funding. So you can get two grants, that is not double dipping; no grant, that is fine. If a child changes school because their parents move, and they attend two schools in a short period that both received funding, that is not double dipping. So if a child receives access to funding in two schools because their parents moved, that is okay; yet if a child receives funding from schools because they are ill and have to attend hospital, that is double dipping. It is bureaucracy gone mad, to the detriment of a fine school in my community and to a group of students in real need. It is bureaucracy wrapped up in a false notion of fairness.

I would like to talk about fairness in this instance because there is no fairness. ‘Fair’ for a child goes out the window when he or she gets so sick or injured that they end up in hospital for long enough to go to school there. Fairness goes out the window when illness or injury rips a child out of their regular school and regular life. Life is not always fair for children—and it has not been fair to the kids at the Hospital School.

But governments can compensate. Let us put a little fairness back into the lives of the kids at Westmead. If the government wants to hide from its responsibilities behind a set of rules, it had better make sure that the rules make sense and stand up to scrutiny. This situation reeks of poor policy, poor implementation, and trying to cover an error with poorly scripted pollie-speak. The government made a mistake on this one and it is about time they fessed up and fixed it. The kids at Westmead Hospital School deserve no less.