Jennie George (Throsby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to raise the issue of how schools are classified as being disadvantaged schools, and I do that pursuant to last year’s list of schools under the national partnership agreement. It was interesting that my colleague the member for Werriwa had some concerns, and I recall him asking a question of the minister at that time. One of the local schools known well to me, Albion Park Rail Public School, was missing from the list, and the school requested that I take up the issue with the minister. Under that agreement states were to have had flexibility to nominate schools from outside the provisional list, outside the nationally agreed methodology, if they could provide a more accurate identification of low-SES schools using more detailed state based data, so I was involved in continuous representations, both at the federal and state level, without much success. Let me quote from the principal about this particular school, which I think on the data would show how disadvantaged it is:

My school has a 13% Aboriginal population … 8% NESB students … 13% of our school has physical, intellectual or mental health diagnosis. The area includes Government Housing, Aboriginal Housing and Emergency Housing. My school’s SaCC (Tongarra Family Cottage) caters for an Aboriginal Playgroup, Autism Playgroup, parenting courses and two young mothers groups with mums under 18 years old.

Regrettably, I was not successful in having Albion Park Rail Public School listed under the program. In that regard I welcome the announcement made by the Minister for Education this week in which she has said that an additional $11 million on top of the $2½ billion already allocated to help disadvantaged schools would flow through and that data from the My School website indicated there were an additional 110 schools that would have fallen through the cracks and missed out on additional funding. The minister said that without the My School information, the federal government would never have known these 110 schools had large numbers of students that required the additional assistance.

I welcome the announcement to cross-reference state data with federal data. I think there are obvious statistical discrepancies, such as the comparison between a local school, Bulli High School, and Trinity Grammar—and of course we all wait for the information about resource allocation, which ultimately can only stand to benefit students in disadvantaged schools.