Laura Smyth (La Trobe, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Prime Minister, what reforms is the government undertaking to deliver a better education system?

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

I thank the member for La Trobe for her question and know that she is very concerned to ensure that schools in her area benefit from the government’s reform agenda and that we are offering every child in every school a great education. The principles that are driving our reform agenda are of course transparency: we want to make sure that parents and community members that care about education have more information than they have ever had before. We want to drive national consistency. That is what endeavours like the national curriculum are about. And we want to make sure that we are focused on improving results for kids. That means that you have got to invest in teacher quality, that means that you have got to invest in literacy and numeracy, that means that you have got to invest in the most disadvantaged schools in the country and that means that you have got to invest in school capital, because school capital matters. You need to keep building on those reforms, and this government will.

We will be providing greater empowerment for school principals, having already during the life of this government, since 2007, taken more steps to empower school principals than any government before in the history of this nation at the national level. We will build on our rewards for schools and teachers to keep investing in the quality journey, to keep saying to every teacher, to every school, ‘No matter how good you are today, we want you to be better tomorrow.’ If you are going to drive this agenda then you have to have the information, which is why the announcement I made a little bit earlier today with the minister for school education about the new form of the My School website, My School 2.0, is so important. This is making sure that parents have more information than they have ever had before.

Significantly, compared with the earlier version of the website, we will now have information on the financial resources available to schools from the federal government, from state governments and the amount collected from parents. We have improved the index which enables you to look at the disadvantage of schools. Until such an index was created under this government’s leadership, there was not one. Over the 12 years of the Howard government there was no way of listing which were the most disadvantaged schools in the country because the Howard government had not bothered to collect or analyse the information. If you care about disadvantage then you need to know where disadvantage lies. We have ensured that we know where disadvantage lies through the construction of this special index, which has now been improved in this version of the My School website. And of course we can compare schools with schools that serve similar students because of this special index, and that reveals where best practice is and also where underperformance is, so we can share the best practice and we can remedy the underperformance.

This version of the website, My School 2.0, for the first time can give you data over time. This is the first time that we have had kids sit tests so we can compare their learning journey over two years. I know Australian parents will be excited about this new information. They were excited about My School—2½ million parents visited the website. We look forward to being able to launch the website in December and feed the community’s thirst for this information in order to keep improving education.