Karen Andrews (McPherson, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the report School libraries and teacher librarians in 21st century Australia. By way of background to the report, notifications announcing the establishment of the inquiry were made on 18 March 2010 for the 42nd parliament and on 25 November 2010 for the 43rd parliament. Through the committee's website and the Australian, the inquiry was advertised to the public. As a consequence, a total of 386 submissions and nine supplementary submissions were received from a variety of sources, including individuals, education departments, schools, teachers and community groups.

The inquiry offered relevant stakeholders the opportunity to comment on the contribution made by school libraries and teacher librarians to education in Australia as well as to examine what else might be done to increase their value. This report is the result of both the submissions and the evidence gathered for the inquiry into school libraries and teacher librarians in the last parliament.

On 23 May 2011 the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Employment, of which I am a member, tabled its report. The library and information management sector has for some time now called for an inquiry such as this so that the work of school libraries and teacher librarians could be reviewed. I note particularly the positive role the inquiry and report have made in raising the often unassuming and understated role of teacher librarians and the constructive contributions they make to our education system. Having said that, I share the concern of my colleague and deputy chair of the committee, the member for Grey, Rowan Ramsey, that teacher librarians are probably not as valued by schools as an educational source as much as they should be—although I do note that, anecdotally, teacher librarians are more likely to be given higher seniority when the schools are more engaged with their librarians.

There is a widespread lack of understanding about the role of a teacher librarian, not only within schools but also in the broader community. A New South Wales teacher librarian stated to the inquiry:

Students and teachers expect to be able to select and use resources in a library but have no idea of the time and effort it takes to develop and maintain a library collection. Many primary school parents are surprised to learn that the teacher librarian actually teaches their children.

I will now briefly discuss some of the recommendations set out in the report. Eleven recommendations were made, revolving around four central areas: the impact of recent Commonwealth government policies and investments on school libraries; the potential of school libraries and librarians to contribute to improved educational and community outcomes; the recruitment and development of teacher librarians; and partnering and supporting school libraries and teacher librarians.

The important role the internet and online technology now plays in educating our children in the 21st century was recognised, and it was recommended that a discrete national policy statement be developed with cooperation from the Commonwealth government and the states and territories. This statement will define the importance of digital and information literacy for learning and will be an effective guide for our educators. It was also recommended that all Australian schools have access to online database resources through Commonwealth funded partnerships with education authorities. Emphasis was also placed on the need for the Commonwealth government to provide support for the promotion of reading as well as an assessment and study of the links between library programs and student literacy achievements. It was also recommended that a component of training for teacher librarians should be included in the rollout of the new national curriculum. Having met with nearly all of the principals, headmasters and heads of school from both independent and state schools in McPherson, I know that this would be something that they would most likely support.

A further recommendation was made that the Commonwealth government, through the Ministerial Council for Education, Early Childhood and Youth Affairs, discuss ways to enhance partnerships with the state, territory and local levels of government to support school libraries and teacher librarians. The report demonstrates a clear theme that centres on the promotion of improved federal, state and local government relations to support school libraries and teacher librarians. This has been a theme in discussions that I have had with educational leaders in my electorate of McPherson.

Soon after my election, I took the opportunity to convene a meeting with most of the lead educators in McPherson. The consistent issue raised by those educators was the need for increased support, certainty and uniformity from all levels of government. This view is relevant not only to teacher librarians but to a range of education issues. At a local level, I have seen the wonderful work done by teacher librarians as they work directly with students and I will continue to support the schools in McPherson and especially the teachers, principals, headmasters, heads of school, students and teacher librarians.

Alan Tudge (Aston, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I also rise to speak on the School libraries and teacher librarians in 21st century Australia report. I would like to make some brief comments in relation to it. Like the previous speaker, the member for McPherson, I was not a member of the primary committee that did most of the work in this area, a committee in the 42nd parliament. We, the present House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Employment, took most of their work and the findings of their inquiry and finetuned it. The purpose of the inquiry was to look into and report on the role, adequacy and resourcing of school libraries and teacher librarians in Australia's public and private schools. Specifically, the committee was to focus on the impact of recent policies, the future potential of school librarians and the factors influencing the school librarian workforce.

While libraries are just a small component in some respects of a school, the report was quite timely, because school libraries—indeed, libraries in general—are going through a period of fundamental change due to rapid technological advances. When we went to school, all of the information was contained physically at the library, and that is where you went. Maybe it was a little bit different for the member for Longman, who is sitting behind me in this chamber, but when I went to school that was the case. But these days a lot of the information is indeed online. Certainly at the secondary school level, in doing research projects and the like, students are searching online for their information and so do not necessarily have to go to the physical location of the library to find that information. And it is similar even at the primary school level. Increasingly, primary school students are accessing information through online media. That changes the fundamental nature, purpose, role, structure and staffing of libraries. So the report was timely in that regard in that it could examine a lot of those issues and determine therefore what the right policy responses should be to support the evolving nature of the school library.

I should point out, of course, that the federal role in school libraries is quite a small one. The federal parliament has no jurisdiction over employing librarians, it does not manage the schools, it does not allocate the resources as such—they are all the role of state and territory governments, in the case of state schools, and non-government authorities or non-government individual school principals in the case of the independents and Catholic school sectors. So we have to bear that in mind that, in terms of the recommendations which were made in this report. We cannot be overly prescriptive in the recommendations made, and can really only provide some high-level policy overview and some guidance rather than detailed prescriptions, which are rightly left in the hands of the school authorities or the school principals themselves.

Some of the issues which did arise in this particular report—you should see them if you just pick up a copy of the report and scan through it—included accessing the databases of resources, which of course is a very important thing, and not all libraries are equal in that capacity; different libraries have a different number of resources to be able to purchase the databases which the students are relying upon.

The issue of cyber-safety arose, inevitably, and that is an issue that arises in almost every single school setting. It is certainly something that I hear in my electorate from parents, teachers and school principals. There were issues around technical support for teacher-librarians, and how that is provided these days. There were additional issues that came up through the inquiry about the status of librarians these days, and how arguably that has declined—and therefore how that contributes to fewer applicants applying to be librarians, it contributes to retention issues et cetera. Indeed, it was even pointed out in the inquiry by a number of submitters who said that there is a bit of a vicious circle as well—if you do not have enough senior librarians and senior staff to then be able to train more junior librarians, you start to be faced with a real issue.

So this particular committee, as I said, was largely the work of the 42nd parliament rather than the committee which I was part of in the 43rd parliament, but we did agree to a number of recommendations. They were largely established in the earlier parliament but we also agreed to them. They picked up some of the issues which I have just outlined. Probably the most important recommendation I would highlight is the first recommendation, which is to fund the provision of a core set of online database resources which are made available to all Australian schools. The rationale, really, for the Commonwealth to be involved in doing that was a belief by the committee that there would be economies of scale to be had by the Commonwealth being bulk-purchasers, if you like, of those databases. My natural inclination would be to leave it to the individual school principals to determine what databases they want, but I think there is some justification in this instance from a purchasing-power perspective.

Recommendation 2 was to develop a discrete national policy statement that defines the importance of digital and information literacy et cetera, which of course is relatively straightforward. It makes recommendations around the Commonwealth government initiating an Australian based longitudinal study into the links between library programs, literacy and student achievement. Again, it seems sensible to do further research into this to fully understand what the impact is on students' achievements. There are also some recommendations around the teacher-library workforce, in terms of doing some further research to understand what the gaps are and what additional training is needed. Finally there were some recommendations which concerned partnering relationships in terms of encouraging individual schools to partner with other schools and indeed for partnerships between states and territories to share learnings and best practice. Again, I think that is good common sense. Hopefully that would occur without necessarily the recommendation of a parliamentary inquiry to make it happen.

Let me conclude by reiterating the importance of the school library despite the changes that we see in today's school environment and despite the changes that we see in the broader community with the advent of technology. The library itself may have changed in terms of its focus and the technology and skills required; nevertheless it still has a very important place in Australia's schools. Hopefully the recommendations arising from this inquiry will further enhance the importance of school libraries in Australia's school systems.

Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to take the opportunity to welcome the report School libraries and teacher librarians in 21st century Australia produced by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Employment given that I was the chair of the former House Standing Committee on Education and Training, which originally commenced the inquiry in the previous parliament. I was very pleased that post the election the Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth asked the new committee to continue with the work of the previous committee and to produce this report. I commend the chair, Amanda Rishworth, the member for Kingston, for the work that has been done and all members of the committee in following up and producing this final report. I do so in particular because the issue was originally brought to my attention as a result of an online petition that had been running amongst teacher librarians. They were particularly concerned about the fact that in the digital age, for some reason—I think we gathered a lot of evidence that is reflected in this report about why this was happening—people were coming to the view that teacher librarians were not necessary in schools, where in fact quite the opposite could well be argued to be true. With the depth, complexity and breadth of information available to young people today, they need an experienced navigator more than ever to assist them in assessing the source, the legitimacy and the value of information that they are accessing, in particular, online. It was something that, particularly as a former teacher, caught my attention. We sought a reference from the minister, the current Prime Minister, and undertook to do a study into the matter.

As previous speakers have said, the Commonwealth is not the direct employing authority, so some of the issues that particularly exercise teacher librarians around staffing formulas used in the provision of their expertise in schools are directly matters for employing authorities. In the quality agenda in terms of school leadership and digital education that the Commonwealth was involved in, there may well be some useful actions that we could take in order to provide national leadership on the issue of teacher librarians and the resourcing of school libraries. I commend the work in this report and hope that the government takes up every one of the recommendations and pursues them. The importance of this issue is reflected in a quote on page 36 of the report:

Each day we are inundated with vast amount of information [through television, radio and an immense array of online resources]. Though we may know how to find the information we need, we must also know how to evaluate it … This new type of literacy requires competency with communication technologies, including computers and mobile devices that can help in our day-to-day decision-making.

That is a quote from President Obama's proclamation of a digital literacy awareness month in October 2009, where he was emphasising the importance for all Americans to be adept in effectively navigating the information age. I think that there is a profound argument, which is made in this report and was brought to the attention of the committee by teacher librarians across the nation, about the significance of full digital citizenship, full participation in the digital age, enabling all of our students to manage this sort of information. I think there are real threats if we do not get on top of this. Cyberbullying, as some of the previous members have talked about, is an emerging issue that is very much at the forefront of the minds of educators and parents. But, more broadly, digital citizenship is an important issue that all young people are going to have to come to terms with. There are, for example, the privacy implications of digital participation. With the posting of photographs on social websites, the exposure of personal information will exist in that environment for a lifetime. All of these conversations are occurring now.

It is important to acknowledge that the dual qualification of a teacher librarian—the teaching qualification, which helps them to understand the pedagogy, the curriculum and the developmental issues with the young people that they are working with, combined with the library qualification, which gives them the expertise in information management and assessment—is a unique combination that is invaluable in a school. We could see, when we took evidence from some of the more well-to-do private schools, that, where they had the capacity, they were investing in these resources in very significant ways. The teacher librarian leadership in their libraries was in fact part of the school leadership and was developing the schools' digital policies, digital citizenship policies and education programs. Teacher librarians across all sectors were very keen to take up the new responsibilities and to play a greater role in their schools in this way.

There is much in this story of their involvement that should be shared. We found in some states—and it is identified in the report that a couple of states did not give evidence to the committee, although most did—that there was a very sad depletion in the numbers of teacher librarians. They were down to what you might call critical mass if you were looking at figures for the survival of a species. They were really, really low numbers. If you have gone through as the leader of the school never having had the value of a teacher librarian, then, not surprisingly, you are unlikely to seek that out and value it. And yet all the international evidence, including the Lonsdale report in Australia, backs up the argument that there is a direct link between a fully resourced library with a qualified teacher librarian working in it and improved literacy and numeracy results in a school. If more people in school leadership roles were aware of this evidence, they would be more likely to seek out and to utilise more effectively their teacher librarians. I think it is a real asset that we should be looking not only to maximise but to expand.

I am encouraged by the fact that the member for Kingston, as chair of the committee, reports that there has actually been increased enrolment in teacher librarian courses at universities this year. Some of that may have been as a result of the conversations that occurred as this inquiry took place, raising the awareness.

In the few minutes I have left, I want to challenge some of the evidence that was given to us, when I was chairing the committee, that all teachers would do this and therefore there was no requirement to have a specialist in the school. As a former history teacher, I am acutely aware of the importance of resources. I am also acutely aware of the multiple pressures on the time of a classroom teacher. The thought that you would say to a history teacher in my day, 'There are a thousand text books published in this particular topic; go out and have a look at them and work out what is most appropriate for your curriculum,' is ridiculous. The average classroom teacher does not have the time or capacity to engage in that way. The teacher librarian is a specialist who does that for you and provides good quality resources for your classroom. It is a tremendous partnership that I relied on on many occasions. I think it is very short-sighted of education authorities to think that this role can just be subsumed into the classroom teacher's role. I would challenge them to have another look at what the evidence actually shows about the importance of the teacher librarian.

I want to commend the recommendation around the provision of at least a base level of online resources to schools. Schools reported to us widely variant amounts of resources that they had available to purchase products for their libraries. It is important that we keep books, that we keep reading and that we keep the love of literacy, but it is also important that we keep good quality based resources available online. I think that this is a good proposal.

Finally, because I did not have a chance in the former parliament, I also want to acknowledge the work of the secretariat: Glenn Worthington, the secretary; Justin Baker, the inquiry secretary; Ray Knight, a senior researcher who I worked with; and Daniel Miletic and Tarran Snape. They are not my committee secretariat anymore, but they were a fantastic group who did tremendous work. It is certainly reflected in the support that they have given to the current committee and I absolutely commend the recommendations in this report to the government. I look forward to seeing some action come out of all the work and the commitment of teacher-librarians who gave us evidence across the nation.

Deborah O'Neill (Robertson, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to welcome the document too. As a new member of the parliament I did not get to be a participant in all of the hearings. But certainly, in the early part of my parliamentary career the latter part of this report was pulled together and I had the opportunity to hear some evidence from some key participants in the field of teacher-librarianship. I acknowledge the previous speaker, the member for Cunningham, and I come to this assessment of the inquiry and its report from the point of view of being a teacher myself. I have never been a librarian and I have always held them in great esteem. The access that teacher-librarians have provided for my own children in the primary context has been a transformational learning experience.

A teacher-librarian is an amazing asset to any school. Teachers have a curriculum to contend with. They have their own pedagogy to continue to work on. As the member for Cunningham has indicated, the capacity to be across the entire range of articles that are available, the entire range of resources that are available for your field and the entire range of literature that is available for your own students—particularly for me looking at it from that point of view as an English teacher—is simply impossible without an outstanding teacher-librarian. I think of my own experiences of how different the experiences were in the primary school setting, the secondary school setting and then the tertiary setting, not only because of the developmental differences that need to be addressed in those different contexts but also because of the different needs of students at those different points.

Being able to access your teacher-librarian outside of the classroom—during recess, at lunchtime, and before and after school—can become transformational learning moments for young people in school. I recall, very fondly, a teacher-librarian who worked at my school during my secondary schooling. As the eldest of six children I can say that our house was a very busy place. In the weekend leading up to the HSC she gave me access to the library so I had a bit of quiet time and a bit of space and access to the books on the shelves to do my final preparation. I am forever grateful to Miss White for giving me that opportunity. Sadly, for a whole generation of young Australians the role of teacher-librarian has become an indication of a crisis in staffing capacity.

I want to address the recommendations of the report in particular. There are five core recommendations. The first section relates to the impact of recent Commonwealth government policies and investments in school libraries. Recommendation 1 is particularly important at this time because it recommends that the Commonwealth government partner with all educational authorities to fund the provision of a core set of online databases which would then be made available to all Australian schools. Of course, books remain a very important part of what a library offers and many debates in many parts of academia and the general community abound about the difference between books and digital information. I note the digital engagement of my two colleagues in the chamber at the moment. We want information. We want to access information and we know that the digital world is out there. How then can we as Australian educators resile from the responsibility to make sure that excellent data access is available to those people in our schools who need to learn about how to responsibly use digital information? The capacity to interact with databases and high-quality academic literature is a very important element of preparing our senior students in secondary schooling to take on the breadth of information that is out there in the world and to be able to make very careful, informed decisions about the quality of the types of articles they are reading. To be able to do that before you get to university really enhances your learning as a student in the later parts of your senior secondary education. It also certainly sets you on the right path for engaging with that digital literacy in the tertiary context.

The second recommendation that comes under the impact statement is regarding the work that needs to be undertaken with the states and territories to develop a discrete national policy statement that defines the importance of digital and information literacy for learning in the 21st century. This needs to be used as a tool to guide teachers and principals on the centrality of deciding how we use resources in schools, how funds are allocated to and for learning in a digital way with the librarian and through a library or how they might be allocated to other things. Without a framework that articulates the importance and the centrality of our teacher librarians and the work that they do, they become extremely vulnerable. That is what we found in the inquiry. Although I only heard the end of the inquiry, certainly that remained the case as the inquiry closed.

The second section dealt with the potential of school libraries and librarians to contribute to improved community educational outcomes. This really goes without saying. The reality is that teacher librarians bring a special set of skills and competencies to any school community. They are an asset to the local community, who have come to use the library in many situations. Right now in Spencer on the Central Coast a community school library is being constructed with funds from the Building the Education Revolution. I also want to note in my own electorate the amazing facility that the Central Coast Grammar School have built. The access that they provide for the community to that resource is a fantastic thing. The teacher librarians were an absolutely vibrant part of the conversation about how that physical space could be shaped and also how that space could be used most effectively for the students.

One of the other critical recommendations that I want to address in the time that I have remaining regards perhaps the core issue that triggered this report, and that is the issue of recruitment and development of teacher librarians. As the member for Cunningham expressed in her speech just a few moments ago, we have hit a point where we have lost so many teacher librarians that they are nearly extinct. There are many reasons we could explore for the reality we currently face, but the reality of the future is what we need to be focused on. That is why this report offers us some very important signposts for the way we proceed.

One of the things that needs to be addressed is the reality of some teachers returning to work from periods of time where they may have been unwell, and instead of being supported adequately, they are simply farmed off to the library, which positions the library as a mere adjunct, something perhaps much less important than what happens in the classrooms. We have heard comments that the perception that teacher librarians do not make a significant contribution has actually become alive and well in some of our schools. It is hard to believe that we could have reached this point in an age when we talk about literacy so frequently and openly. And the multiplicity of literacy that we need to acquire demands that we have even more skilled teacher librarians than has been the case in the past. Instead, a number of principals have told me that they put the worst teachers in the library because that is where they will do the least damage. There can be no possible way that it would ever be okay, not only for the students but for the teacher themselves, to put a poor teacher—a teacher who is struggling in any situation where they are interacting with young people—in that situation, regardless of whether they are delivering a curriculum or delivering critical digital literacy, critical thinking and critical support for students in a teacher-librarian context inside a library. This goes to the heart of the professionalism that is required. The professionalism of the teacher librarians that I, along with my colleagues on the committee, took evidence from was absolutely outstanding. They deeply understand what a teacher librarian can bring to learning and to life outcomes for young people.

I definitely commend the report to the House and I look forward to the minister's action in this area.

Mike Symon (Deakin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to start off by thanking the member for Robertson for a very good speech, which went to the depth of the report. She has really expanded on a lot of the issues in it. The committee inquiry went for a long time. I have had the benefit of being in both the last parliament and the present one, but the member for Robertson had to start about three-quarters of the way through the inquiry, and I think she has truly grasped the gist of it.

As a member of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Training in the 42nd Parliament, which commenced this inquiry, and a member of the Standing Committee on Education and Employment in the 43rd parliament, which concluded the report, I have no hesitation in commending the report to the House. I would particularly like to acknowledge the work of the member for Cunningham, Sharon Bird, for her work in chairing the committee in the 42nd Parliament and the work of the member for Kingston, Amanda Rishworth, for her work in chairing the committee and in concluding the report in the 43rd Parliament. Although the terms of reference at first glance may seem quite limiting, this was one of those inquiries where the more questions were asked the wider our scope seemed to get. Because of the change of parliament, the inquiry actually went longer than planned. But I am very pleased, standing here tonight, to be able to say that we completed the job we were given, and I think the committee as a whole completed it very well.

The inquiry's schedule for hearings took us to every state and territory. There are vast differences between the state and territory systems, which we saw in our travels and heard about from witnesses. No two states or territories were the same but, having said that, there was nowhere that I would give a pass mark to. Everywhere we travelled we heard of the problems of teacher librarians in the system and with the resourcing of libraries, and in most cases it was a long-term trend that was heading down.

There were exceptions, however. I found the exceptions quite surprising, but on reflection they are probably not. We found that private sector schools overall greatly valued teacher librarians and used teacher librarians as a selling point to attract parents to their schools. It was a fairly simple argument that they put to us, and it came from many sources: having teacher librarians in our schools improves our results. I do not doubt that. Having heard from so many teacher librarians, their associations and various other groups during the inquiry, and seeing international evidence as well, this issue came up time and time again. Whereas some state systems were inclined to use teacher librarians as relief staff if a teacher was sick or could not attend class for some reason, that certainly was not the case in the evidence that we heard from the private schools. As a better qualified person than a 'standard' qualified teacher, if that is the right description, the teacher librarian has knowledge above and beyond, and to be put into a position where you can be called away from your job at any time to go and mind a class because someone is not available really undervalues the profession. I would also like to say that we took some very good evidence from the various professional associations. One thing I would really like to highlight in my time here is the summation of what a teacher librarian does, because many people do not quite understand. They think, 'A teacher, a librarian—maybe it's someone who files the books.' That really undervalues the profession in a huge way. The summation of what a teacher librarian does I will leave to the words of the Australian Library and Information Association. I think they got it quite right in their submission to the inquiry. What they said was:

Teacher librarians support and implement the vision of their school communities through advocating and building effective library and information services and programs that contribute to the development of lifelong learners …

The teacher librarian is both an educator and an information manager with integrated understandings from both areas. Professional staff qualified in teacher education and librarianship (teacher librarians) are responsible for both shaping and reflecting the school’s objectives with respect to library and information programs and services.

As an integral partner in the school’s teaching and learning team, the teacher librarian has a role in the planning, implementation and evaluation of education policies, curricula, learning outcomes and programs, with particular reference to the development of learners’ research and information literacies.

I think the key words in those few paragraphs are 'information literacies'.

As we conducted the inquiry, it became more and more apparent that the way many schools teach has changed rapidly in recent years. Information literacy now includes the digital world. We found too often that it was taken for granted that teachers and their students would know by instinct how to research on the internet. We heard large amounts of evidence as to why this was not the case. It was very interesting to hear that in many cases the role of a teacher librarian directly suited the role of a digital gatekeeper for information. I must say, I had not thought of that at the start of the inquiry, but by the end of the inquiry I was quite convinced that this is a new and expanded role for teacher librarians. It probably builds the case more than ever for having teacher librarians in greater numbers in as many schools as possible. There will always be the small schools that have only two dozen students where it is not going to be feasible to have a full-time teacher librarian, but there are many schools of hundreds or a thousand plus students where it should be an absolute necessity. The report certainly goes into some of those areas and the reasons why.

Talking of digital literacy, I have a school in my own electorate, Ringwood Secondary College, which did something that was at the time fairly new. It has caught on so quickly it is not notable anymore. In 2010 all 300 of their year 7 students were required to have an iPad instead of textbooks. From memory, I think they actually had one textbook and everything else was on the iPad. That is a 300-strong army of iPads, if you like, that need looking after from the school's point of view as well as the student's—someone to guide what goes on and how they are used. That is not going to happen without someone who has knowledge and understanding of where the information comes from. That was in 2010, and I note that in 2011 there are many schools in my local area that now have iPads as part of their school equipment. I am sure that in the next couple of years it will become a very standard item. It is good from the student's point of view—they do not have to carry around a schoolbag with a dozen or so textbooks in it—and it is good from the school's point of view because they can update texts as they go through the year. That is one of the great points going forward where teacher librarians can be a real asset to any school. There are, of course, many other things that they do, and I am not going to go over everything that is recommended in the report. I thoroughly agree with all 11 recommendations in the report, and I certainly recommend that report for reading by the wider public and especially the education sector.

Further to that, we heard a lot about access to online libraries and the price that schools had to pay to be able to do that. In many cases it was quite an exorbitant fee for not a whole lot of use. We heard evidence that school libraries could spend 25 per cent of their budget subscribing to an online database, and you cannot expect many schools to do that. There is a resource called Electronic Resources Australia that offers a very wide range of data and can be accessed across all schools. I think one of the key recommendations of the report was that governments at both levels put money and resources into allowing schools to be able to access that at a bulk rate as cheaply as possible. I commend the report to the House.

Yvette D'Ath (Petrie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is certainly my pleasure to stand and support this report of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Employment, titled School libraries and teacher librarians in 21st century Australia. The member for Deakin and I were both members of the committee in the previous parliament, which commenced this inquiry, and I want to acknowledge the chair of that committee in the previous parliament, the member for Cunningham, who I know has spoken on this report. I also want to acknowledge the contributions of the member for Kingston, who is now the chair of the education and employment committee, and also the member for Robertson. I know all of these people are extremely passionate about education. This was a comprehensive inquiry. It received hundreds of submissions from teacher librarians across Australia to give evidence, and teacher librarians appeared in hearings in each state and territory. It just shows the importance of this issue to education.

The federal Labor government has made a strong commitment to investing in education. We have built, and continue to build, new libraries and resource centres, and we refurbish existing libraries and resource centres in every single primary school across this country. I have seen the benefits that have flowed from those facilities across the primary schools in the electorate of Petrie. What these facilities do is provide opportunities. It is what happens inside these facilities that is so important. That is where the learning truly happens. If we are going to optimise those opportunities, get the most from them and provide the best possible education for our children, we need to make sure that we have the skilled teachers to be able to utilise those facilities and work not just with the children but with their peers and the whole school community.

That is what we heard through this inquiry. We heard examples of teacher librarians who are working so closely with their school communities and with their principals. They are not just the teacher librarian; they are the head of curriculum. They are on the key body within the school to decide how that education is rolled out across all of the various curricula. Then we heard the examples where the teacher librarian has really become a relief teacher or is now there simply to teach people how to use the computers or the Smart Boards but not how to really utilise that resource. It was interesting that, as the report notes at 3.40, in the survey that was undertaken of librarians:

It was almost unanimously agreed (99 per cent) amongst librarians surveyed that:

And they are seeing these results in NAPLAN results. That was the evidence of the teacher librarians.

I just want to go to some of the recommendations, and I know the member for Deakin has spoken about some of these as well. On the last point that the member for Deakin raised in relation to online database resources: how can we expect that every child in every school will get the same opportunity if they are not getting access to the same resources? That is clearly the case. That is the evidence we saw across the country. There are those schools that can afford it and are able to subscribe to the broader online databases and then there are those schools who just cannot find sufficient funds in the budget to subscribe adequately to those databases. You can put in computers and you can train the teachers but, if you do not have the resource there for them to use, the children will not get the benefit and the children will not get the same opportunities, irrespective of where they go to school. The first recommendation that we make in this report is:

The Committee recommends that the Commonwealth Government partner with all education authorities to fund the provision of a core set of online database resources, which are made available to all Australian schools.

We also saw that there was an issue with the intake of students, those who are doing degrees in education who are going on and doing a masters of education in teacher librarianship, in that really this was not being promoted as a potential career path. I note the comment of the chair in the foreword of the report:

The Committee was advised that Charles Sturt University’s second semester intake of students into its Master of Education (Teacher Librarianship) had doubled in 2010, and, it was suggested that the publicity surrounding this inquiry may have been a factor in the increased numbers being attracted to the teacher librarian profession.

If that is what this inquiry did, if it does nothing else, that is a fantastic result.

But there is much more to be done. We need to make sure that, in the development of the curriculum and in every aspect of government policy and work being done to ensure the best education possible for our young people, we are looking at the role of our teacher librarians and the important function that they have within our schools. Recommendation 3 is:

The Committee recommends that the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority include statistical information about the breakdown of all specialist teachers, including teacher librarians, on the My School website.

This recommendation was made because it became clear that we do not know what specialist teachers we have in our schools. We found out in Queensland that you may have done a masters in teacher librarianship, you may be a specialist in this area, but when you register in Queensland as a teacher there is not even a category to identify yourself as a specialist in this area. That needs to be rectified. It also showed once again that we do not have consistency across the states. If we want consistent outcomes then we have to have consistency across the states on the value of teacher librarians and the recognition of this as a very important specialist teacher role.

There are many other recommendations in this report. I support each and every of one of those recommendations, as does every member who has spoken on this report. I know that this report was unanimously supported by all members from both sides of this parliament, as it should be. This is an extremely important report. It is one that I know many in my electorate have been eagerly awaiting the release of. I look forward to forwarding copies of this report out to those teacher librarians in the schools so that they can see what their effort to bring information to us has resulted in with these recommendations. I commend the report to the House. It is an extremely important report and one that I hope the government follows closely.

Debate adjourned.