Andrew Leigh (Fraser, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth. Will the minister update the House about the launch of the My School 2013 website in my electorate today? What are some of the school success stories highlighted by the site? Is the minister aware of other approaches to giving parents more and better information through the site?

Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Fraser for his question and for his longstanding interest in education policy and reform. We on this side of the House understand that investing in education is investing in the nation's future, and we understand that investing in students' education gives them the opportunity for good jobs in the future. And that is why it was great to be with the Prime Minister at Latham Primary School today to launch My School 2013—and congratulations to that school on their very good year 5 results.

My School is a powerful tool that provides a more complete picture of school and student progress and, importantly for us here, helps us learn what works in schools. So five years on, five million hits later, this website is providing more information than ever before. Five years on, we also know that the investments we have made in national partnerships in literacy and numeracy and for low socioeconomic community schools are also improving results. That is what we discovered today.

In the National Partnership on Literacy and Numeracy we have been more successful in reducing the percentage of students at or below minimum standards at all schools in Australia. In the National Partnership for Low Socio-economic Status School Communities, we have seen improvements for Indigenous students, where education is a passport out of poverty.

I am asked about success stories. There are plenty of them, but I was struck by an article in the Age about Sunshine North Primary School, where many students come to school and struggle with reading and writing. The principal, Mr Ryan, was 'not an early convert to the NAPLAN student testing scheme' but he now sees it as 'a useful tool in pushing his staff and students to do better'. There, again, the results speak for themselves. In 2008, 53 per cent of students were at or below the national minimum standard for year 5 reading; in 2012 that had dropped to 32 per cent, an absolutely fantastic result. So we know that My School is important because it can drive focused and targeted investment and because it builds a good body of information for policy and education. Parents know it is important because they get more information. The Gonski report acknowledged it as a foundation for funding reform. In fact, it seems that the only person who does not support My School in this way is—surprise, surprise!—the member for Sturt, the shadow minister for education.

Class sizes do not matter to the member for Sturt. He wants to show one in seven teachers the door and now he wants to strip out the very NAPLAN results that I have spoken to today, cutting away crucial school-level information for parents, closing down the transparency that has provided the platform for school reforms. We are proud of My School. We are proud of the investment that we are making in schools to lift student results and we will commit ourselves to further education reform, in the interests of all Australians.