Michelle Rowland (Greenway, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Speaker, my question is to the Prime Minister. How has the government made sure that parents and school communities have the information and the funding they need to make every school a great school?

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

I thank the member for Greenway for her question. I thank her for her passion for improving schooling in her electorate, because she recognises, like I do, that the future of this country is being made in Australian classrooms today and that we cannot be the strong, smart, fair nation we want to be in the future unless our children get a world-class education.

Information is important to getting a world-class education. When this government was first elected and I first became Minister for Education no-one could tell you how children were going at school around the nation and no-one could tell you which were the 1,000 most disadvantaged schools in the country. No-one could tell you any of that information—no-one had bothered to find out. Well, find out we did and we put it on the MySchool website and now you can see on the MySchool website not only the results of literacy and numeracy testing over four years but three years of financial information. Why did we do that? We wanted parents to know. Why did we do that? We wanted the nation to know. We also did that because we then wanted to work in national partnership schools and prove that extra resources combined with new ways of working mean children get a better education. And we have proved that. In our national partnership schools 71 per cent reduced the number of students who were below minimum standards in year 3 reading and 70 per cent reduced the number of students below minimum standards in year 5 numeracy. Put simply, the kids in those schools in those classrooms have got a better education.

Now we want to lock this in for 9,500 schools not just for today but for generations and generations to come—for the nation to be able to say to itself that the broken funding model of the former Howard government is gone and that we are funding our teachers, classrooms and children right for generations to come. That is why I am determined that around the country we see every school included in the benefits of our school funding reforms, that we see every child in every school get the benefits of our National Plan for School Improvement. I do not want to see any child left behind. That is why we will be spending the days between now and 30 June calling on premiers and the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory and working with them to make sure that they put their children first and put the politics second. Australia's children deserve a world-class education and I am absolutely determined that they get one.