Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) notes:

(a) the importance of investing in education and ensuring that Australia remains competitive by providing quality education to all Australian children regardless of their postcode; and

(b) with concern that the gap between the most well off and disadvantaged students in Australia is on average 2.5 years, which is a much wider gap than the OECD average;

(2) acknowledges that the:

(a) well respected and qualified 'Gonski panel' identified six loadings and the importance of school reform as the key to improvement; and

(b) New South Wales, Victorian, South Australian, Tasmanian and Australian Capital Territory governments along with the national Catholic and independent school authorities signed up to this funding model;

(3) recognises that under the new four year funding arrangements for education, that it is impossible for the Government to guarantee that no school across Australia will be worse off; and

(4) calls on the Government not to return to the inequitable Socioeconomic Status scheme funding model of the past, but to commit to its promise of honouring the education funding agreements already entered into and provide equity by making it a truly national system.

There has been much said about our performance as a nation in the international measures of education in recent years. I have not heard one voice suggest that there is not a need for improvement. In fact, I would argue that no matter what our performance—be it low or high—there will always be room for improvement, because the education of our young people must continually improve to keep pace with the demands of modern life and to ensure that Australia can compete in a global economy.

It was to this end that the Labor government set about building a national system; a system to measure our performance and the resources going into our schools; a system that provided transparency and clear measures so that we as a nation could monitor our progress. The Labor government understood that national improvement requires national effort, a national plan, and national resourcing. The national Better Schools Plan, or Gonski as it is colloquially known, was designed to deliver just that, and it is needed—not least because each state and territory does things very differently; from curriculum to starting age, funding levels, and even centralisation and autonomy. But rather than doing as they promised, this government and this education minister have created division after diversion, to avoid getting started on the real work. On the same day that the minister made his announcement about the dismantling of ACARA, the body established to work with each state and territory system to make a national plan possible, he began a new curriculum war—the first of many distractions. And for what? So that, after years of an exhaustive consultation process, we can start again with a two-person expert review? His second distraction was about independent schools. The minister talks about independent schools with such relish, as though they are a new idea. He claims they are the cure-all for student outcome improvements. But the minister refuses to acknowledge Victoria, where autonomy and local decision-making have been happening in state schools for a long time and where, clearly, autonomy in and of itself does not improve student outcomes state-wide. And finally, in the latest announcement—that is, once again, a rehash designed to distract and divert—the minister talks about teacher training.

The Gonski plan incorporated the required changes in teacher training. The states that signed up to Gonski have already started on this work. Labor's Gonski reforms provide the necessary funding for, and make sure that states pursue, the following improvements: better admissions; tough literacy and numeracy standards; more practical experience in the classroom; professional standards for teachers at every stage of their career; and to continue to improve teacher education programs in partnership with the Tertiary Education Quality Standards Agency, universities and employers. If these things are already happening, why is the government wasting money on a review? Because they are stalling. They are stalling because the minister does not want to commit to needs-based funding. He refuses to even talk about it. We have only had reference to the SES model being a good system, signalling to many a return to the Howard years—a far cry from what the Gonski panel recommended. This, despite Victoria having had a model for many years, Western Australia having already conducted a review, and New South Wales embracing the same. This is the fundamental recommendation of the Gonski report. It goes to the heart of addressing the inequity in education that is holding our performance back. The minister needs to give us at least what he said he would give us—a unity ticket on equitable education. He needs to put the planks for national school improvement back in place; to deliver the full six years of better schools funding; and to let the schools and teachers get on with the job. The new mantra for this government is, 'get out of our way'. I say to them: there must be something standing behind you, because all you are doing is moving backwards.

I commend the motion to the House.

Ian Goodenough (Moore, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is there a seconder for the motion? I call the member for Fisher.

Mal Brough (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion. Education is pivotal to the future of my children, my grandchildren and the nation. We all know that, and I think those on both sides of the House recognise it. We have debates about a range of issues. We sometimes fight on ideological grounds. We sometimes fight about the dollar value. We sometimes fight about whether it is the state or the nation that should actually be governing different aspects of the education system. As a former soldier, I know what it is like for families to go from one state to another and fight with the variation in the school starting age—it really is debilitating. A lot of those things are being addressed by both sides of the House. But today's bill is actually quite misleading, on so many fronts, and I think that it behoves me to point out to the new member for Lalor where it is failing.

First of all, she makes the point that the Labor Party were somehow going to implement Gonski, and we saw around our school gates: 'Implement Gonski', 'I'm for Gonski'. I can tell you now the Labor Party were not, because they did not deliver anything remotely like what the Gonski review panel put up—nothing. So let's not kid ourselves. Let's not pretend we are not who we said we would be and connect ourselves with something that the Labor Party simply was not going to enact.

Secondly, the member who now stands as the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Shorten, was the very minister who at the time withdrew money from my state. He also withdrew money from the Northern Territory. When we are talking about a national program and those most in need, I think I am well qualified, both from my public life and my private life, to talk about what it is like to be a remote schoolteacher in the Northern Territory working with the most disadvantaged children. Yet it was the Labor government that crowed about its commitment to education that did not guarantee the money under what you, the member for Lalor, depict as a national scheme. A national scheme, by definition, would be for everybody. WA is part of our Federation, Queensland is part of our Federation and the Northern Territory is part of our Federation, but they were not part of it. They were locked out.

Can I tell you that the students and teachers in my electorate are absolutely delighted that the Queensland state government is delivering Commonwealth funding of $131 million—not next year, not the year after, not the never-never. It is in their pockets today. Every single school on the Sunshine Coast has extra money thanks to Tony Abbott, the Prime Minister, and Christopher Pyne, the Minister for Education, delivering on an election commitment. That is money that they actually have the autonomy to spend. In speaking directly to principals in the last week, they told me how important it is that they can engage their local business communities. They do not have to get onto QBuild, which might have outrageous costs. And in doing so they get to do the things that matter in their schools, when it matters to them and they have control. That means that have more autonomy and more focus on what matters to their school and getting the outcomes that matter. Local decision making is essential if we want to get the best outcomes, because no two communities are the same.

The member who just spoke said 'national, national, national'. My view is local, local, local—local parents, local businesspeople, local teachers and local school bodies that get together and work to overcome the disabilities and the challenges in their own school communities to get the outcomes that we are all seeking. When you build a national scheme, as the Labor Party referred to, the first thing is to get everybody involved. They failed that test. They were unable to do so. They failed the test of being able to build simple buildings in schools—outrageous costs, huge waste, buildings that actually went places.

Ms MacTiernan interjecting—

I can tell the member from WA who is having a little whinge over here I know of instances where they pulled down buildings in remote communities to put other ones up in their place with no net value. If that is what you consider value, it is no wonder the Labor government you were part of in WA was a failure and it is no wonder the federal Labor government was a failure in this area as well. Get to know your facts. Talk to the teachers, who will tell you that they actually want autonomy. They wanted autonomy and they received it from the WA government. The Queensland government has done it, as the previous member said. The Victorian government has as well. This government is delivering cash to families and to teachers, so the people who know what is needed in their schools can make those decisions. We will not be wasting money. We will not be distracting people. We will be giving schools what they need so we have the education that the country both needs and deserves. (Time expired)

Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In this general education debate I think it is important to say—and I have been on the record saying—it is not just about money, that one does have to get the pedagogy right. You can continue to throw money at a bad program and it will not help, but we definitely do need the money to ensure that particularly those people in lower SEI groups who are not achieving their potential are given the opportunity to do it. I have always argued we have to get the pedagogy right, but then we have to fund the delivery of that so that we can make up the difference.

What I really want to talk about today is the most lamentable backtracking on the part of the Minister for Education on a principle that he espoused when he was in opposition and now seems to have reneged on. It is the importance of lifting the standards of people who are going into our education system. The Minister for Education said that we need to lift the ATAR standards of people being admitted to education. Indeed, that was consistent with the COAG reforms that from around 2011. Since appointing the vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University to chair this review of teaching standards, he has totally backtracked. That is most unfortunate.

We often talk about Finland. It has been most successful in turning around educational outcomes. In the late 1960s Finland shut down its existing teacher-training colleges and it only allowed education to be attached to its most prestigious and elite universities. To have any chance of being a teacher one had to be very well-educated and a relatively high achiever. This is an important principle that we need to bring into place here. In Australia we have continued to lower the standards for admission to teacher-training programs. Across Australia last year, for example, 7.3 per cent of people admitted to education degrees had an ATAR of less than 50 per cent. We had 16.6 per cent of people with ATARs of less than 60 per cent and 27 per cent of people with ATARs of less than 70.

I accept that ATAR is not the only judgement of a person's intellectual capacity, but adopting the principle that had been supported through COAG, of requiring people to be in the top 30 per cent in literacy and general intellectual achievement, is not unreasonable. Unfortunately, Vice-Chancellor Greg Craven, overseeing this investigation into teacher standards, said that all we need is a 'lick of paint'. We do not just need a lick of paint. We need something much more profound. I will give you the example of a test done at ECU. A document was sent to me in around 2010, so perhaps the test was done in 2009. They gave the year 9 literacy test to first-year education students. Ninety-three per cent of those students failed, first up. It was three weeks, intensive. They got the number down to about 86 per cent failing, after another three-week intensive, and then they got the score down to 81 per cent failing the year 9 literacy test.

This is not good enough. The fact that we are now saying 'Look it's quite good; we're now getting universities that have got their ATAR standard for education at around 65—that's a real achievement' shows a demeaning of education. We are discouraging smart, bright, hardworking young students going into education by allowing such low scores. We know that the Australian Catholic University— (Time expired)

Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

At the heart of everything here, the one thing I like about this private member's motion is that we are talking about education, because education is the key. The previous member raised a couple of valid points. Finland is a great example of what can happen, but Finland is a very small section. I have friends who went on sabbaticals to Finland. When they walked in, every kid looked the same, every kid had the same blonde hair and every kid had the same background. No one in a Finnish school has to deal with kids who have not had breakfast. No-one in Finland has to deal with kids who have the other challenges that Australian schools have. No-one in Finland has to deal with those things that are inherently tough in the Australian education system.

Ms MacTiernan interjecting—

The one thing I will agree with, member for Perth, when you talk about teachers, is that in Finland they are PhD qualified. They are very special people. Teachers that I know who have walked into classrooms in Finland talk about the level of engagement there. They say it is spectacular. What we have to do is talk about that engagement.

My younger brother Stewart is a secondary school principal in Brisbane. He is a very good teacher. He sent me a photograph of his grade 3 class at Texas State School in 1970. There were 34 kids in that class, one teacher and no teachers aide. Six kids in the class had there shoes on; the rest of them were barefoot. There were some terrible haircuts. I bet every kid in that class could read and write. There was no teacher's aide, no special needs—nothing. What that teacher, Miss Baker, had to do! She was a very, very tough teacher. In those days, because of the way education was, the smart women were never going to go on to be doctors, pharmacists, accountants or engineers. They were probably told they would make good teachers and nurses. Those of us who are of that age were so blessed with our education, because we had that level of female teaching. My wife is an early childhood teacher. She also is a spectacular teacher. In her class she has three special needs. She has kids who cannot toilet themselves and she has 12 hours aide time. The challenges in education are so much bigger than they were in our time. We ask so much more of teachers today than we ever have.

I take the point of the member for Perth about ATARs and the level of education coming into the system, but I think that what we have to do is look at why people are taking up education, why people are becoming teachers. I think a lot of it is to do with the lack of risk. When kids leave school, because we have been so risk averse at school, they do not know what to do. They want to feel safe. They have not done anything. We have primary schools in Townsville where you are not allowed to do a cartwheel. We have schools in Townsville that do not compete in sports between them because they do not want anyone to find out what it is to be a winner or a loser. Those of the sorts of things in which we have to encourage kids to risk, to fail. When I speak to year 12 kids who are about to leave school and to year 7 kids I wish them failure, because to have failed means they have stepped outside their comfort zone, taken the risk or put themselves on the edge. We as a society have to say to our kids: 'It's okay to fail. It's okay to step out,' and be done with it, to have a go, to scrape you knee, to break your arm, to do that thing. That is what we have to do. We have to encourage risk. The greatest teachers I have had in life were the ones who engaged with me personally. I have no idea what their educational qualifications were, but they loved their subject and their students. That is what we want in education

I say to the Labor Party: can we move on from Gonski? What the Labor Party proposed was never Gonski. It went so far away from what Professor Gonski said. It back ended the payments so far that it was three parliaments from when it was proposed. The legislation brought to the parliament was so inadequate there was no way of working out exactly what it was doing. When the PEFO was produced we saw that they had pulled $1.2 billion out of education. Then Minister Shorten said, 'Of course we were going to put it back. It was only for the purposes of PEFO.' We are getting on with the job on education. We are actually putting smart things into schools. We are trusting our teachers to provide the teaching outcome. We are encouraging parents and principals and school communities. As the member for Fisher, Mal Brough, said earlier, Labor talks about national, national, national; big picture all the time. What we are talking about is local, local, local. That is where the education debate must be.

Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I speak on this motion on education funding at a moment when the importance of investing in the skills and education of people in my electorate has been made all too clear. The education system in Melbourne's first is already under great strain. Schools face larger class sizes and smaller budgets, and our TAFEs struggle with the consequences of the state liberal government's $300 million of budget cuts. Our exceptional teachers and school leaders in Melbourne's western not to blame for the strains confronting our education system. Watching what they do with so little is remarkable.

One such school, Sunshine Secondary College, which was rightly recognised by the Grattan Institute's Turning around schools: it can be done report last week, was acknowledged as a leader in school turnaround. The vision of principal Tim Blunt for Sunshine Secondary College is to be applauded, and the results the school is now seeing in maths attainment are a worthy model for schools across the nation.

Despite these success stories, those teaching our children in Melbourne's west are facing difficult times. The loss of the Toyota plant in Altona has sent shock waves through our community and will place an increasing strain on our education system in future years. Due to the Prime Minister's inaction, at least 2½ thousand manufacturing workers in Melbourne's west are losing their jobs. Two and a half thousand families will be suffering the social dislocation of redundancy and an uncertain economic future.

The way for Melbourne's west to rebuild is through retraining and education. The need for investment in our education system has never been greater, for it is not only the workers but the children of the workers that will suffer from the decline of manufacturing in the west. Studies show that a child's health and wellbeing decrease if a parent has been unemployed for the past six months. It is hard for these kids to focus on English and science when their parents are at home struggling with the reality of unemployment. This stress has an impact on a child's ability to learn. A child whose parent loses their job is 15 per cent more likely to repeat a grade at school. This impact on a child's marks has nothing to do with their intelligence. These kids will face new obstacles to reaching their full potential through no fault of their own.

Our schools need to help these children get the educational support they deserve so that the gap between those who have and those who do not does not widen, for, if left unchecked, it will widen. Studies show that the children of unemployed parents will on average earn nine per cent less than the children from similar backgrounds throughout their lives. They are also more likely to end up on welfare payments themselves.

So an increased and, importantly, better targeted investment in our education system needs to happen now. It needs to happen both for the manufacturing workers now looking for new career pathways and the children struggling with a stress they cannot fully comprehend. Even the state Liberal government claims to agree with this. In the wake of the news of the Toyota closure, Victorian Treasurer Michael O'Brien declared, 'It is time to redouble our efforts and to make sure that we can manage this transition and give those workers new opportunities, give them training opportunities to get new jobs.'

If the Victorian Treasurer is serious about looking after the unemployed workers of Melbourne's west, he can start by reversing his government's record cuts to the TAFE sector. I know that the higher education institutions of Melbourne's west, led by Victoria University, would be far better equipped to deal with this new retraining task had they not had the additional $40 million, 80 courses and hundreds of staff members taken away from them in 2012.

This investment in TAFE is important in the short term, but what is needed to deal with this long-term dislocation is investment in our schools. Yet, rather than giving school students the tools to escape the chasms they now find themselves in, the Abbott government are digging deeper and deeper into the earth. They are playing games with the education funding they guaranteed during the 2013 election. First, the Minister for Education announced that, despite their promised unity ticket, funding was no longer guaranteed and it was back to the drawing board. Then he announced that the funding was there but allocated according to the Howard government's failed socioeconomic status model. Finally, the education minister affirmed the funding but, staggeringly, did not tie it to any needs based funding model at all. We are left wondering what further surprises the Abbott government will pull to prevent our schools from receiving the funding they deserve.

It is an uncertainty that would not have been seen under a Labor government. Under the Better Schools Plan, education funding was to be allocated to the schools that needed it the most. This needs based funding model would have been a boon for schools like Sunshine Secondary College, allowing an innovative principal to do even more to serve students from low socioeconomic backgrounds and non-English-speaking backgrounds. And, under the Better Schools Plan, Labor would have invested $75 million in 35 schools in Gellibrand, increasing these schools' funding by an average of more than 30 per cent.

This is the funding our kids need to reach their full potential. This is the funding needed to ensure that kids in our community are supported while their families are going through tough times. But all we have seen from the Prime Minister on education is false starts, backflips and blank cheques. The Prime Minister needs to do for these children what he could not do for their parents and provide the support that they need to have for a brighter future.

Matt Williams (Hindmarsh, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I speak to oppose the motion today. My father is a teacher, and I am on the governing council of my children's primary school. Education has been and will be a massive part of my life going forward. I, like many parents, am concerned about the state of Australia's teaching standards and education, including in South Australia.

We are on the same page on a number of things. The member for Lalor talked about the need for improvement. Yes, we know there needs to be improvement. The member for Perth talked about the need for better teacher quality. We agree and we are doing things to that end. From our side we also know we are providing certainty for schools over the forward estimates. We know that we are replacing the $1.2 billion that Bill Shorten ripped out over four years for Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia and we are delivering $1.6 billion for the remaining states and territories on the commitments to non-government schools. We are taking a national approach to this. Over the next four years we will focus on what really matters in education—improving the quality of teaching, ensuring that we have a robust curriculum, increasing school autonomy and encouraging greater parental engagement. The importance of the home environment is something that the member for Gellibrand just touched on and how that influences a child's outcome. We are committed to a fairer funding model, which will ensure that no school will be worse off because of anything the Commonwealth does. Final amounts, as we know, for government schools are determined at a state level, and so there is a different application for the model.

We agree that there needs to be a new approach in this debate, and that it is not simply all about funding. Around 33 per cent of Australian school children are failing to meet minimum standards in reading, maths and science. This is despite an increase in funding over 10 years, and that tells us that it is not all about money. When compared to other countries, Australia is going backwards in maths and science. We need to do something about this. So, what are we doing? We are looking to have better training for teachers and we are looking to give parents and principals more autonomy in the way they run the schools. We all know that if you pick a team, that gives you great confidence in matching the needs of your community organisation to the needs of your business operation. That is what giving principals greater autonomy means.

We have set up a ministerial advisory group on teacher education that will identify gaps in current teacher education and recommend implementation timeframes. The member for Perth touched on the need for teacher quality. When I was out in the community, a constituent, an experienced teacher, told me that, if young teachers could receive better skills through guidance and mentoring, that would provide considerable benefits to all. How many times do we hear parents talk about the values of the teachers and how privileged their children are to have a great teacher. Like all good organisations, some principals make better leaders than others, but that is not to say that we cannot get those principals performing at a better level and get mentoring for those who have turned things around.

I was interested to read that, according to the OCED, Shanghai in China has one of the best and most equitable education systems. They have taken a certain approach to change behaviours and practices in some schools. The government contracts a high-performing school to work with a low-performing school to achieve an improvement over a two-year period. These development programs build leadership and teaching skills that are required for change. In my short time as a local member going out to schools, I can already tell the principals who have a clear vision to create a strong culture and have been able to execute their vision. That ability to execute should never be forgotten.

We have heard the member for Gellibrand talk about the school at Sunshine. We have also had the Grattan report, publicised in the Weekend Australian, which talked about turning school performance around. It is most interesting to see the five steps they followed and, while we have heard about some of them today, not enough emphasis has been placed on some of these steps. They are things like strong leadership, effective teaching, a positive school culture and engaging parents. There is evidence that where parents are engaged better student outcomes follow. As Obama said in his book, The Audacity of Hope:

All the money in the world won't boost student achievement if parents make no effort to instill in their children the values of hard work and delayed gratification.

Debate adjourned.