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

It is the last week of term 3 in Victorian schools. Term 3 is an incredible term. People work tirelessly across the term preparing senior students and, of course, students are finishing the last week of term 3 looking forward to the examination period. Term 3 also sees schools receive the detailed reports on school performance in NAPLAN, the National Assessment Program-Literacy and Numeracy. Across the last five weeks in my electorate in Lalor, where there are over 50 schools, many of those schools have been carefully studying the levels of student growth that they are achieving on an individual student basis, on a class basis, on a school basis and even across schools in networks. They are looking at whether children are meeting their milestones; they are celebrating the great achievements that have been made in student growth across a two-year period. They are also identifying the challenges—identifying the areas where they can do better in their classrooms and the areas of the next learning for their groups of students.

This is incredibly important work. They are validating or challenging what the NAPLAN results—that one-off test—tell them about students' learning across the last two years and then setting up children's learning across the next two years. It is incredible work. The challenge, of course, is improvement at scale. The challenge is in getting all of our schools into an improvement cycle. Of course, as a country, this is one of our biggest challenges. It is why the previous Labor government had its education review. That found that we needed equity in resourcing as an absolute priority. It also highlighted that we needed teacher quality—pre service and for those existing teachers we need to implement a culture and a system that continues to train our teachers as they embed in our schools.

I noted yesterday our new Prime Minister talking about the opportunities and challenges of a rapidly globalised economy. He said:

We know that our future lies in technology. It lies in science. It lies in all of the new industries. It lies in the future.

Today I would like to call on our new Prime Minister to please make education a priority when considering your cabinet and considering the future. Education has not been a priority in the previous two years. Promises were made and broken. It is time now to revisit those, to look to the future and to ensure that our schools get the resourcing that they need.

An enormous report was delivered in this place and it needs to be addressed. I call on the Prime Minister to think seriously. Give us a minister who cares about education. Give us a minister who understands the issues around education.