Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to speak on the Schools Assistance (Learning Together—Achievement Through Choice and Opportunity) Amendment (2007 Budget Measures) Bill 2007. The bill provides for extra funding of $50 million to increase the English as a second language program for humanitarian entrants and introduces a loading in the recurrent school-funding arrangements for regional and remote non-government schools of around $40 million.

The Australian Democrats will support this bill. We have said on many occasions, along with others in this chamber, that any additional funding to enhance the facilities of our schools is more than welcome. We particularly welcome the first measure in the bill, which provides more funding for intensive English language tuition for newly arrived migrant primary- and secondary-school-aged children.

Under Australia’s humanitarian program, more families from African countries are coming to Australia. In 2003-04 and 2004-05, 70 per cent of the 12,000 refugees invited here were from Africa. In 2005-06 that was 56 per cent.

Resettling populations from protracted conflict areas does bring with it particular challenges but Australia is able to meet those challenges. Many are leaving refugee camps in which they have lived for most, if not all, of their lives. These camps often house 70,000 to 80,000 people. The refugees arrive in a country that offers welfare payments, access to health care and, importantly, schooling for children. But it is by no means an easy adjustment that they face when they come here. Some of these difficulties are common to all refugees: displacement and alienation; men being unable to find work and losing their sense of worth; women finding themselves isolated; children challenging traditional limits; and prejudice and racism, both real and perceived. Many African refugees have spent extended periods in refugee camps, often for more than 15 years, and have not had access to adequate food, water, shelter or health care.

Many of these women and children are highly traumatised. Many women have lost husbands and often on multiple occasions have been brutalised and raped in their home countries, during flight and in the camps themselves.  Many children and young people have known no other life than the refugee camp. They have grown up with very limited schooling—some with none at all. Their basic literacy skills are non-existent or very low. In 2005-06, 42 per cent of humanitarian arrivals were of school age with an average of only three years of education prior to their arrival. It is overwhelmingly obvious that we need to provide more support to these children and young people. We need to provide more support across all areas, including education and English language tuition.

In Australia, children whose schooling has been disrupted or whose schooling has been largely non-existent because of war, poverty and sickness are placed into classes according to their age and not their ability. They are already well behind the eight ball. Many will not have family or friends who are in a position to help and support them and, for these students, added support to learn English is a good thing and it will go some way to ease the difficulty that these young people face. I certainly hope that this is not the full extent of the government’s effort to provide more support. I hope the government will show more compassion for vulnerable cases and consider extending the time period and the level of service available for settlement services. I hope it will introduce long-term service provisions for at-risk cases and I hope it will fund widespread community education about the circumstances from which these groups come. The government seems very keen on spending money on advertising; let’s see some of that go where it could do some good. Rather than scaremongering about refugees with HIV, the government should provide real information about the experiences of these people who were not lucky enough to be born into Australia’s predominantly safe environment.

Unfortunately, the Democrats have far less enthusiasm for the second element of this bill. We would be the first to say that there is a clear need for additional resources for education in rural and remote Australia—that is nothing new. This government and previous governments have struggled to provide equitable access to quality education and training in rural and remote locations, and that has been the case for many years. The reality is that schools and training facilities outside metropolitan areas have different needs and costs to those in the cities, and this applies equally to government and non-government schools and facilities. It is a great shame that the government has not recognised this—these institutions are affected by their location.

There is a mountain of evidence and information available about student participation and achievement levels in rural education. On average, the school performance of country students lags behind that of urban students. There is a gap of 11 points between the percentage of students in metro areas passing the year 3 writing benchmark test and their counterparts in rural areas. That gap pretty much stays the same across years 5 and 7, give or take a percentage. One in five students in rural schools is not meeting the writing benchmarks, and it is no better in reading and numeracy. Yes, the gap between kids in metropolitan schools and kids in rural schools is only seven points in year 3, but by year 5 the gap increases to 11 and 12 and stays there for year 7. Again, we are looking at one in five rural students not meeting the benchmarks, and the situation is even worse if you look at students from very remote schools. Here, the gap between the percentage of students from urban schools and the percentage of very remote schools meeting the year 7 reading benchmark is 38. That is a difference of 38 points. For writing, that figure is 33 points and for numeracy it is also 33 points. All of us in this place have questioned the benchmarking and testing that goes on in years 3, 5 and 7 as being useful in telling us what needs to be done, but here you have a very clear example of the differences between metropolitan, rural and remote, yet we only have a very partial response from this government to fix the problem.

According to the National report on schooling, country students are also far less likely to finish school than their metropolitan counterparts. Seventy per cent of students in metro areas complete year 12 and only 53 per cent from remote areas do so. Although students from remote areas make up around one-third of our school students, rural and remote students constitute only about 17 per cent of tertiary students in Australia. That is a disgrace. We know there are problems with attracting and retaining teachers in rural schools and that we need better pre-service teacher preparation and ongoing support for those working in these country areas. Indeed, a HREOC report back in the year 2000 recommended that all teacher-training institutions should require undergraduates to study a module on teaching in rural and remote communities and should also offer students the option to undertake a fully funded practical placement in a rural and remote school. Now, you do not hear the Minister for Education, Science and Training talking about this when she goes on about performance pay for teachers being the way to lift results, and we see nothing in this bill to fix that problem or pick up on that recommendation made seven years ago.

There are disincentives affecting staff in rural and remote schools. The isolation; cost of travel; cost of living, including higher telephone, food and power costs, poor-quality and often expensive housing; and limited opportunities to participate in professional development, with resulting impacts on promotional opportunities, are some of the many difficulties. There have been suggestions that we should have a senior teacher outreach program to enhance the ongoing education and training of rural teachers and to provide for rural leadership, support and development—again, gone missing in this bill. Positive long-term incentives to increase and strengthen the rural education workforce and to encourage teachers to remain in rural areas, incentives similar to the incentives offered to country health professionals, are clearly needed. There has been talk about the need for more flexibility at a local level so that education facilities can be restructured to become more viable and relevant to their communities.

These issues and solutions are not unique to non-government schools. They are matters which apply across the spectrum of rural, regional and remote education and across early learning, primary and secondary education, vocational training and higher education. And they apply to both government and non-government schools—and that is the crux of the problem with the measures in this bill: once again the government’s anti public services bias is showing through. Yes, according to figures from the report on government services, 24 per cent of non-government school students attend schools in regional and remote areas. But 32 per cent of all government school students also attend schools in these areas. The public education system gets none of these incentives. Those 715,502 students get absolutely nothing in this legislation.

The government’s tired old refrain that public schools get more of the total combined federal and state money misses the point. This should not be about public versus private schools. It is about what schools need to meet the educational needs of their students. Of course, as we well know now, that is not a government priority. If it were, it would not be able to justify diverting hundreds of thousands of dollars to wealthy schools while other schools have demonstrably too few resources to do their job.

Australia is unique in the world when it comes to an open-ended public funded system for non-government schools that places no obligations on those schools for overall educational outcomes and that takes no account of the schools’ existing resources. The reality is that some schools need extra funding, whether that is because of remoteness, the nature of the students they service or the existing levels of their resources. And the children at those schools deserve those extra resources, whether they are at government or non-government schools.

It is time that we had some honesty in the debate about funding for schools. Let us do a national audit of all schools—government and non-government—so that we can see what schools need more resources and what schools do not need more. Let us see schools with the greatest need, including those with students who have extra educational and social needs, getting the greatest amount of funding. Let us see all schools required to meet the same rules and obligations when it comes to providing education to all—and that includes being subject to FOI and anti-discrimination legislation.

Unlike those in most other OECD countries, despite receiving public funding, our non-government schools can pick and choose. To be fair, many non-government schools do accept children with extra needs, but we all know of cases where children from disadvantaged backgrounds or children with learning difficulties or disabilities are turned away from some non-government schools. If these schools do not feel the ethical obligation to provide for these students, at the very least they should be contractually required to provide for them if they want to receive public funding. And let us see all schools subject to a curriculum that will provide their students with the skills they need for a modern world.

It is not acceptable to provide public funding to schools that do not allow their children access to computers or that refuse to teach sex education, for instance. Let us see all schools required to meet the same accountability and transparency standards for the public funds they receive. The Australian public deserves to know how public money is spent. Let us not be fooled by the government’s very narrow definition of choice, which is simply code for entrenching inequality between schools and giving more support to those who are already most advantaged.

Let us remember that free public education is at the core of providing equality of educational opportunity, and that participation in quality education reduces poverty and social exclusion and improves health, wealth and wellbeing. Societies where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is smaller are more cohesive, healthier and happier societies.

I also note that this piece of legislation is yet another variation to the hopelessly flawed SES funding model. We were all hoping that this year might have been the year when that model was properly reviewed and looked at and a new, more sensible model was introduced. But I see it is just more of the same tweaking around the edges to provide funding here and there. As I understand it, most of the schools that are subject to the SES model are exempt in one way or another from its rules. This is a disappointing piece of legislation to have to deal with in this place; with a stroke of a pen this money could have been going to government schools as well in remote areas, but it is not. Shame on the government for doing this.