Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister representing the Minister for Education, Senator Carr. How will the government’s agenda for school reform affect teacher quality?

Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the senator for her question. The question we face is this: how do we ensure that all Australian children fulfil their potential in a time of great economic, social and environmental change?

Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Abetz interjecting—

Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Abetz may not be interested in these fundamental issues facing this country and it is a pity he does not pay greater attention to this. The question remaining for this parliament is: how do we ensure that every Australian child has a way of finding a meaningful and rewarding place in the world? The answer is: by providing a quality education. The key to providing a quality education is quality teaching. McKinsey and Company tell us:

... students placed with high-performing teachers will progress three times as fast as those placed with low-performing teachers.

This is a point that is worth stressing, even though it may not be new. A decade ago, the Senate Employment, Education and Training References Committee concluded:

A fundamental premise, which must inform all deliberations about education, is that good teachers lie at the heart of successful learning.

Every student deserves quality teachers but, for disadvantaged children in particular, a good teacher can make the difference between success and failure—between staying on and dropping out.

In the latest national benchmark results for year 7 students, students with parents in the lowest status occupations got results in reading, writing and numeracy between six and 18 percentage points lower than students with parents from higher status occupations. Students in remote areas got results that were 11 to 15 percentage points lower than metropolitan students. Indigenous students got results 18 to 34 percentage points below those for the total year 7 population. These results do not reflect well on this country. They do not reflect on the differences in ability; they reflect upon entrenched social, economic and educational disadvantage.

One of the most effective ways we can redress this disadvantage is by giving all students access to quality teachers. That is why this government is working through COAG to establish a national policy partnership on quality teaching that will raise overall performance by improving the pathways into teaching, especially for high-achieving graduates, by improving recruitment and retrenchment policies and rewarding outstanding teachers’ performance and by the allocation of the right teachers to schools with high needs by providing the right incentives and support. That is why we are offering HECS remissions for maths and science graduates who choose teaching as a career.

The next step will be to offer a new scheme, based on the United States’s Teaching for America program and the United Kingdom’s Teaching First program, which will give talented graduates an accelerated pathway into teaching. It will place them in the most challenging school environments and pay them at a higher rate. Australian teachers are critical to everything this government is trying to achieve in social justice, in productivity and in innovation. It is essential that we achieve teaching excellence in every school. That is what the government’s agenda for school reform is all about.