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

I thank the member for Parramatta for her question and note her deep interest in all matters related to education, and particularly school education in her electorate. The more than decade of neglect of our education system by the Howard government is over, and not a moment too soon. I regret that I have to advise the House of some very disturbing statistics emerging from the National Report on Schooling in Australia 2007. These statistics show what happens when you have a national government that engages in more than a decade of neglect of education, as the Howard government did. For six of those long years the Leader of the Opposition and the Deputy Leader of the Opposition had the education portfolio. This report shows that numeracy achievement across the years of primary school actually goes down—that is, the number of students who fail to meet adequate benchmarks increases the further that they go on in primary school.

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