Belinda Neal (Robertson, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise in the House to speak to the Schools Assistance Bill 2008. The measure before the House today will not only continue the education revolution but will constitute a major building block in the shared national agenda for the education sector. The $28 billion provided under this bill is part of the Rudd Labor government’s commitment of $42 billion over the next four years to investment in education in both government and non-government schools. This bill appropriates $28 billion over four years for recurrent capital and for targeted assistance for non-government schools.

One of the major election commitments given by the present government in 2007 was that no school in Australia would lose a dollar under new funding arrangements. To facilitate this commitment, the existing socioeconomic status, or SES, funding system for general recurrent funding of schools will be continued. New arrangements of the SES formula and a review of the SES scores for each school are to be completed through an open and transparent review process which will conclude in 2011. In the meantime, funding certainty for schools will be guaranteed through a continuation of the SES system.

Irrespective of potential changes in a school’s SES score over the next quadrennial period, schools will have their funding entitlements guaranteed to be at least equivalent to 2008 levels during the upcoming four-year period. The Rudd government has made it clear that it is not interested in taking money away from schools. Rather, its national education priorities lie with identifying disadvantaged school communities and focusing resources on where they can have the greatest impact in improving student outcomes.

This bill will provide certainty, stability and transparency to the funding of non-government schools in the next period from 2009 to 2012. These measures will ensure the delivery of the Rudd government’s election commitments to bring an education revolution to the schools of Australia. The bill will also uphold the government’s commitment to continuing the current socioeconomic status funding and indexation arrangements for these schools.

Among the other notable elements of this bill are provisions that will strengthen support given to remote and very remote schools and to schools with a very high proportion of Indigenous enrolments. Both of these provisions are extremely welcome and very much needed. This allocation will include additional assistance for individual Indigenous school students. The Rudd Labor government already demonstrated a commitment to revolutionising the education sector in Australia in its 2008-09 budget. Two of the most fundamental innovations in the budget were the funding for the Trade Training Centres in Schools Program and the digital education program, which is delivering computers and broadband access to secondary school students across Australia.

Working through the Council of Australian Governments, the Rudd Labor government has been developing a new framework for investment and reform in Australian schools. This initiative will result in the national education agreement, which is due to be finalised later this year. The COAG reform framework means that, for the first time, all governments in Australia will agree to work together to put in place a unitary set of nationally consistent objectives based on an agreed platform of educational priorities and reform directions for all the nation’s education systems.

The priorities for the reforms envisaged by the COAG process include raising the quality of teaching in our schools, ensuring that all students are benefiting from schooling, especially those students from disadvantaged areas, and improving transparency and accountability of schools and school systems at all levels. A framework of nationally consistent and socioeconomically equitable funding that is transparent in its needs based approach and is focused on the quality of its teaching and learning outcomes will thus form the basis of the national education agreement.

In implementing this framework we need to be careful to lift the quality of the states’ education systems to the best standard rather than adhering to a lesser average. With this in mind, the government has built into the Schools Assistance Bill a number of multifaceted provisions to assist disadvantaged remote area schools and schools with high Indigenous enrolments. Part of this assistance is in changes to the implementation of the SES formula in such disadvantaged school communities. Schools with 80 per cent or more Indigenous enrolments and schools located in very remote areas with 50 per cent or more Indigenous enrolments will automatically be entitled to the maximum level of general recurrent funding. This single provision will commit approximately $5.4 million over four years to the identification of, and provision of additional support to, such disadvantaged schools. An estimated 2,157 Indigenous students will receive maximum funding under this initiative.

Perhaps the most significant initiative in the bill—and one that seeks to provide enhanced support for disadvantaged school communities—is contained in two linked programs: the Indigenous Supplementary Assistance program, ISA, and the associated measure, the Indigenous funding guarantee, the IFG program. The ISA program will provide $239.1 million for four streamlined programs that provide funds for supplementary recurrent assistance schemes, homework centres, Indigenous tutorial schemes and English as a second language schemes for Indigenous language speakers. Funding is allocated on a ‘per Indigenous enrolment’ basis, with remote area loadings and indexation of funding built into the program. The IFG program is a transitional measure that will ensure non-government providers have their funding maintained at 2008 levels. This capped guarantee scheme means that providers who might otherwise lose funding under the new arrangements will not lose precious resources.

In my own electorate of Robertson, based on the Central Coast of New South Wales, measures such as the Indigenous Tutorial Assistance Scheme are vital tools that serve a real need. Although many of the programs contained in the Indigenous supplementary assistance program outlined above will go to helping schools and students in remote and very remote parts of Australia, there are approximately 1,300 Indigenous students living and learning on the Central Coast. I am therefore delighted that these Central Coast students—and thousands more like them across Australia—will have in-school tutorial programs funded to a level that supports quality learning outcomes.

These tutorial schemes help our local Indigenous students stay on track in class and assist with the completion of homework. This is something that I am very pleased to see. They form a vital support mechanism that helps close the gaps in educational outcomes that currently exist between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students on the Central Coast and across Australia. Closing the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students is one of the goals of the Schools Assistance Bill. Gaps in literacy and numeracy benchmarks between these groups are still far too wide in Australia. In year 3 reading, there is a 13 per cent gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students and in year 7 numeracy there is a 32 per cent gap. This is completely unacceptable. This bill seeks serious solutions to these problems and I commend the government for continuing the support for Indigenous teaching and learning programs.

In addition to working with the states and territories to create a national education agreement, which I mentioned earlier and which will provide a new era of national cooperation on education priorities and outcomes, the Rudd Labor government is currently in discussion with the states and territories on three national partnerships in education. The first will target disadvantaged schools, the second will improve teaching quality and the third will improve literacy and numeracy.

Funds for the first two national partnership priorities will be determined by the COAG process. This will provide an opportunity for additional investment in public education. We certainly need additional investment to facilitate these improvements after 12 years of neglect. The third national priority—the literacy and numeracy partnership—already has $577 million budgeted in the forward estimates. The Schools Assistance Bill provides a range of allied programs that will push forward the education revolution over the next four years. These three programs will assist in laying the foundations for a truly national and coordinated approach to education across Australia.

Besides $26.3 billion provided by the bill for general recurrent grant assistance and $239.1 million for the ISA and IFG programs, some of these allied programs planned for the next four years include: $790 million for the Literacy, Numeracy and Special Learning Needs Program; $557.6 million in capital grants to help build, maintain and upgrade non-government school facilities; $24 million for a country areas program to assist geographically isolated children; $48.4 million in remoteness loading attached to general recurrent grants to more than 400 regional and remote and non-government schools; $43 million under the English as a Second Language—New Arrivals Program, which assists newly arrived students of non-English-speaking backgrounds; $56.4 million for the languages program to improve learning outcomes of students learning languages other than English; and $4.8 million for short-term emergency assistance to support the operation of schools that have been affected by unforeseen emergency circumstances.

All this is a huge contribution to the education revolution, but these bills are only part of the overall program. There has already been significant investment in schools through the National Secondary School Computer Fund, the Fibre Connections to Schools program, the Trade Training Centres in Schools Program, a local schools working together to share facilities pilot program, the development of a national curriculum through the National Curriculum Board, the National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools Strategy, and the education tax refund for parents who have paid for the educational needs of their children.

The Schools Assistance Bill will require the implementation by 2012 of a national curriculum. This is currently being developed by the National Curriculum Board, as I have said, and it will apply to all Australian schools. Another set of initiatives focuses on enhancing the transparency of each school’s performance information and reporting framework. Transparency is needed in order to give parents the right information about how their child and their school are performing. This information will support parents with accurate and nationally comparable information when they come to make the right choice of school for their children. It is very important that the right values are being assessed and that the performance of the schools is measured not just the natural talents of the children who are attending those schools. It will also help the government guide resources and policy decision-making towards the greatest possible effectiveness and improvement.

To encourage excellence in schooling, Australia needs fair, consistent and accurate analysis of how different schools are performing. Reporting on the results of individual schools in national tests will form part of these arrangements but, as has been stressed on a number of occasions, such reporting will not take the form of simplistic league tables. The COAG process will determine, through agreement with the states and territories, the final form of this national reporting framework. This should be based on the school’s capacity to improve the skills and learning experience of the students and not just a comparison of the students’ scores, which would be an indication of the students’ original abilities and the socioeconomic backgrounds they are drawn from rather than the enhancement to their education provided by each school.

The Australian government has proposed the creation of the National Schools Assessment and Data Centre to be an independent institution for the management, analysis and publication of schools data. This new era in transparency will bring together a simpler, strengthened framework for measuring and reporting on the performance of both students and non-government schools across Australia. This will be consistent with the conditions required of the states under the national education agreement. The government is currently in discussions with the states and the independent and Catholic school systems about the next quadrennial funding agreement that will outline funding arrangements for all schools. As part of this process, the 2009-12 national education agreement currently being developed through the COAG process will provide certainty and stability for national education systems in Australia.

The Schools Assistance Bill 2008 provides a new era for the funding and other relations between schools systems in Australia. It sets in place the building blocks for a truly national education system. It represents one of the most significant and fundamental revolutions in education in Australia for many decades. I commend the bills to the House.

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