Craig Thomson (Dobell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Certainly we know that there is a three-ring circus on the other side. We keep seeing the ringmaster change, but we certainly do not see the policies change. The circus continues in relation to the opposition in the area of education.

The Rudd government is also investing up to $1.5 million per high school to create trades training centres in all of Australia’s 2,650 secondary schools and up to $1 million per high school to allow every Australian student in years 9 to 12 access to their own school computer with the aim of lifting school retention rates from 75 per cent to 90 per cent by 2020. As I said earlier, this is particularly important when you look at my electorate, where retention rates languish around 44½ per cent, well below the state and national averages, which shows that the opposition when in government certainly took their eye off the ball in terms of education on the Central Coast.

The Rudd government is investing over $1 billion in providing an additional 450,000 skilled training places over the next four years to help lift the productive capacity of the Australian economy. We are encouraging students to study and teach maths and science by halving their HECS and halving it again if they work in those fields after graduation. We are keeping our best and brightest in Australia by doubling to 88,000 the number of undergraduate students receiving a Commonwealth learning scholarship and providing 1,000 new Future Fellowships for mid-career researchers.

But today we are here to discuss the Education Legislation Amendment Bill 2008 and the Schools Assistance Bill 2008. These bills are a key part of the education revolution and need to be put in that context. The Education Legislation Amendment Bill demonstrates the Rudd government’s leadership by providing for more than half a billion dollars to be spent over the next four years to establish evidence around what works and highlight good practice. By extending the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Act 2000, we provide appropriations to continue our election commitments, such as funding for additional teachers in the Northern Territory, in a bipartisan way and continue good programs introduced by the opposition such as the Indigenous Youth Mobility Program. This funding will also allow us to continue to work with Indigenous communities, philanthropic organisations, corporate leaders and national organisations to build the partnerships that are so critical to improving outcomes for Indigenous Australians.

The government is working with government and non-government education and training providers to achieve the very important goals of halving the gaps in literacy and numeracy achievements, halving the gaps in year 12 or equivalent attainments and halving the gaps in employment outcomes for Indigenous Australians. We also aim to give every Indigenous four-year-old in remote communities an opportunity to access early learning programs. We are establishing national collaborative arrangements that will assist us to collectively work towards these targets. However, the Commonwealth must maintain an ability to provide national leadership and perspectives to close these gaps.

The Schools Assistance Bill 2008 provides Australian government funding for non-government schools for 2009 to 2012. It succeeds in part the Schools Assistance (Learning Together—Achievement Through Choice and Opportunity) Act 2004, which provided funding for both government and non-government schools for 2004 to 2008.

In Australia, over many decades the focus of the schooling debate has been the competitive relationship between government and non-government schools. But the education system cannot simply be broken down into two groups, with a disadvantaged public sector on the one side and a highly resourced non-government sector on the other. The most cursory examination of Australian schools will tell you this simply is not accurate. There are schools that struggle with limited resources trying to serve disadvantaged communities in both sectors. There are independent schools in my electorate that struggle with resources just as there are public schools in my electorate that struggle. Funding is important, but a more fundamental debate is needed about how to improve the quality of school education for all students. We need an ambitious national strategy to improve our schools, driven by the goal of higher quality education.

To do this, the Commonwealth is working with the states through the Council of Australian Governments to develop a shared set of aspirations and policy directions which will provide the basis for school funding agreements and reform initiatives over the coming years. Working and consulting with non-government schools is a vital part of that process. The new framework will connect new educational investment in schools, teachers and families with challenging new achievement targets and clearer, more transparent reporting systems. New national partnership payments will encourage further improvements in national priority areas. The $28 billion provided in this bill is part of the government’s minimum $42 billion commitment for schools funding during 2009-12.

In this legislation, the government is honouring its election commitments to non-government schools. Those commitments are to use the existing funding formula based on the SES model and the existing indexation formula to set funding levels and to maintain or guarantee the current funding levels of all non-government schools during 2009 to 2012 to ensure that no school loses a dollar. The Australian government is working through COAG on a new national education agreement, which will deliver the funds promised to public schools. In addition, through the COAG process the Commonwealth is working on three new national partnerships to improve the quality of schooling, particularly in disadvantaged schools. These national partnerships will be focused on improving the quality of teaching, meeting the needs of disadvantaged school communities and improving literacy and numeracy.

A central focus in moving forward is improving educational outcomes for Indigenous students. The incorporation of a number of Indigenous-specific education programs in this bill is aimed at improving the capacity of non-government schools to accelerate the closing of the gap in outcomes for these students. The bill continues the general provision in schools funding legislation for the minister to make conditions in the agreements for Commonwealth funding for schools.

However, the current act introduced an unprecedented number of specific conditions for Commonwealth funding for schools. Whilst a number of these conditions have been met, superseded or abandoned by the bill, it retains the broad thrust of the educational outcomes accountability framework of the current act. There are now six conditions covering school performance: participation in national student assessments, participation in national reports on the outcomes of schooling, provision of individual school performance reports to the minister, provision of plain-language student reports to parents to include an assessment of the student’s achievements against any available national standards and relative to the student’s peer group at the school, provision of publicly available information about the school’s performance and the implementation of the national curriculum.

All schools and systems authorities must provide to parents or guardians of each child the student reports specified in the regulations. These reports must use plain language, include assessment of the child’s achievements in comparison with the child’s peer group at the school and meet any requirements in the regulations. The minister would be able to determine the format of such reports and how often they had to be provided to the parents. Parents will also receive reports from national literacy and numeracy tests, which will show student achievements against key indicators such as the national average, the middle 60 per cent of students and the national minimum literacy and numeracy attainment standards where these have been met. A continuous scale of achievement across 10 bands, from year 3 to year 9, with each year level reported in six bands, will mean that as students advance through the years of schooling it will be possible to track their progress in literacy and numeracy attainment.

The introduction of plain-English report cards is most welcome on the Central Coast. Parents have a right to know how their children are going at school. They need more clarity than knowing whether their kids are beginning, consolidating or established—that is, more than a graph, a line or a pie chart telling them how they are performing at school. This government is acting on this and that is why these bills are here before the House today.

Research and evidence show that the best way to boost productivity is to invest in human capital. That is why education is the pathway to prosperity. The link between long-term prosperity, productive growth and human capital investment could not be clearer from the extensive research that economists have been undertaking around the world in recent decades. The research demonstrates strong links between levels of education, levels of earnings and levels of productivity. OECD research shows that if the average educational level of working-age population were increased by one year the growth rate of the economy would be up to one per cent higher.

Again going back to my electorate, which is dominated by the shire of Wyong, when we have only 44.3 per cent of school kids in my electorate going through to year 12, when the state average is 65.66 and the national target is 75 per cent, we can see the problems, the disadvantages, that children growing up in my electorate have in terms of being able to get a job and a job that pays well. More importantly than that, we have the problem that the economy of the Central Coast and the economy of the nation have been affected by 12 years of inaction by the former Howard government in relation to education. It is time that education were more than just about putting flagpoles in schools. This bill is an important step in making sure that non-government schools are properly funded. It is an important step in delivering the education revolution that our kids deserve, that the parents in our electorates demand and that the Rudd government is delivering.

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