Mark Butler (Port Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is with great pleasure that I rise to speak to the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority Bill 2008. It is just the latest chapter in the Rudd government’s—particularly the Deputy Prime Minister’s—education revolution. I thought at the outset that I would recap a couple of the key elements of that revolution, because they are the background to this bill, which is perhaps the most exciting step that we have had so far in this revolution.

The first element is that our approach is a fundamentally different approach to early childhood. This government recognises the overwhelming research, not just in Australia but around the world now, that shows that the first five years are the most important in a person’s development. The research of James Heckman in the United States, and many other researchers all around the world, shows that a human being in the first five years of their existence has the greatest capacity in all of their life to develop cognitive abilities. The research also shows that a dollar invested by the government in the first five years of a person’s life shows a greater return than a dollar invested in any other years of a child’s or an adult’s education. As a government we also need to deal with a significant legacy of underinvestment. The Australian investment in preschool education has been at around 0.1 per cent of GDP compared to the average OECD investment of 0.5 per cent. The key plank of this government’s different approach to the first five years is the commitment to a universal 15 hours per week of preschool for four-year-olds.

The second element of the education revolution thus far has been an overhaul of school infrastructure, in particular the digital education revolution, which seems at the moment to be attracting a great deal of attention, finally, from the opposition. It is a program of $1.2 billion over five years which has already seen money for about 116,000 computers roll out to the different state, independent and Catholic systems. I have been to a number of high schools in my electorate and spoken to principals, teachers and students about this program. It is an exceptionally popular and greatly overdue program, as is the trade training centres program that has been initiated by the Deputy Prime Minister.

The Trade Training Centres in Schools Program is a crucial element of the education of young Australians. In my own electorate I have visited high-school tech study areas that, frankly, have not changed since I was at school. They have equipment that was put in there in the 1960s. I am not sure how working on lathes that were installed in 1964 could equip a 15- or 16-year-old to work at the Australian Submarine Corp. in Port Adelaide. A program of $2.5 billion over 10 years will massively uplift the trade-ready skills of young South Australians and young Port Adelaide people. It is a great element of the education revolution, as is the support given to parents for the costs that go with all of this—I particularly refer to the education tax refund in the amount of about $1 billion per year.

Perhaps the most important element of the education revolution is our program to lift the performance of our schools. While we have a great schooling system it could and it should be doing better. I look at the Deputy Prime Minister’s budget papers for education released earlier this year and see that the OECD PISA results for 2006 show that although Australia does relatively well internationally we could do much better. Our performance has slipped between 2003 and 2006. The papers indicate:

In the period between 2003 and 2006 Australia declined in both its absolute and relative performance in reading literacy, and its relative performance in mathematical literacy.

And they indicate something that is particularly relevant to my electorate:

Australia has too long a ‘tail’ of underperformance linked to disadvantage. The PISA results indicate that over the last six years the percentage of students who are less than proficient at reading or maths has not reduced.

Our objectives in this area are crystal clear: firstly, to get better outcomes across the student population, particularly in key skills such as literacy and numeracy, and also to improve school retention. Retention rates in Australia have dropped dramatically since the early 1990s and now sit at a level which is low by OECD standards. This has been quite dramatic. I know that in my own state of South Australia in the early 1990s school retention to year 12 or its equivalent sat at about 92 per cent of the school population, and it dropped to below 60 per cent by the end of that decade and has crept up only marginally since then.

So our government, along with state and territory governments, has a goal through COAG to lift school retention to 90 per cent by 2020—and it is not just for the sake of keeping kids in school, because we know that international research shows unequivocally that every year of schooling has a financial return to the student of somewhere between 10 per cent and 17 to 20 per cent. According to James Heckman, one of the pre-eminent education scholars in the United States, ‘There is a firmly established consensus that the mean rate of return to a year of schooling as of the 1990s exceeds 10 per cent and may be as high as 17 to 20 per cent.’ That is the extra income that a young Australian will earn for every year that they remain at school.

The government has a multipronged strategy for lifting school and student performance. As I indicated, literacy and numeracy standards are a particular concern of the government—and, I am sure, of Australians in general at the moment—and are a particular focus of our government. These are skills essential to success in every subject and potentially every career imaginable. This government has an action plan on literacy and numeracy agreed through the COAG and amounting to about $577 million over four years. That particularly involves extra support for disadvantaged areas that struggle in literacy and numeracy and it will be scientifically targeted on the basis of the literacy and numeracy tests, or the LAN tests, that were conducted around the country earlier this year.

The second plank is the establishment of a national curriculum—something COAG agreed would be in place within three years. This was an early decision of the new government and put into effect through the establishment of an interim National Curriculum Board chaired by Professor Barry McGaw, a scholar of international acclaim, particularly through his work with the OECD in this area. Already, within 12 months, framing papers in the four core subjects of maths, science, English and history have been released by that board and are out for consultation now.

The third plank in the strategy to lift school and student performance which concerns this bill is the collection of data and the reporting of data on school performance—something that again was openly and transparently an election commitment of the Labor Party. This bill particularly concerns the issues of a national curriculum and also the reporting of school performance. Without over-egging the pudding, it is truly a revolutionary approach to school education which until now in these areas has been very much state based and, in the area of performance, has been very much opaque.

In the area of a national curriculum, differences between states and territories are hard to fathom in a rich and modern country. There are about 80,000 school-age students, I am advised, that move interstate each year, between schools or between jurisdictions that have different curricula, even in core subjects. Employers and universities in a modern economy should be able to assume that students applying to work or study at their institutions have the same core competencies that are being taught from Cairns to Bunbury or from Broome to Hobart. This seems to me something of a no-brainer.

The second element of the bill is to introduce a level of transparency and accountability that the school system in Australia has not seen before. In the area of accountability  and addressing this issue—has become a bit controversial—it is hard to imagine more important public institutions than our schools, whether they are government schools or publicly assisted, funded and supported non-government schools. But there is precious little reporting on their performance to the community that funds them or even to the parents that use them. To achieve these two ends, the bill establishes the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. It is another example of cooperative federalism. There was no ambush here. There was no bludgeoning of states’ rights. This authority arose as a result of mature negotiations through the COAG process—negotiations that started with the review through MCEETYA by the Boston Consulting Group. The recommendations of that group were adopted by the MCEETYA in September and approved by COAG in October—a very good case study in cooperative federalism that those opposite might want to consider in the event that they return to the treasury bench.

The authority is an independent statutory authority established under the Commonwealth jurisdiction, under the CAC Act, but accountable to all governments through MCEETYA. MCEETYA will be setting the work plan of this authority through a charter developed every year. The authority will be required to report to MCEETYA, at which all governments are represented, on the progress of that plan and any other activities it has been directed by MCEETYA to perform. Its functions are clearly set out in the bill and the supporting speech made by the Deputy Prime Minister. Firstly, it is to subsume and continue the work of the interim National Curriculum Board to develop a comprehensive national curriculum. As I said earlier, this is a long overdue goal in Australia.

The interim National Curriculum Board, under the leadership of Professor Barry McGaw, has already achieved a great deal indeed—as I said, framing papers were released recently in those four key subjects of maths, science, English and history, They are out for consultation now but generally, as far as I can tell, have been very well received. This highlights the importance of independence in this area. This is not a job for politicians to set national curricula that might reflect their particular peccadilloes; this is something for independent experts to determine through an interim NCD of the type that we have set up. It is important to balance the goals of national consistency with flexibility that still allows teachers and schools to build a class and a subject around the core elements within the national curriculum—indeed, that allows specialised schools like the Montessori schools or systems like the international baccalaureate to build their own particular approaches around core competencies—on which students, parents, employers and higher education institutions can rely.

The second function is to not only develop and administer the national assessment of school and student performance but also, more importantly perhaps, handle the reporting to parents and the broader community of that school performance—perhaps the most controversial element of this bill. I go back to my earlier point about the importance of transparency and accountability here. Governments at different levels spend an extraordinary amount of money every year on such an important purpose, and there is a very heavy onus upon those who say there should not be transparent accountability for the expenditure of that money to argue that position and to argue why that should continue to be the case. A very important reason for this transparency is to encourage parental participation and community engagement in our school systems. This has been identified by COAG as a particular priority over the coming years, and it is reasonable as a parent to expect that, if you are being asked to be more engaged in your school system, you have good information about but how that school is going.

The Deputy Prime Minister released a survey today that showed that 97 per cent of parents agree that that sort of information should be available to them as parents, and it currently is not. More than 83 per cent of respondents—and apparently it is a higher figure in government schools—across the community agreed that that information should be available not only to parents but also to the broader community. We know that if we are able to lift parent and community engagement in the school system then we will get better results. Again there is a good deal of research to show that parent and community engagement lifts achievement and lifts retention. I again quote from James Heckman’s piece on human capital. It says that a major determinant of successful schools is successful families. It says:

Schools work with what parents bring them. They operate more effectively if parents reinforce them by encouraging and motivating their children, and they are only going to be able to do that with particular effectiveness if they are engaged fully in what the school is doing—what they are doing well and what they are not doing so well.

Done properly, these functions and the bill generally should lift school and student performance for three reasons. Firstly, if you have greater transparency and accountability in your school then there is just a natural human incentive to lift your performance under a system of reporting. It is an innate trait that all of us have from the time of birth. Secondly, it will allow the government and the community to target extra funds and effort where this reporting shows there is an identified need. The flipside of that is that, where the reporting shows a very successful approach or successful model, it will allow the government and the broader community to crosspollinate or cross-fertilise that successful approach into schools that are not doing so well. This government is putting its money where its mouth is in this area—the Prime Minister’s Press Club address in August showed that—and has supported this approach with a sum of around $500,000 for an average-size school. These funds will be available to target areas of need that are identified through this reporting.

The third reason this will work is that it will be supported by a very strong focus on improving teacher quality. All of the research shows that the most important and most effective way in which you can lift school performance is through lifting teacher quality—reducing class sizes helps and a range of other things such as parent engagement helps, but nothing is as effective as lifting teacher quality. This government very early on in its term developed through COAG a draft national policy partnership on teaching, which we have heard from the Deputy Prime Minister will be presented for final determination at the COAG meeting this weekend.

We also heard a very welcome announcement earlier today by the Deputy Prime Minister that $500 million will be put in place to support this program. This will also involve a program to attract the best principals and the best teachers to the schools that need them the most. It is all well and good for the best teachers and the best principals to work at schools that are already doing well; our challenge as a community is to bring those teachers and principals to schools that need them the most to lift their performance.

It is true that this system of reporting is not without its dangers. Any system of reporting the standards of something as important as a school is never without its dangers. We know that each school operates with a different suite of advantages and disadvantages, particularly in terms of the background of their student populations. This reporting system cannot be simply a league table that ranks schools as if they were all bringing the same contexts, backgrounds and student populations to the table—they are simply not doing that. If we were to do that then we would run the very serious risk of undue stigma attaching to schools that, for a whole range of understandable reasons, do not perform as well as other schools that have a range of advantages. The Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister have made it crystal clear that this reporting system will allow the community to compare like with like: it will allow the community to compare schools on the basis of their socioeconomic status, their Indigenous student populations, the percentage of their student populations that are newly arrived to Australia through migrant or refugee programs, their teacher population and a range of other things.

In summary, this bill is just the right thing to do. It is a significantly overdue package of reforms that, I think, will revolutionise our school systems. In my electorate I have a range of schools that I visit often that have very significant challenges arising at all levels, whether we are talking about the student population, the teacher population, their capacity to access funds other than from the government or a number of other issues. This package will allow the community and parents in those areas to become more engaged. It will attract the best teachers. I commend the bill to the House. (Time expired)

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