Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Sustainable Development and Cities) Share this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to make a contribution to this debate, and I will come back to some of the themes that have been raised which try to present this as a package of long-reaching, visionary reforms as part of the education revolution. All soaring rhetoric, but when you get down to it this bill sets up a bureaucracy—a needed bureaucracy, but let us not overstate what is going on with this bill before the House. The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority Bill 2008 will, quite simply, establish the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. That is its purpose and that is what it aims to achieve. Many of the other things that speakers, particularly on the government side, have sought to impute to this bill are just complete fiction. That is not to say there are not other things going on. We have had a hearty debate about some of those issues, including the way in which funding for non-government schools is being altered—or at least the framework is being put in place for an attack on independent school funding. Labor has honoured its election commitment not to go for the jugular of independent school funding immediately, but it is certainly assembling the arsenal of weapons and equipment to do so, with some of the extra reporting and information requirements in the Schools Assistance Bill.

That bill, with its framework for further funding, segues into this bill, because one of the conditions that may confront non-government schools is their compliance with the Australian curriculum. One of the things canvassed widely in the debate about the Schools Assistance Bill is that we do not actually know what this national curriculum looks like. At the conclusion of the debate on this bill, we still will not know what it looks like. What we do know is there will be a new authority set up to address these issues. So much of what the opposition has sought to do here is to highlight the opportunity that this bill represents but to take on trust what will happen with these tools, with these instruments, with these institutions once they are established. I think it is important for people contributing to the debate to recognise what is in the bill, not what they would like to have seen in this or some other bill.

So what this bill does, quite frankly, quite simply and singularly, is establish the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. It sets up that authority as an independent statutory authority, something that is welcome. The authority’s role is to manage the creation and the implementation of the national syllabus, the national assessment and reporting procedures of school educational outcomes and to do things with that information. That is it; that is what this bill is about. As I said, that is something that is needed and is welcome, although it is important to recognise that the ‘operationalising’, the implementing of these requirements that will be put before this soon-to-be established authority, is something that we have to wait to see. We will review and examine this with great interest because the promise that is being held out about this authority—it sounds a little bit like the UN—when you describe it in its generality, is magnificent. We will have to wait to see what comes out in actuality, because this is an important area but, as some speakers have touched upon, it is an area that is fraught with its own difficulties and obstacles.

Some of those difficulties and obstacles were well experienced by the former, coalition government. Despite a very positive record in supporting education innovation and reform, one of the things we could not quite get to was convincing state and territory governments that what we are debating here—something that has been around as a public policy discussion all of my adult life and then some—was something that we could all agree on. They like this stuff; this is constitutionally their baby. And you can imagine there was some reluctance to give way to what seemed to be a collegiate, Commonwealth-wide approach when most of the state and territory jurisdictions had the pretty firm idea that whatever they were doing was right and that others should emulate them. And you can imagine that in a room where everybody is offering their model as the right model you will get a difference of opinion.

Despite that difficulty, the coalition did manage to increase funding for state government schools in every budget, delivering funding increases of 70 per cent in real terms between 1996 and 2007. It put the interests of the students and the parents at the heart of the debate in the discussion about the direction of our education system, recognising that those key stakeholders have as much to say and as much to contribute as education bureaucracies and teacher unions, and will carry the consequences of decisions much more than they will. That is not to say that education bureaucracies and teacher unions do not have something to offer but that the consequence of all of that effort and enterprise rests very much with the students and with their families. The coalition enhanced the capacity of parents to make a choice and to participate directly and to be fully engaged in the educational pathways of their children through government or non-government schools.

It struck me as somewhat ironic that the member for Port Adelaide was talking about the virtue of independence. That independence, that virtue, seems to extend to the role of this bureaucracy but not to the role of parents and school communities. I am sure that in many electorates there are a number of non-government, low-fee, independent schools that were established with the encouragement and support of the coalition government, in complete contrast to the former, Keating government’s new schools policy that was set up not to have any new schools. So this idea of independence seems to be fashionable. We hear the Labor members of parliament talk about it when it suits them and then abandon the idea when it does not. Nothing is more evident of that than perhaps the work of this authority. We listened with interest, in a previous debate, to what funding for non-government schools involved, and you certainly could not say that was about school independence. It was about increasing school dependence on central frameworks and mandated requirements and, I fear, risking the stifling of educational innovation to find the new pathways, the effective models, the pedagogy and the student and family and school community engagement that I think we need to pursue.

But these bills actually create a greater dependence. They seek to put in place the framework that must be complied with by those seeking funding. We have provided the opportunity on a number of occasions to the Rudd government to reassure those school communities that may be pursuing other academic pathways—well-recognised, well-established, different teaching models, and you heard some of those mentioned earlier—that those kinds of teaching models will be deemed to comply or at least work within a framework that amounts to adherence to this curriculum framework that will become mandatory. But they have declined to take that up. That is a cause of great concern and has unsettled many, certainly in my school community, who actually thought educational innovation was something that should be valued—and I would certainly support that view.

The bill does talk about a number of functions. One which is not there but again was implied by a Labor speaker is that somehow better practice in the education of young people will be distilled out of the results and then shared more generally. Boy, I hope that does happen—that would be my wish—but that is not what the functions of the bill talk about. It says that the authority is a collection agency for information and it puts in place frameworks for national assessment, but in this bill you do not see working models that recognise the context in which school communities operate, the competencies and levels of attainment of their students and then the teaching and learning interventions and practices that bring about the best achievement for that diverse group of students. I would have liked to have seen that specifically mentioned as a function, where the authority would work as a clearing house of better ideas and innovation to encourage, recognise and reward those things rather than hope they will somehow pop out the side from all the data collection that seems to be at the heart of this authority’s functions.

There is scope for a lot of good to come out of that work, but this bill sets up the machinery to put in place a national curriculum. It puts in place the machinery to set up an assessment and reporting framework. I hope it extends its work into a place of learning and sharing of insights and identifying what works best in a very difficult environment of diverse school communities, diverse levels of achievement and diverse appreciations of what intelligence and attainment means for different students with different ambitions for their lives. I hope it does that. But it would be wrong, as the member for Port Adelaide sought to do, to project that into this bill when it makes no such claim that that is the purpose of the authority. The member for Port Adelaide also talked about parent and community engagement, and never do you see that displayed with more vigour and vitality than when you see some of these new, low-fee independent schools set up, where parents make a very enormous commitment to the school community to help set up an education system and a place of learning and teaching that supports their hopes, ambitions and values for their families. It is a sight to behold and there are a number of outstanding examples in my own electorate.

The work of establishing a national curriculum is not new, and certainly I am no stranger to it, having argued the case for some years, more recently prior to the election of the Rudd government when I was the Minister Assisting the Minister for Defence. I was thinking about military families, the defence community and how forced mobility via deployments in the ADF presented a very real example of the challenges families and students face in the absence of a national curriculum. Those forced mobility challenges were then added to by the elective mobility of people pursuing employment opportunities in different parts of the continent. They were finding that their children were disadvantaged because they needed to bolt onto a different kind of educational framework in a different jurisdiction. That certainly made the task of successful relocation and engagement with those new communities even more difficult. Thankfully, in the ADF we had a lot of student support services to assist that transition being made by people to the great state of Western Australia. My friend and colleague the member for Kalgoorlie talks regularly about the employment opportunities. If you actually take up those tantalising opportunities and you are not in the ADF, you would not have that support service that is available for our serving men and women to make sure that their children successfully transition into that new environment. It is a classic example of how workforce mobility is making this an even greater priority.

One issue that has arisen, though, is that of consultation. As I contacted school community leaders, both at the board level and at the school committee level, or senior teachers and principals, they were worried about the whole national curriculum debate happening around them. They read much about it in the media. They often heard members of parliament and ministers talking about it, but they felt that it was all happening to them. One said, ‘When are we,’ meaning the teaching professionals, ‘going to get a chance to have a say about all of this?’ I thought that was a very interesting insight when engagement, consultation and stakeholder input were supposed to be the hallmark of this process. I hope those early moments of unsettling reflection, where people felt quite removed from the development of the curriculum, are something that is remedied over time as this authority is established and its personnel can see that done in a more systematic and engaging way.

I also heard anxiety about this adherence issue and the conditionality that may be attached to government funding for non-government schools. As I mentioned earlier, this is not a shot in the arm for independence; this is a creation of greater dependence at a time when we have heard speakers from both sides of the parliament suggest that the innovation that comes through independence and the constant search for new insights and new practices may be stymied by a strict application of this national curriculum—and with it the conditionality that if you want government funding you need to adhere very closely to whatever this framework might end up like.

I think to say that this bill is an educational revolution is complete hyperbole. You could not even say it is an education devolution. As I have mentioned, the dependence is greater, not lesser.

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