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

I am just explaining the three elements of the program for the shadow minister. He asked me about them. I am presuming that he is interested in the answer. With respect to science and language centres, schools individually applied, went into a competitive round, an independent panel assessed who was going to be successful and 537 schools were successful. In contrast, when the government announced the National School Pride Program and the Primary Schools for the 21st Century program, we said that they would run out in correlation with school size and we would manage the process through education authorities.

We worked through education authorities for the three rounds of Primary Schools for the 21st Century and for the rounds for the National School Pride Program. We managed them through authorities rather than having individual school based applications sent to the federal government. The shadow minister obviously would be aware that, in working with the Catholic education system, the independent schools system and with state and territory governments, we managed the programs through those authorities. They then worked with school communities. The school communities identified projects, and the projects went through in three rounds for the primary schools and in a number of rounds for the National School Pride Program.

I would have thought that that was fairly clear and easy to understand. The shadow minister then asked me about costing assumptions in relation to Primary Schools for the 21st Century. As I have explained, in the management system I have just described the costing assumption was that there would be a 90 per cent take-up—that is, as we managed through school authorities and they—

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