Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Hansard source

Is a pleasure to follow the member for Bowman, who has a great passion for Indigenous health, in particular, but all aspects of Indigenous communities. As an eye surgeon and as a person who has volunteered his time in communities throughout Australia, I know that he feels very passionately about the need to close the gap. Closing the Gap is a statement that the Prime Minister makes each year, a report to the parliament, about the progress that we are making as a nation towards improving the welfare of Indigenous Australians and, in particular, Indigenous children. In my case, as the shadow minister for education, that is what I want to focus on in my brief remarks today.

As the Prime Minister said in her statement, education is the key to unlocking the potential of every child. It is a hackneyed term but it remains a truism. For Indigenous children that is just as much the case as for any other child. We heard the Prime Minister in her statement on Closing the Gap talk about national testing results and express her disappointment that the literacy and numeracy results being achieved by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students have not closed towards their non-Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peers nearly as much as she would have hoped or, indeed, any of us would have hoped. I know that members on both sides of the House have the same ambition as the Prime Minister that progress should be quicker for Indigenous students and we all share her disappointment that it has not been the case.

We have also seen, as a nation, increasing reports that Australia is falling further behind in international tests for literacy and numeracy in general. For example, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development—the OECD—Program for International Student Assessment known as PISA revealed a significant difference in the range of scores between the highest and lowest performing students in 2006 to 2009. In 2006, the range of the scores between the highest and the lowest percentiles was narrower for Australian students than the OECD average but in 2009 the range had widened for Australian students and was wider than the OECD average. For Indigenous students that also remains the case.

These results have led many experts to conclude that the gap is widening in Australia for two reasons. Firstly, it is because our most gifted and talented students are falling further behind and, secondly, it is because student achievement from our most disadvantaged students is failing to improve. These PISA results are just one disturbing example about decline in student achievement in this country and governments simply must act to address this gap as a matter of priority. We need to both lift the achievement of our best and brightest students and also improve the outcomes for our most disadvantaged students if we are to reverse this gap. Indigenous students rank disproportionately amongst our most disadvantaged students.

The Prime Minister also highlighted to the parliament that, if we are to make progress in closing the gap, we need to improve school attendance. Most of us instinctively know that student outcomes can only be improved if we actually get these students inside the school gate, as the member for Bowman said in his speech. The Prime Minister foreshadowed in her statement that supporting regular school attendance and improved data collection will be one of the government's priorities in the so-called National Plan for School Improvement. We are yet to see the detail of the government's National Plan for School Improvement or, in fact, their response to the Gonski review.

I know that both the Leader of the Opposition and my colleague in the other place the coalition's Indigenous affairs spokesman Nigel Scullion strongly support the government's intent to improve the way we collect school attendance data so as to give a better picture of how and where we can improve Indigenous school attendance. We do need better information and statistics to inform us of the communities that are improving and those that are not. But we also need to be mindful that any statistical analysis and data collection are efforts that are important but remain behind meaningful, relevant and sophisticated policies to ensure school attendance. We do not want to lose sight of the very purposes of why we need to collect data or overcomplicate and unnecessarily overburden education authorities. I look forward to hearing the detail of the government's response to the Gonski review and the national school improvement plan in due course.

I also want to take this opportunity to share some of the more positive initiatives I have seen in my time as the shadow minister for education which really do give me some hope about progress in closing the gap that can be achieved much faster if governments of all persuasions get the policy settings right in our schools. We know that governments have been ever increasing the amount of funding being spent on students facing particular types of disadvantage but, at the same time, outcomes have been failing to significantly improve. The money is there but the way it is being spent has failed to improve the outcomes of our students. That is not a political statement. It is simply a statement of fact. I know that Labor sometimes are obsessively focused on the amounts of funding and large new spending commitments, but the issue of education is not the lack of funds. The issue is how the funds are being spent.

I believe an equally important subject in addition to how much the government should spend on students with additional needs is how the funding is actually being spent at the grassroots level. A recent analysis of national testing data undertaken by the Centre for Independent Studies has concluded that only two states have seen improvements in meeting Indigenous literacy and numeracy targets. They are Western Australia, following the introduction of independent public schools, and Queensland, through the joint reform efforts of the Cape York partnerships—and the member for Bowman mentioned the work of Noel Pearson. The success of these two states has been attributed to reforms to introduce school autonomy. This means that principals are provided with more flexibility in hiring teachers, budgeting, timetabling and organising their own school programs, as well as introducing what they know will work in their school. Initial results following the implementation of direct instruction teaching, for example, in Cape York, gives us all reason to believe that we can make rapid progress in improving student achievement in remote primary education across the board, as long as we give schools and education authorities the freedom and the opportunity to pursue the course they want to follow.

Direct instruction is an evidence based explicit instruction teaching method, recognised to be highly effective in the teaching of literacy and numeracy to children internationally. The member for Herbert has real experience, as the member who covers Townsville, of the importance of literacy and numeracy in north Queensland. The results in Cape York are showing us that students can catch up to their peers if schools are allowed to have autonomy in developing intensive curriculums and rigorous instruction and through their own strategies can develop a strong work ethos among staff. All of us have met with representatives of the Cape York partnerships over the last few months if not years. The passion and the enthusiasm that those young people and not-so-young people bring to their goal of improving the student outcomes for Indigenous students in Cape York is unmatched by any I have ever seen. In meeting many education authorities across Australia over the last four years, I have never seen the passion and enthusiasm that the Cape York partnerships bring to their role.

In Western Australia, government school principals are also making remarkable progress through independent public schools. I have been to visit many of these schools, where principals and their governing councils have been provided with complete control over their school budgets. It has resulted in providing principals with more opportunity to better spend government funding in a way that has a positive impact on improving outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and their communities.

So the coalition strongly supports any moves the government makes to improve school attendance. But if we are really to improve educational outcomes for Indigenous students we need strong and meaningful action by this parliament as the government's reforms for school funding progress to ensure that any reforms that are passed are linked to school and principal autonomy. If we do this, maybe both sides can stand before the parliament in future Closing the Gap statements and actually celebrate real student outcomes, where people at the coalface of education have been given the opportunity and the freedom to actually close the gap.

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