Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for External Territories) Share this | Hansard source

I congratulate the previous member for his contribution. I concur with much of what he said—I do not agree with all of it. I want to wish Morgan and all her mates all the best as they sit the horrific process of final year-12 exams this week.

I also want to talk about education, in particular the process by which the Northern Territory government is proposing to give schools greater autonomy in managing their own budgets through global budgeting and through setting up a system of independent government schools. I say this because I am most concerned about the impact this will have on the school community and most particularly on people who live in communities which are disadvantaged and where inequalities are already in evidence.

There is no compelling evidence that the devolution model being proposed will lead to better school performance. Students in New South Wales, which has Australia's most centralised staffing system, achieved an average at about the level of students in Victoria, with the most devolved system. The evaluation of Western Australia's independent public schools pointed to a feel-good factor amongst schools but no evidence of improved performance overall. It is a similar story overseas.

There is a concern about widening the achievement gap. One of the impacts of greater autonomy is that it tends to further exacerbate inequalities within the education system as more advantaged schools find it easier to attract both more resources in monetary terms and more capable teachers and students.

There is also the issue of fiscal squeezing. In the Northern Territory the CLP has already carried out major funding cuts at a macro level, pulling out over four years $250 million from the education system. Greater school autonomy takes this to a micro phase by forcing schools to be more efficient in the use of their resources, not necessarily better in their use of the resources.

I am most concerned about this in the context of Aboriginal communities and in particular small schools. I visited a small school recently—a single-teacher school. There are 30 students in the school—there is one teacher—with an age range from four to 12. There is no education going on in that school, clearly. Yet now the school is being told that potentially it will have to manage its own global budget. The principal is already the cleaner, the driver and the schoolteacher. Now this person and people in small schools like it—single-teacher and two- and three-teacher schools—will be involved in this insidious process.

We are not getting better education outcomes. We know what the Northern Territory government have been doing in these schools. In particular, they are taking away resources. When they take away resources they increase the potential for disadvantage and for poor educational outcomes. This is in complete contrast to what the federal Abbott government are saying they want to achieve out of education and what the CLP itself is saying it wants to achieve out of education. It will do neither.

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