Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Lindsay for her question. I know that she, like all members of this side of the House, is deeply concerned to ensure that quality education leads to good outcomes for Australian students. I can report that in the last week the NAPLAN results for 2015 have been publicly released. They show that year 3 results are improving slightly and that year 9 results are declining slightly, but across the board there is stagnation over the last eight years in terms of the results of our students.

On this side of the House, we do not regard that as good enough. We believe that much needs to be done to improve the outcomes for students, and that is why we have a four pillars policy to change the outcome for Australian students. It consists of reforming the national curriculum from 1 January next year—to declutter the curriculum and to make it more robust and rigorous to extend our students more. This has been agreed to by all the states and territories and the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority.

We are reforming teacher quality in Australia by forcing all institutions across Australia to be reaccredited to train teachers, so that we can put in place the structures necessary to have high-quality teachers being produced by our institutions, which will change the entire system of teaching in Australia. We are introducing more school autonomy. Every state and territory jurisdiction has signed up to the government's independent public school model, at a cost of $70 million, because research shows the more autonomy in a school the better the outcome for students.

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