Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I was sent a photograph by my younger brother, who is now a primary school principal. It was his grade 3 class, Texas State School, 1970—34 children in the class, one teacher, no computers, no data projectors, nothing. Six of the kids in the whole class had shoes on. Every one of those children could read and write. The way our curriculum is, the way our teachers are trained today and what is expected of a teacher today are so vastly different to what was expected in those days, during my time. I find the pressure that we put on teachers today not only to step up as surrogate parents but also to be social workers, to handle difficult situations, to diagnose areas of disability—especially with autism and Asperger's—to be a huge impost on people who are paid as professionals to teach. My ultimate thing here in this speech is to beg everyone that we let teachers teach, and we must support them in that endeavour.

My wife is an early childhood teacher, and she has a Down syndrome child in her class. We have to be able to, from a local level, redefine success. What is success for a normal happy, healthy child is being able to get through that class and progress to year 1 and onward into a full-blown education. What my wife's Down syndrome child defines as success and what the parents define as success should be something that is done on a very local level. She has started school completely non-verbal and has finished at the school being able to say 'more hugs from Ms Linda'. It is a massive step. What Lola has been able to bring to my wife's school is a level of texture, a level of giving and a level of love that you just do not come across all that often. That comes down to what the principal does. It is about how empathetic he or she is towards a child, towards inclusion in our education system. We have massive opportunity here but we also have massive responsibility. As the member for Hasluck said previously, what we used to do was just bar these kids from classrooms and put them in special places where they would sink to the lowest common denominator—to the lowest level. We are better than that. But, when it comes to funding, we have to be able to divest the area where they can access funding to where the teacher needs it.

Quite often we see from schools and boards of educations and from state governments that the area that is required to be taken away all the time is for aides—the people who are needed the most to be able to attend to children who are non-toilet trained in grade 1. A teacher cannot do that. Supporting a teacher and getting that decision-making ability as close as possible to the teacher, as close as possible to their customer, is the best thing that we can do. We need to be able to have flexibility. At Hermit Park State School, Clayton Carnes, the principal, is a fantastic educator. He is able to shift resources from one classroom to another because his teachers work as a team and they are able to pull those resources and make sure the child needing the most resources gets the most assistance. That is what we have to do.

I agree with the Member for Lalor: there are many things that we have to be able to do in this space. This is one of the frustrations I have as chair of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Employment. When you cross over from federal to state boundaries and cloud those issues, it seems to me that we always leave enough room to blame each other for not doing enough. I always say that I am not a federalist, but a national response has its appeal. I would prefer a school-by-school response. I would prefer a school to be able to say, 'We welcome this. We are able to cope with it. And our school community demands that we are accepting of these things.' Change comes from the bottom up, not the top down. We have to do better than we are doing. I agree with everyone on this. This is a hugely important thing. We have to be inclusive. My son, who finished year 7, was Lola's year 7 buddy. He is a better person today because of what Lola gave him. We have to be more expansive. I thank the House.

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