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

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this matter of public importance. My wife is an early childhood teacher and my younger brother is a high school teacher and now primary school principal, and he has been a principal in secondary schools as well. My thoughts on education and my work with the education committee have been assisted by both of those people with their varying views on education, but also by being involved in school communities over 10 years with my kids going through the school system. I say for the record that there is no way in the world that I could ever become a teacher. I lasted one day as a brickie's labourer; I lasted half a day as a builder's labourer; I would not last until little lunch as a teacher.

We have stated that teacher quality is a key thing that we want to drive toward, and I believe that is so. Having a wife who is a teacher, I see the hours that teachers put in. The notion that teachers have all these holidays is a complete furphy. They work during most of the holidays. Every Sunday, my wife and her co-teacher were going through individual plans for their children. What drives them most is not the pay or anything like that; what drives them most is love for the children. That is what we have in this country, by and large: we have teachers in our system who actually love children. As I said before, I would not last 15 minutes as a teacher.

What we want to do is make sure that, when we are graduating teachers, the right sorts of people are coming through. The last time I checked the numbers was in about 2014, so they may have varied. In those days, the dropout rate of teachers in the first two or three years, for whatever reason, was about 27 per cent. There are a lot of reasons for that, but that is over a quarter of the teachers who could graduate from university. There is the amount of money that all levels of government have provided to produce those teachers and the investment to get teachers out there. To have a quarter of your cohort completely disengage from the education system tells you how stressful being a teacher is. When I was in primary school was a long time ago and school was different. Today's teachers have to be social workers, they have to be surrogate parents, they have to feed kids, they have to clothe kids and they have to take kids to the toilet. We have very serious issues here.

This is the central point I want to make: we have two theories. One is Labor's theory: if you just throw more money at needs based education, you will drive better outcomes. Money has been thrown at education without any concern for outcomes since 1972 when Gough Whitlam got to power, and including all governments. It has been shown that throwing money at education without demanding things from a federal level and without demanding some sort of return is not the way to go. We need to focus on making sure that teachers in classrooms are properly prepared so they can get things done. We have to make sure that parents are engaged and that, when something goes wrong in the classroom, the teacher is not the one they blame and the school is not blamed; that they look to what their children is doing and they participate in bringing their children to school. We have to make sure that principals are able to make decisions around their school with their school community. If you engage with those things and you make the decision as close to the coalface as you possibly can, you will get a better decision. That is the basis of what we are trying to do. Freeing up the curriculum is my personal pledge. I just do not see the point in trying to teach a preschooler geography when they cannot read, write or grip a pencil. There are so many things that we could do in this space.

There is failure at all levels of government in letting our education standards slip: allowing kids to get to high school when they cannot read or write; refusing to fail kids because it might hurt their feelings; and being attacked by parents. This says to us that it is not going to be cured by just throwing money at it. We are investing a lot of money. We are all investing a lot of money. We have a different approach, but that is all it is: a different approach. I think we all care about education and we should all care about education.

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