Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

I thank my friend, the sensational member for Pearce, from the great state of WA, for her question. Last week, we signed an agreement with the WA government to fully fund all public schools in Western Australia. What that means is that Western Australia will become the first state in the country to get public schools to that full funding level that David Gonski set all those years ago. It involves the Commonwealth government chipping in. It also involves the WA government chipping in. All up, it's worth an extra $1.6 billion for public schools in WA.

But it's not a blank cheque; this money will be tied to real and practical reforms to help our children who fall behind to catch up and to keep up, to see more children finish high school. That's important, because, over the last seven or eight years, we've seen the number of children in public high schools complete high school go backwards, from about 83 per cent down to 73 per cent. That's what we've got to fix. It's what we've got to turn around. It's what this funding is all about—investing in things like a phonics check and a numeracy check in year 1 to identify children, when they're very young, who are already falling behind and need extra help and investing in things like evidence based teaching and catch-up tutoring to make sure they get that extra help.

Catch-up tutoring involves getting children out of a class of 25 or 30, four or five days a week, for 40 minutes at a time, into a class where there might be three or four of them and one teacher. What we know is that, when you do that in the right way, a child will learn as much in six months as they would otherwise have learnt in 12 months. In other words, they catch up. In other words, this works.

This investment will also find extra investments in mental health support. There is an obvious link between health and education. We know children who experience mental health challenges are more likely not to be at school and that by year 9, on average, they're about 1½ to three years behind their classmates when it comes to literacy and numeracy.

We also need to make sure that this money glows in the dark, and that's what this agreement is all about as well. In the next few weeks, I'll introduce legislation to make all of this happen, to lock all of this in. When we do, we know what will happen—the Liberal Party will vote against this. London to a brick, they will vote against this. They've already said as much. They've said they don't think we should be putting extra money into our public schools. Well, good luck explaining that to the parents of WA!

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