Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

BIRRELL (—) (): I move:

That this House:

(1) condemns the Government for failing to address the critical issue of classroom disruption in Australian schools which is severely impacting the learning outcomes of Australian students as well as forcing teachers to leave the profession in droves; and

(2) notes:

(a) that despite the escalating levels of classroom disruption and even violence in many classrooms, the Government has failed to respond to the Senate inquiry report by the Education and Employment Reference Committee into the issue of increasing disruption in Australian school classrooms;

(b) the declining ranking of Australia in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) disciplinary climate index, making Australian classrooms amongst the world's most disorderly;

(c) the impacts, demands and experience of disorderly classrooms on teacher safety, work satisfaction and workforce retention;

(d) the impact of disorderly, poorly disciplined classroom environments and school practices on students' learning, compared with their peers in more disciplined classrooms; and

(e) how leading OECD countries with the highest disciplinary climate index rankings can provide valuable lessons on reducing distraction and disorder in Australian classrooms.

It is good to hear people waxing lyrical about education. I think it's something that all of us agree is really important for the future of our nation. We've got to have an honest debate about how we get the outcomes we all want to achieve. I think there are some real challenges in education in this country at the moment. I don't think things are going in the right direction, and there's a lot of data to suggest that. In fact, OECD data shows that Australia's education standards have fallen since 2006, with Australia ranked 12th for reading, down from sixth; 10th for science, down from sixth; and 16th for maths, down from eighth. We need to have the analysis as to why we think this is happening. The data and many of our experiences in the education system show us that behavioural issues and disruption in our classrooms are key reasons why education standards are slipping. I'll talk about some experiences that I've had, and then I'll talk about what the Senate committee found.

Many years ago I was asked to be principal for a day at a state school in Shepparton, which means I got to shadow the principal and work with the staff. What I saw were a lot of teachers who were there because they were very committed to educating young people. They were very committed to doing it in the state system, because they wanted to give everyone a fair go, as did my mother, who was a teacher at Shepparton High School for well over 30 years. But increasingly they were finding that they couldn't do what they were there to do, which was to teach, because there were a lot of behavioural issues coming into the classroom, and the system wasn't giving them the tools to deal with those behavioural issues. I saw kids outside trying to cool down because they'd blown their stack in the classroom, and I saw children being disruptive. There are cases where children have been violent, and assaults towards teachers are up. So we really need to understand what's going on here and try and work through it, because if kids aren't in a calm, safe environment, they can't learn, and if teachers aren't in a calm, safe environment, they can't teach.

On the coalition's pushed request on 28 November 2022, the Senate referred the issue of increasing disruption in Australian school classrooms to the Senate Education and Employment References Committee to inquire and report on the issue of increasing disruption in Australian schools' classrooms. There were a number of recommendations. I haven't got time to read them all out, but I'm just going to precis a few of them and then question whether the Albanese government in its funding agreements can focus on this very issue of behaviour and disruption in the classroom and get to the core of it. Senate recommendation 8 states:

The committee recommends that the National School Reform Agreement Ministerial Reference Group consider including strategies for addressing disruptive classroom behaviour as one of the priorities for the next National School Reform Agreement.

Now, I'll go to another recommendation. This was recommendation 3:

The committee recommends that government and non-government education authorities are required to invest in the professional development of teachers, so that they are supported by the latest evidence-based teaching skills to manage classroom behaviour.

So we need to give our teachers the tools that they need to deal with classroom behaviour, and it's getting harder. It's not like it was when my mum was a teacher in the eighties. Kids were coming from more stable backgrounds, in my experience. Now there are a lot of social issues—particularly since the COVID pandemic and the onset of social media. Disruption is becoming endemic in classrooms, and we need to focus on that and make sure we create environments to learn.

I'm trying to understand where Minister Clare's funding agreements are up to with four of the states, because my understanding was that they were supposed to be done by 31 December 2024, and, in four of the states, we haven't seen the funding agreements. Not only do we want to see them but we also want to see whether there is any focus on this critical issue. As well as the curriculum and as well as increasing funding to schools, which are supported aims, we want to see whether there is a focus on this insidious and challenging issue that all of us are seeing and all of us are hearing about from the parents and the staff of disruption and behavioural issues in classrooms. It's causing a lot of problems with learning and a lot of problems with teaching, and it is seeing teachers move out of the sector—sometimes out of the state education sector and sometimes out of education altogether, and that's not what anyone wants.

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