Chris Hayes (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Education. Will she update the House on the government’s national reform agenda for school education?

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Werriwa for his question. Earlier this week, on Monday, I met with Dr Ken Boston, a former director-general of education in New South Wales and South Australia and head of England’s Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. Dr Boston is travelling around the country at the invitation of the Australian Primary Principals Association talking to primary principals about the national debate that is now underway—sparked by the Rudd government’s education revolution—on school transparency.

This nation has many excellent schools, but international comparisons show that we can do better. For too long, this nation has tolerated an assumption that children from disadvantaged backgrounds are somehow destined to do worse at school. I absolutely reject that assumption, and so should the nation. Every child in every family in this country has the right to achieve highly at school and to get a great education. To do that, we need great teaching, a great curriculum and great family and community support. We know these things can make a difference. But, if we are going to deliver on this potential as a nation, we have to have an honest, open and accurate picture of what is happening in our schools, which school students are in which schools and the differences in our school communities and their needs.

Since the Prime Minister called for a new era of transparency late last year, state governments and the non-government school systems have shown that they are ready to take up the challenge. The Tasmanian government has published data about the performance of its schools. It is there for all to see. The Queensland government has published a school report card. The New South Wales government has taken a courageous stand against legislation banning the publication of this information by newspapers and media organisations. We are now in the midst of this, and we need to have an open and fierce debate about where disadvantage lies in our education system. Many Australians would be shocked to learn how little real information is currently available about disadvantage in our education system. To identify which schools are struggling, we need more detailed information about schools and the communities those schools serve.

When we were elected, we inherited a system where the federal government did not have accurate data about state schools and disadvantage in those schools. There was information on non-government schools—the SES index—but no comparable information on state schools, even though two-thirds of Australian children are educated in state schools. We are determined to fix that problem. We need to be able to obtain and publish rich, accurate information about our schools—real data about resources, about the background of the student population, about parental income and about literacy and numeracy results. It should not be a matter of a guesstimate as to where disadvantage lies; it should be a matter of indisputable public record. It should not be a matter of convoluted demography and statistics; we should know for sure where we should be investing additional resources, if we care about disadvantage.

We will build this transparency system, and new information will be available from 1 January next year. But, to quote Dr Boston, ‘Kids only get one chance at school.’ Disadvantaged kids have already waited too long for a better education, and we are not going to keep them waiting any longer. That is why we are determined to start delivering our $1.5 billion of new resources to disadvantaged schools. In order to be transparent about how low-SES schools are to be defined and selected to share in the funding of this program, it was agreed by governments to use the information we now have, which is the Australian Bureau of Statistics index of relative socioeconomic disadvantage. That was to be the basis of selecting the initial list of schools for inclusion in the low-SES national partnership. It was also agreed that states would have the flexibility to nominate schools from outside the list if they could provide more accurate information about the nature of schools and where disadvantage was.

Using this ABS data, the best we have at this stage, the New South Wales government has published a preliminary list of schools selected to participate in this new partnership. The Rudd government has been clear that this is a list for consultation. Clearly, the limitation of the data available through the ABS is shown by the fact that schools like Claymore and Macquarie Fields are not on this list. It is obvious to everyone who has been to those schools and to those communities, as I have—and the member for Werriwa is intimately familiar with Macquarie Fields—that this data is not giving us the full picture and that these schools and communities need assistance, need our partnership and need our help.

We can do better, and we must do better, by pushing ahead with the transparency reforms that are part of the Rudd government’s education revolution. Every element of our reform agenda—from transparency to a national curriculum, national testing, teacher quality, literacy and numeracy—is interconnected and absolutely directed to addressing educational disadvantage. There has never been a government in this nation’s history more concerned about and determined to address educational disadvantage than this government. Caring about educational disadvantage, and acting to correct it, is a revolution.