Geoff Lyons (Bass, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth. The recent OECD report into school education recognises the significant contribution the government has made to school education. What is the progress of the government's reforms and how have they been received?

Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Bass for his question. Last week the OECD released a very important report on education, OECD reviews of evaluation and assessment in education:Australia, and unambiguously gave this government a big tick on education reform. I want to quote briefly from what the OECD review team said. They said, 'The overall evaluation and assessment framework appears as highly sophisticated and well conceptualised.' They went on to say that 'particularly positive' features include a focus on student outcomes, a coherent system of assessments for learning, a structure to integrate accountability and improvement, and the commitment to transparency. We could not have put it any better if we had tried. My School, national testing and the Australian curriculum got a huge vote of confidence by the OECD looking at national progress on education and the Gillard government's reforms in that area.

The review also pointed towards further improvement, and there it identified the very policies that we took to the last election and are now delivering—a national performance management system for teachers, rewarding our best teachers, identifying our best schools, providing rewards for school improvements, and empowering local schools by allowing them to make decisions about what works best in their community.

The fact is that this government is committed to making every school a great school. The architecture is in place and the next tranche of reforms will take the reform even further. Let us remember the context: significant improvement of the facilities of schools in the country through the Building the Education Revolution, providing some $2.5 billion to our nation's schools to lift the performance of students who are falling behind and to improve teacher quality. This government is spending over $65 billion on education—nearly twice what was spent previously by the coalition. Unfortunately, every time the shadow cabinet sits down to look at funding cuts education is on the chopping block. The fact is that Mr Abbott and the coalition are already on the record as committing to some $2.8 billion out of education. While the shadow minister for education trails his coat on foreign policy and, it seems, writes very literate essays about China, at the same time when they meet in the shadow cabinet all they are doing is contemplating cuts in education. He admitted on Meet the Press recently that education would not be spared from the $70 billion that the opposition is contemplating cutting from our budget.

Whether it is $5 billion or $10 billion or $15 billion—and $15 billion, incidentally, is a quarter of our education budget—the fact is that these reforms are absolutely essential to the nation's prosperity and progress. But the sorts of cuts that the opposition has in place mean that NAPLAN is gone, My School is gone, the Australian curriculum is gone, teaching standards are gone and remaining trades training centres are gone. And the policies identified by the OECD that this government wants to put in place—performance management systems for teachers, local school empowerment and digital technology opportunities; all of those things—are gone under an opposition that does not know how important education is for the future of this country.

We will continue to deliver those education reforms and to make every school a great school.