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

My question is to the Prime Minister. Will the Prime Minister update the House on the government's plan to improve our nation's schools? What will this mean for children growing up in my electorate of Bass?

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

I thank the member for Bass for his question and I thank him and his colleagues—my colleagues—for their interests, their passion and their commitment to ensuring that every child in every school gets a great education. I want to thank my colleagues for turning out in such numbers this morning to support a piece of legislation which is close to our Labor hearts—to see introduced into this parliament an education bill that will create a new era for education in our nation and that will ensure that for every child in every school, as part of their citizenship entitlement, we commit to them: that they will get an excellent education; that we will work as a nation—as a people—to improve the quality of education for every child in every school; that we will ensure that every school has a school improvement plan; and that we are focused on the transparency of results—something that the opposition, when it was in government, failed to do. It could not get into the hands of Australian parents, Australian teachers, Australian governments, state and federal, the kind of information that is necessary to guide education policy.

I am proud that because of the work of this government we now have the information we need to drive an era of improvement and change; that we can talk about the achievements of every school; that we can point to—because we have done it—what improves education for children in schools; and that we can show some certainty about what drives up results in literacy and numeracy, and educational achievement around the country.

Now is the time, having done all of that work across five years in government, to move to the next stage: to ensure that there is a national plan for school improvement; to ensure that every child's education is properly funded; and to ensure that we drive our schooling system for our nation into the top five schooling systems in the world and that our nation realises the full economic promise of the century in which we live, this Asian century of change.

We laid out in our white paper, our national plan for the nation's future, our determination to make sure that we win the economic race by winning the education race. I was proud to bring to the parliament this morning personally as Prime Minister, working with the Minister for School Education, Peter Garrett, a bill to enshrine that commitment to an excellent education at the heart of our national life. And I think it is to be regretted that members of the opposition—including the shadow minister for education—think education is so unimportant that they could not even be bothered to be here.