Jane Prentice (Ryan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Education. Can the minister confirm that the academic results for Australian school students have gone backwards in real and relative terms when compared with the rest of the world in recent years? Minister, what plans does the government have to improve the academic outcomes for Australian school students?

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Ryan for her question. Unfortunately, I can confirm to her that literacy and numeracy results have gone backwards in recent years both relatively and, most shockingly of all in real terms, in comparison to our competitor nations around the world. Whether it is the program for international student assessment, trends in international maths and science study, progress in international reading literacy, and of course the Labor Party's favourite report, the Gonski report, all of these studies show that our literacy and numeracy outcomes for students have declined in recent years. It is a very serious problem for the economy, for productivity, but more importantly it is a personal tragedy for those students, those children, emerging from schools who do not have literacy and numeracy skills as a result of our education system. We are letting them down.

Many in the Labor Party refuse to remove the log in their own eye with respect to this matter. Instead, they lecture parents that the current methods of teaching are efficacious and do not need to be changed. They are of course in fear of the Teachers Federation, which wants to continue to pretend that the outcomes are good in Australia and that nothing needs to change. Successive Labor ministers for education, including the Leader of the Opposition, who was a Minister for Education, sat on their hands for fear of taking on the Teachers Federation.

Mr Champion interjecting—

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Wakefield will desist!

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

But there is one brave soul in the Labor Party, the new member for Perth, who is not afraid to split with her Labor colleagues on this issue and is prepared to call a spade a spade. She did so in very strong terms. She said—and I quote her column in The Australian on Thursday, 24 October:

To me, it is immoral to allow so many Australian children to be victims of a failed educational fad. We are not just failing to teach these kids to read—we are destroying their confidence as learners. We teach them to hate school.

It was a very strong quote, and unfortunately I agree with it, because education should not be in that terrible state after years of successive Labor governments.

But we are fixing Labor's mess. We will fix Labor's mess. We have a $22 million fund that we will soon announce the details of to establish orthodox teaching methods in remote schools around Australia—things like direct instruction, explicit instruction, Jolly Phonics and MultiLit. We want our children to be able to read. We are not going to be hidebound by the ideological fights of the last two decades in education. We want to put students first.