Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Education and Training. Will the minister inform the House what progress has been made to ensure the national curriculum is robust and useful? How will an improved curriculum ensure Australians are more productive in the future?

Chris Bowen (McMahon, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Tangney for his question. I can assure him and the House that the Intergenerational report has a very heavy emphasis on productivity in the future for Australia and participation in the workforce. One of the most important aspects, of course, to productivity is the education of Australians, the skilling of Australians, the retraining and training of Australians, higher education, but particularly schools.

I have very good news for the House today, just hot off the press. At an Education Council of Ministers meeting at 12.30 today, they unanimously endorsed the proposed actions of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority to implement the Australian government's response to the Wiltshire-Donnelly curriculum review. This will come as a very nasty blow to the Labor Party because they insisted that the Wiltshire-Donnelly review should be consigned to the dustbin. They did everything they could to discredit the Wiltshire-Donnelly review, which was an excellent document, an objective document, about how to make our curriculum robust and effective and useful for young people. I congratulate all the ministers, state and territory, Labor and Liberal, who have unanimously today endorsed the government's response and the implementation by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority.

What it will mean for the future of Australian schoolchildren is that they will be educated in a more robust and relevant and useful curriculum. Specifically, it will have more depth and less breadth. It will reduce the quantity of content in the curriculum. It will de-clutter the primary school curriculum, combining history, geography, civics and citizenship, and economics and business—four separate subjects into one subject in primary school. Importantly, for parents around Australia who have been crying out for this for a long time, it will ensure an appropriate emphasis is placed on phonics and phonemic awareness in the Australian curriculum in English, which will specifically mean the involvement of Macquarie University and their MultiLit program in the training of school students in how to read and write. So it acknowledges for the first time and puts at the centre of the curriculum the acknowledgement that reading and writing, and emerging from school being able to do so, is so important that students should be trained in the practical application of how to do so through phonics and phonemic awareness. I am absolutely delighted with more good news from the Abbott government that we are getting on with the job, whether it is teacher training, independent public schools, improvement in the curriculum, parental engagement, higher education reform—just what the Intergenerational report requires.