Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The whole of Australia is grieving today with the results of an education study showing that we have fallen to 28th in the world—behind Kazakhstan, Slovenia and every other nation you have ever heard of—in schools. I would appeal to state ministers Kate Jones, Piccoli, Merlino, Close, Collier, Rockliff, Lawler and Fitzharris: reform your departments. Stop listening to unions and start rewarding achievement and progress and not just need. The more need you fund, the more need you get. Let us be honest.

Study maths and science through to senior years. Let us see that there are more maths and science teachers available to our states. We do not need any more health and PE teachers; we have got a generation's worth of them already.

Start rewarding high-performing teachers with more money. Take poorly performing teachers and retrain them—something that never happens. And let us of course make sure that we do not keep adding non-teachers to education bureaucracies.

Do more formative assessment of what works and what does not. Do more formative evaluation of our curriculum so that we improve every year and do not fall behind.

Let us end the racist stereotyping of Asian education systems. As long as they wipe the floor with us, those top achievers will take our standard of living and remove our prosperity. We must have better schools producing the greatest Australian graduates that we can. Let us no longer fund need, as this discredited Gonski model suggests. Start to fund outcomes, start to fund value and start to fund achieving schools and the principals that achieve it.