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

I rise to recognise the passing of the Hon. Con Sciacca this afternoon. He will be close to many of us in this chamber. He had a long battle with cancer which came to an end today. There will be many friends of Con who will be looking forward to an opportunity to share stories about the amazing impact that he had in this building. He was like a father to many in my electorate. He was the traditional politician who was public property to everyone. He changed the lives of school students, adolescents struggling with personal challenges. He gave people a start. He found jobs for people who needed them. Many people will be getting together in the coming days to tell stories about the significant life, the full life, led by Con Sciacca.

I speak today about schools in Redlands. For a long time now, we have known that midyear means the opening of report cards. Many parents around the country will be opening report cards tonight—the shock, excitement, thrill, exhilaration and celebration of seeing As, Bs and Cs, and the immense amount of work that is done by students around this country to achieve those results.

But it is still a great challenge for us to identify gain over time for students. For too long, we have been emphasising snapshots of achievement instead of looking at the gain and the tracking over time. This means that a student from a poor household who makes significant improvement is not often recognised, because we just take a snapshot of where they ended up at the end of the year.

I want to go to the particular effort of identifying schools in my electorate that went beyond what was predicted. These are the schools that had a gain that cannot be explained by normal movement between years. I call it impact. One of the things that I would like to do in my public life is to change the conversation around school achievement from one of just attainment—of schools simply recruiting smarter kids and calling themselves a more successful school—to identifying where students started from and the journey that we took them on in the educational process. Schools in my electorate have done that.

From the ACARA website, we have looked at the 2015 year 5 NAPLAN and looked at the tracking between year 3 and year 5. Of course, these students are now off in high school, but no-one has recognised that, back in 2015, when they sat NAPLAN, there were schools that went over and above the normal progression you would expect between similar schools of social and educational similarity. A school like Vienna Woods has been recognised by ACARA but not in the mainstream press.

Vienna Woods, a tiny school in the most disadvantaged part of my electorate, achieved a 28-point NAPLAN gain relative to similar schools over that two-year period between years 3 and 5. We cannot look at year 7, because they are now in high school. Vienna Woods was the most significant change, followed by Capalaba at 23 NAPLAN points, Cleveland State School at 22 and Redlands College, an independent school in my electorate, at 22 also. In numeracy: Vienna Woods, again, a 24-NAPLAN-point improvement in 2015; Capalaba State College, 20 points; and Thornlands, 19 points. These schools are never recognised. They come from some of the tougher parts of my city. We are too often celebrating the high ATAR scores without recognising the gains achieved over time. Put together in that 2015 cohort, Vienna Woods, Capalaba, Cleveland and Thornlands represent outstanding achievement in that year.

Move now to 2016, where people were now identifying NAPLAN as being a significant marker of school achievement. Victoria Point primary had a 40-NAPLAN-point achievement relative to similar schools over time. They are moving faster. They are progressing their students even more quickly. Redlands College had 36 for literacy. Bay View had 31, Ormiston College had 29, St Rita's had 23 and St Anthony's had 20. Those last two schools are Catholic education schools that devoted themselves to better tracking of NAPLAN outcomes and found themselves, for the first time, in the top grade of schools around gain. I also want to recognise, in numeracy, Macleay Island, which had a 51-point gain, and Ormiston college, which had a 20-point gain.

As I conclude, I just want to recognise the change agents in my city. These are the teachers who changed lives for the better. In first place are the primary school teachers—the year 3 teachers in 2014 and the year 4 teachers in 2015—at Macleay Island who achieved a 28-point gain. Second were Victoria Point and Redlands College in a tie. In fourth place was Vienna Woods. In fifth place was Ormiston college. In sixth place was Bay View. Seventh was Capalaba college. Eighth was Cleveland primary school. Ninth was St Anthony's. Tenth was Thornlands. The top 10 change agents—those primary schools—are recognised here tonight in the nation's parliament.