Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to give a clear shout-out to the principals, school council presidents leadership teams in the schools across the electorate of Lalor. Over the past four weeks, I've visited the schools in Lalor to see some fabulous work going on on the ground, to see professional learning communities not just working across faculties and across year levels but across schools, working together to give our kids the best start in their lives. The key to this has always been resourcing. The key to this is giving schools the tools and the funds that they need to do such important work. I also want to give a particular shout-out to Steve Butyn, the principal of Werribee Secondary College, who celebrated 50 years in public education quite recently. It's a substantial, significant contribution that Steve has made not just to the schools but to the communities that he has served. In a growth corridor like ours, our schools do the heavy lifting not just in building community from the ground up but also in training teachers. They do the heavy lifting, with some schools having over 50 per cent of their teaching staff being graduates. They're doing the heavy lifting in the first five years of training new generations of teachers in Victoria. I'm sure similar things are going on in the outer suburbs of Pakenham, Sunbury and all of our outer areas.