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

This morning I rise to talk about the fabulous education announcements made by my good friend the member for Sydney, who is the Deputy Leader of the Opposition and the shadow minister for education. I'm incredibly excited about the $40,000 bursaries for student teachers. It's up to $40,000 to encourage the best and brightest Australians into teaching, a career that I enjoyed for 27 years. My first choice when I finished school was to go into teaching. This is part of Labor's plan to raise the status of the teaching profession. I don't think there's anything more important that we can do for our communities across this country. After graduating, working in public schools will be required for between one and four years. It's tried and tested. We know it works. We had thousands of teachers who joined the teaching profession through a similar process many years ago. Thousands of women became teachers, built a life in that profession and shared great practice in their classrooms around this country. This supports teachers. It will rejuvenate our classrooms and, in outer suburban areas, where we do the serious heavy lifting of taking on graduate teachers and supporting them to become professionals in our profession, this will go a long way towards raising the community's expectations around teachers as well as assisting and raising the status and profile of teachers.

The minister also announced yesterday a $30 million investment to establish a national principals academy. As a former state school principal, I find this is a really exciting announcement because, state to state, there is such variation happening on the ground in our schools. This national academy will allow principals from different parts of Australia to get together, to share their knowledge, to collaborate, to find the best ways forward and to attest to what's working and what's not working in real time.

Those are really exciting announcements, but nothing is more exciting than the announcement that we will increase funding for students with a disability by $300 million over three years from 2020. This is a really exciting announcement, welcomed across the country by parents of students with a disability. It will ensure that more teachers are involved in supporting those students and that they'll get more one-to-one attention and it will develop the best ways to support students with various disabilities in our classrooms across Australia. Labor are going to put back the $14.1 billion into state schools. That's what's important about Labor. We're going to an election on a win.