Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to speak on the so-called Schools Assistance (Learning Together—Achievement Through Choice and Opportunity) Amendment Bill 2006. This make-do piece of legislation is designed to overcome the problems that arose with the government’s own half-baked schemes of a couple of years ago. Before going into the details of the bill I would like to say that the Democrats will reluctantly support this legislation, but not because we think the programs the legislation refers to are the best way to address the needs of students in schools. Very clearly, they are not—something we strongly pointed out when the original legislation was introduced at the end of 2004. We will support this legislation today because the simple truth is that funding for education in this country is inadequate and, if nothing else, this bill provides some money for education, albeit mostly shifted from other programs. Whether you talk about preschool, primary or secondary school, TAFE or university, this government is not investing enough in education. We say it is essential for the future of Australia that we put more money into those purposes.

It was very encouraging to hear that the government is finally considering the benefits of a year of preschool for all children before they start school. There is a wealth of evidence that shows that preschool education has immeasurable benefits for children, particularly those from more disadvantaged backgrounds. It is time that the focus was not only on how access to early childhood education and care helps parents manage the balance between work and family but also on the innumerable benefits of early childhood education and care for children themselves. Early childhood education lays the foundation for children’s effective learning and improves their social, cognitive and emotional development. It is vital in breaking the cycle of poverty and in reducing crime, teenage pregnancy and welfare dependency. Early childhood education stops children from dropping out of school at an early age and leads to a better skilled workforce. All children deserve the best possible start in life, and Australia has fallen way behind overseas counterparts in providing the sort of substantial and sustained investment needed to make sure that children get off on the front foot.

So I hope that this announcement is not just another political football that gets thrown back and forth between the Commonwealth and the state and territory governments. I would like to see that the federal government, having said that preschool is important and should be mandatory, continues on with that idea and does not then turn around and say, ‘It’s the states’ responsibility to fund it,’ while the states then turn around and say, ‘Child care is important but that’s a federal responsibility.’ We do not need that kind of duck-shoving. Every single Australian child needs to be able to get early childhood education and care that is provided by enough qualified staff to make sure that the focus is on the children’s development, not just on babysitting so that financially pressured parents can do their bit to keep the economy going.

It is not just at the preschool end of things where Australia is lagging behind. We need to be doing more to meet the educational needs at all levels of all our children, not just those lucky enough to be able to attend the most well-resourced schools. Education should be a national priority, but unfortunately, in comparison with other countries and even in comparison with Australia a few decades ago, there is an inadequate commitment on the part of governments to bridge the gap in the educational achievements of the haves and the have-nots. Kids who are bright and who have supportive, well-educated and well-resourced parents are still doing much better than those who happen to be born into poor or isolated families or who might have a learning disability or a language problem or who are Indigenous. Unfortunately, attention in this place has been focused on which schools should or should not be receiving more or less money. The real question should be: what are the educational needs of the child and how can we best meet those needs? Funding decisions should be made on the needs of the child, not on whether the school is non-government or government—but that is not what this government has done, and we see that again in this legislation.

I will now look briefly at the provisions in this bill. They are aimed at providing additional funds for a small number of non-government schools that cater for students with emotional, social or behavioural difficulties. The government is not concerned with providing additional support for all students who require the intensive support that their special circumstances necessitate. If that had been the case, it would have come up with a system to provide resources for all students. As I said, the government has not done that. Instead, we have a system where the government is providing additional funds to a new category of schools, a separate classification of so-called ‘special assistance schools’. These are schools that ‘primarily cater for students with social, emotional or behavioural difficulties’. This new classification means that these schools will be able to receive the maximum level of general recurrent grant available to non-government special schools for students with other disabilities.

The Democrats support additional funding to support students with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties—we certainly need it, as we do extra funding for all students with a range of disabilities. These are high-needs students who need intensive support. But the funding in this bill will not be available to all students with these needs, as I said; it is just available to support students who are in that small number of non-government schools. Government schools that cater for these high-needs students are not eligible, and students with these high needs who are not in specialist schools but may be in a special classroom within a mainstream school or even within standard classes in mainstream schools, whether government or non-government, will not receive additional funding.

So while the government talks about needs based funding there is no real effort to develop an approach that is based on the needs of children whether they have behavioural difficulties, learning difficulties or whatever. Again, the focus is on the school, not on the needs of the students. But hiding behind the mantra of so-called choice—again we see that in the title of this bill—the government continues with its flawed SES funding model that, whichever way you look at it, leads to an unfair and inequitable distribution of funding. Again, the distribution of funding is not based on the needs of children. Nowhere in this model does it take into account the needs of a child with language problems, the needs of Indigenous students or students with learning disabilities.

I would like to take a moment to speak specifically about students with learning disabilities. The recognition and funding of students with learning disabilities is a subject I have raised a number of times here in the Senate, and the 2002 Senate inquiry into the education of students with disabilities very clearly identified the special needs of students who have learning disabilities and the lack of support that is available in schools. The Australian Learning Disability Association’s submission to the national inquiry into the teaching of literacy last year reiterated that the compulsory education sector does not differentiate between learning disorders and learning difficulties. The submission also made the point that funding is not available to support those students with learning disabilities as required. In simple terms, having a learning disability means that a child will not learn in the same way as approximately 90 per cent of the population—that is, these children and students need to be taught differently.

It is estimated that, like in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, approximately 10 to 12 per cent of Australian students have a learning disability of some kind, but unlike these countries in Australia disabilities such as dyslexia, poor visual and motor control and short-term memory problems have been largely ignored, at least at the official level. Students with learning disabilities do not get a satisfactory education, so we test them, we benchmark them, but at the end of the day there is very little by way of services, at least from the federal government’s perspective, that assists them with their problem.

There is still a lack of understanding, awareness and acceptance amongst the public, policy makers and practitioners with relation to learning disabilities generally, and in particular of the need to differentiate between—and I would say diagnose—learning difficulties and learning disabilities. There needs to be a national push to promote the needs of these students, particularly within school communities, because they will take their learning difficulties with them throughout life. Teachers have told me that even in those areas that may have developed policies for assisting students with learning disabilities there are no resources to support teachers to improve their skills, and there are often no facilities to provide the accommodations that students need. Teachers are having to work in spare classrooms if they are lucky, and staff tearooms or even storage rooms if they are not. There is almost no access to note takers, readers or scribes, or any of the technologies like laptop computers, that would so help these students.

Another key problem is that schools are unable to even identify students with learning disabilities correctly. There is a lack of guidelines and procedures for assessing the needs of students and little help within the school system to organise an assessment or to pay for it. Parents face costs of hundreds of dollars just to have an assessment of their son or daughter made. We need national guidelines for testing for learning disabilities and we need funding to support that testing. Teachers and schools cannot be expected to adequately cater for the needs of these students if they do not know how extensive the problems are or what the exact nature of them is.

Current funding for programs to support students is ad hoc and inadequate. The federal government will no doubt argue that the Literacy, Numeracy and Special Learning Needs Program provides assistance for these students, but this simply demonstrates the failure of the government to recognise the difference between the needs of students with learning difficulties and those with learning disabilities. This is a failure shared by the many state and territory government education departments. They chose to provide support for students with learning disabilities through umbrella programs that are primarily designed to help students with difficulties.

We would not want to see students with learning difficulties miss out. These students are also educationally disadvantaged and need additional support. However, their needs are generally very different from those with disabilities and, while some students with learning disabilities might be assisted by programs which target those with learning difficulties, it is very likely that many students with learning disabilities are missing out. This is a really serious issue and it is time that the government sorted out what needs to be done in order to fund learning disabilities and what the differences are with the current set of disabilities that are funded through the states grants legislation—that is, students with physical, intellectual and emotional disabilities. We need to look at the group that has difficulties that can be overcome by literacy programs and then examine the other group that is much more difficult to assist.

Unfortunately, taking a coherent and thoughtful approach to funding the educational needs of children seems to not be what this government is about. What it is about is ad hoc, ill-conceived add-on programs that are driven by ideology, badly administered and fail to provide any real contribution to the quality of education of Australian children, and certainly the Tutorial Voucher Initiative fits into that category like a glove. That is the reason why we have this legislation before us today. It is mopping up the mess made by two of the programs that this government put in place 12 months ago—the Investing in our Schools program and the Tutorial Voucher Initiative. When they were introduced we did not support that approach. We argued that it was administratively inefficient, inequitable and would ultimately be ineffective. One of the reasons the tutorial voucher system did not work was that the government was so opposed to that system being done through schools, and so, as I understand it, the schools at the end of the day became brokers and became involved—but only because the government simply could not make the system work that it had planned. That idea of brokers and tutors coming from nowhere and being available to do this work was a gross failure.

We welcome additional funding for education. We do not, however, welcome the way in which those funds have been administered. There must be a shift in this process from government schools across to nongovernment schools, and the Democrats are always opposed to that notion. We need more money for capital works in schools. Overall, Commonwealth expenditure on capital works has dropped since 1993 by around 30 per cent. But the Investing in Our Schools program was always going to benefit most those schools that have active, committed parent organisations that can write good grant applications for that shade over the sandpit or other small item that schools may be able to put forward that fits within the limit of the grant amount, a limit which only applies, of course, to government schools.

There was no mechanism in this program for any sensible or equitable prioritising of the funding. We desperately need a national standard for basic school amenities but there is still no sign of that turning up any time soon. We need an audit of school buildings and facilities, so that we can all see which schools do not have basic infrastructure. We then need to fund the necessary development in a coordinated manner, but that just has not happened. We also need a better approach to literacy development. Giving $700 vouchers to parents of grade 3 students who fail the reading tests so they can access private tutors was never going to be an efficient or an effective way to help those children.

The Democrats argued at the time that the $20 million should have been used to support existing programs in schools. Schools already have the structures and the expertise; all they need are the resources to work one on one or in small groups with struggling children. Again, the reason this has been put in place is that the Commonwealth cannot reach agreement with the states on how to do this, and we constantly have this bickering about cost shifting, who is paying for what and who is getting the plaudits for putting programs in place. That is what this is about; it is not about any sensible approach to improving learning outcomes.

There were many questions raised about the voucher scheme when it was first proposed, such as the availability of suitable tutors, the capacity of some parents to seek help for their kids and how this tutorial assistance would tie in with what students are learning at schools. Now we are seeing the results of that failure to pay attention to those questions. The government cannot say that those in the Senate did not point this out to them. I hope that this time the government have learnt something from this kind of fiasco.

We need more investment in schools, more money for capital works, more money for literacy development and more money to support students with additional educational needs. In this respect, the government must do much better. All Australian children deserve and need a quality education regardless of their circumstances, the state or territory in which they live, the resources of their parents and which school they go to.

I indicate that the amendments circulated in my name will be withdrawn.