Judith Troeth (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I present the report of the Senate Standing Committee on Employment, Workplace Relations and Education, Quality of school education, together with the Hansard record of proceedings and documents presented to the committee.

Ordered that the report be printed.

I seek leave to move a motion in relation to the report.

Leave granted.

I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

This inquiry was one of the most interesting I have ever been engaged in. I would like to thank the members of my committee, notably Senator Barnett, Senator Mary Jo Fisher, Senator Birmingham, Senator Fifield and Senator Lightfoot, who all contributed substantially to the remarks of the majority report.

As a former teacher, I feel that at this particular point in Australia’s education history it was necessary for the committee to be brave. And so we have made several recommendations which, on the one hand, carry on some of the initiatives that have been implemented by this government and, on the other hand, take them into further unknown territory. I would like to go through the recommendations and outline some of the things that we have been talking about. The committee received a vast amount of evidence and there was genuine interest and enthusiasm from both the teaching sector and also from members of the general public such as parents who obviously have children at school at the present time. We took account of all of this in the things that we recommended.

At the present time, there are national benchmark tests in literacy and numeracy and, as I understand it, children are tested at year 3 and at year 5. The government plan to extend those benchmark tests to year 7 and year 9, but we also want to go further than that. When the national benchmark tests are done the school receives the results, and then what happens to them? One of the conclusions drawn by the committee is that although Australia has a number of very high achieving students, according to international studies and international rankings, we also have a very long tail of what I could only describe as underachieving students. The reason for putting recommendation 1 in place was to see that the national benchmark tests are not only done but also used. That is, the school uses that information to identify students who need more help and that help is given. It seemed to the committee that, at the moment, the tests are done, the results are received by the school, and then there is not a lot of action after that.

As well as the quality of curriculum—as in the teaching of literacy and numeracy as two of the basics—we also looked at the quality of teachers and teacher training. The committee discovered that more teachers, possibly at secondary level, now do a four-year BEd course, which is a general education course. The committee decided that we would like the government to consider ways of restructuring teacher training so as to encourage or require aspiring secondary teachers to commence their studies in arts, science and other relevant disciplines before they go on to undertake specific studies in education by degree or diploma.

Although I did my university course at Melbourne University some 1,000 years ago, this is what I did, and then I continued as a teacher. I did history and geography as my majors and I did a submajor in English. At the end of successfully completing that arts degree I went on and did a specialised Diploma of Education, which gave me my teacher skills, and I then—although I did not feel it at the start—felt relatively well equipped to go out and teach year 11 and year 12 English, year 11 and year 12 history and middle school geography, because I had that subject discipline. So often these days it seems that teachers have the general experience of the Bachelor of Education degree, which teaches them the skills of pedagogy but does not instil the subject disciplines into them, and we feel there should be a move back to that.

We want to see greater professional development in mathematics. Because universities tend to have dropped their requirements for entry into maths courses at universities, schools do not provide in years 10, 11 and 12 those harder maths subjects for entry into university courses, because they are no longer required. Universities often have to take remedial action for their first-year students—not only in maths, I must say, but also in general literacy. That is not the role of universities.

There are several other recommendations that I consider to be very important. We want to train teachers better, particularly with regard to literacy and numeracy. We want to develop a comparable year 12 curriculum across our country, not a national curriculum dictated from Canberra but one looking at common standards and expectations of achievement at designated levels of study and agreed common standards of assessment, because the states differ in all of that.

Last, but certainly not least, we recommend that governments take steps to improve the remuneration of teachers. Teachers do not have the standing and the degree of esteem that they should have in our society. Part of that is because teaching is regarded as a low-paid profession, so you no longer have quality graduates clamouring to go into teaching as you have with other professions. Part of that, although not all of it, is the remuneration that they are paid. We would certainly like to improve that. We would also like to provide incentives so as to provide greater retention rates. We have foreshadowed the introduction of performance pay, after a degree of inquiry to choose the best system.

I would like to look briefly at the opposition senators’ report. I was very disappointed to find some of the very negative comments that they made. For instance, they say in their report that the inquiry demanded:

... a span of attention by committee members which could not reasonably have been expected of senators.

Why not? We are on this committee—we presumably have an interest in education, because that is what we are looking at. I would have thought that the span of attention by the senators would necessarily be a basic requirement. I was also very disappointed that very few Labor senators took an interest in this inquiry. I think Senator Crossin, who was on the committee, appeared at one of the hearings, in Brisbane, and Senator Marshall appeared at the other hearings but he would not come to Perth, where we had some extremely valuable evidence presented from Notre Dame University and from the Western Australian department about their failed outcomes based education experiments and so on.

Our sampling was not limited. If you look at the list of witnesses and submissions, we had across-the-board interest. In their report opposition senators talk about ‘no substantial evidence’ provided to the committee. How do they regard the Australian Council for Educational Research and the subject associations, all of which made detailed submissions to us? They talk about the failure of the Commonwealth. This report is largely about teachers and curriculum. The Commonwealth, as every senator would know, does not employ one teacher. And the curriculum depth and breadth is not in our hands. But I can tell you that we have made strenuous attempts at the Commonwealth level. What about the Investing in Our Schools Program, which has put over $1 billion into our schools and further rounds of application? The opposition report talks about ‘run-down’ government schools. That is what we are doing with Investing in Our Schools, to provide basic necessities. That is what the state Labor governments should be doing, which they are not. If the state Labor governments do not do that, how can we expect a federal Labor government to do any better? They would simply be passing the buck again.

We also got taken to task for our questioning of Professor Wiltshire, a witness in Queensland, over our criticism of the present Leader of the Opposition, Mr Kevin Rudd, who, at the time of the Wiltshire report, was part of the bureaucracy in Queensland. Professor Wiltshire simply said that Mr Rudd—on the report by Professor Wiltshire being delivered in respect of the state of the Queensland education system—simply did not implement many of the reforms and just let the whole thing slide. If Mr Rudd cannot perform in a state bureaucracy, what hope does he have as Prime Minister? The opposition report also talked about how the government will react to this report. I have mentioned the Investing in Our Schools Program— (Time expired)