Penny Wright (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

There are many components to raising educational standards and having quality candidates is very important. We do need to attract the best to teaching and we need to keep them there once they are in the workforce. But it is not just a matter of increasing scores for university. We actually need to create a demand for teaching, and we do this by truly valuing teaching and treating it as a profession, with fair wages comparable to other professions, suitable career structures and ongoing professional development and support. We know from the Gonski review that our current system is that particularly government schools have concentrations of disadvantage, and these educate the majority of students with higher needs. It is for this reason that we need to prioritise the payment of that additional investment in government schools.