Judith Troeth (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to 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)

Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Labor welcomed this inquiry when it was first proposed by the government, even though we were a little bit sceptical about the motivations of the government when initiating it. We understand how important education is. It is what underpins our civilisation. It is what underpins our economic prosperity. It is what underpins our democracy. It is what underpins all innovation. It is fundamental in every aspect of our way of life. We do not underestimate the importance of it.

What we have just heard from Senator Troeth brings an element of truth to the concerns that we had at the time—that this was more about politics than good policy. I will talk in some detail about some of the issues that Senator Troeth raised. I was not going to but, now that she has drawn the Senate’s attention to the fact that not all senators attended some of the hearings—even though she only talked about the inability of some Labor senators to attend some hearings—I will talk about it. If she were going to be a bit more fair dinkum maybe she would have provided the attendance list of all senators and all members for all of the hearings.

It is difficult, from time to time, when the government simply determines that hearings will be held in different cities on particular dates and not all senators can actually attend. It is difficult when the government has the numbers and goes ahead with those hearings, regardless of opposition senators saying that they are unable, for various reasons, to attend on those days. The committee simply goes ahead anyway.

If we want to talk about some examples of other inquiries where opposition senators were able to attend, I can mention a very recent inquiry where not a single government member was able to attend. This was an inquiry that was referred to a committee by the government. But not a single government member made themselves available—an inquiry on a bill that was referred by the government. I think it was a little bit silly—quite frankly, stupid—of Senator Troeth to raise this as an issue, just reaffirming our view that this inquiry was probably more to do with politics than good policy.

The other issue referred to was Mr Ken Wiltshire’s contribution to the committee. His sole contribution in terms of the submission was a copy of an opinion piece he wrote for the Australian some time before. His sole academic contribution to our inquiry was an opinion piece he wrote in a newspaper. We get to the inquiry, and what is the line of questioning from the government senators? They run an argument like this: ‘Education in Queensland has failed. Mr Rudd used to be the chief of staff to a former premier of Queensland; therefore, Mr Rudd now, as opposition leader, is responsible for the failure of Queensland education.’

Of course, there was no evidence that the Queensland education system has failed—none whatsoever. It was an enormously long bow to draw. Then what happened? At the end of Mr Wiltshire’s submission to the inquiry, he went out to a pre-organised press conference and talked about how Mr Rudd is responsible for the failure of education in Queensland. What a set-up! What an absolute set-up by Liberal members of this committee, questioning a witness about a subject that he had already organised to talk to the press about afterwards. If we wanted an example of the politicisation of this issue—instead of looking at good policy, which is what this committee was supposed to do—there is another example.

Senator Troeth talked about attention spans. I did not want to go hard on that issue in the report, but now I am sorry that I did not. That referred to a written complaint from one of the witnesses about a Liberal member of this committee who mocked her evidence during the committee and attacked the issues that she was trying to portray and then went off and read a magazine for the rest of her contribution. The witness felt she had to complain formally in writing to the committee about the attention span of the particular senator. I was not going to talk about that. Senator Troeth introduced it, as if to turn it back on the opposition. We will be talking more about this report in days to come, when I will go into more detail about those matters, given that Senator Troeth wanted to introduce those issues.

This inquiry had very broad terms of reference. In their efforts to politicise this as an issue, instead of coming to a process where we hear from witnesses, we take the evidence, we consider that evidence and we come to considered conclusions, the government members seem to have, all of a sudden, become experts on the education system. Education is something that has billions of dollars every year spent on it. Curriculum development, process and teaching methods employ thousands and thousands of people with enormous expertise who have been working on these issues—as their life’s work, in most cases. That has been going on for generation after generation.

Then we have a couple of government senators, over four or five days of inquiry, hearing from witnesses, who spend 30 or maybe 45 minutes talking to the committee. Some, but not all, of them have put in written submissions. As a result, the government senators suddenly become absolute experts on everything to do with education. In the Labor Party, we tend not to do that; we tend not to overstep our ability or our area of expertise.

It is one thing to collate the evidence, talk about it and put it forward as a policy direction to try assist the parliament in directing where the money should go, assisting the government, bringing these issues to the table and getting all sorts of different people together so that we can talk about the evidence. But here we have a government that all of a sudden comes to all these conclusions and, if anyone takes the time to read this very lengthy report, they will see that on page after page the government has come to all of these conclusions—not all of those have become recommendations, but they are conclusions. When we went through the government’s report, we just could not sign on to that, because, quite frankly, we have no idea how they could come to most of those conclusions. Well, that is probably not quite right. They could not have come to those conclusions based on the evidence that was presented to the committee. They could come to those conclusions based on the politics that they wanted to drive.

Shall we talk about what happened today? If we want to talk about politicisation of this report, we only have to look at the headlines in the Age. Obviously somebody has talked to the press about this. “Schools produce ‘illiterate’ students” is what it says. What an unfortunate headline about the politicisation of this particular government report. Quite frankly it is an abuse of Senate process—an absolute abuse. What they have done with this report is to try to grab a cheap headline and have people believe that education in this country is failing this country, when all the evidence that was presented to the committee says that the education system in this country is amongst the best in the OECD.

We do have a serious problem of equity, and not all students come out with the results that we would expect. Our recommendations go to those very equity issues. In its report the government should have talked about the broad policy framework and identified areas where a good education system has not been good enough, and it should have pointed to the policy areas that need to be addressed. That is what Labor has done, and that is what the government should have done rather than politicising this report for cheap headlines.

This is yet another report—dozens and dozens of reports have been tabled in this place and in the other place but the government has paid little or no regard to them. Often, the government pays them lip-service; it has never resourced any of the programs. This is just another education-bashing political exercise by this government. It is time the government seriously looked at education in this country—at how to make it work across the board for all our citizens in the best possible way—instead of going for cheap political shots.

Guy Barnett (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I stand to speak to the Quality of school education report of the Senate Standing Committee on Employment, Workplace Relations and Education. In the first instance I commend the committee’s chairperson, Senator Judith Troeth, and the members of the committee for the time and effort put into preparing this report. I also thank the secretariat for their efforts over the many months of deliberations and hearings and for their responses to the submissions that were made. I thank the people who put in submissions and the witnesses who appeared at the various hearings.

The report is a good one. It is very comprehensive, and Senator Troeth has referred to it in some detail. Senator Marshall made a number of allegations against Senator Troeth and the government senators on that committee. I reject them entirely. I think Senator Marshall is doing his very best to defend what I would consider to be the dilatory performance of the state Labor governments around Australia in delivering high-quality education to Australian students.

Senator Marshall has picked up on a few finer points, and those are matters between him and Senator Troeth, but all in all I think the report is very comprehensive. It is thoughtful, and it criticises in very many respects the performance of the state Labor governments. It is sad and disappointing for Tasmanian students and their parents that key performance indicators show that Tasmanian schools have very low outcomes compared with interstate students.

The Essential Learning program was a failed experiment in Tasmania that was instituted by former Minister for Education, Paula Wriedt. The state government should apologise to the Australian families, particularly the children, for this failed experiment. So much time, effort and money was put into the program but we can at least thank to some degree the current Minister for Education for throwing it out and heading back to the basics in terms of the curriculum and teaching standards in Tasmania. The report notes that there is a need for further training and support and increased resources to lift teaching standards. In respect of mathematics, recommendation 3 says:

The committee recommends that schools and school systems take particular measures to improve teacher professional development in mathematics.

Recommendation 2 says:

The committee recommends that the Government consider ways of restructuring teacher training courses so as to encourage and require aspiring secondary teachers to commence their studies in arts, science and other relevant disciplines before undertaking specific studies in education by degree or diploma.

Senator Marshall indicated that he did not agree with Senator Troeth in many respects about what this government is doing to support schools around Australia. I commend Julie Bishop, the federal Minister for Education, Science and Training, who has done so much to support schoolchildren all around Australia through the Investing in Our Schools Program, the capital grants program and the Country Areas Program. These programs are so successful. I go to schools all around Tasmania, particularly in the Lyons electorate, and these programs are very much appreciated and well received. The government is trying to fill the gaps left by the state governments, which are letting down the students and their families.

The report is critical of the various state governments. Recommendation 1 is a very key recommendation. It says:

The committee recommends that efforts be made to give the national benchmark tests more credibility and usefulness as teaching instruments.

On page 13 there is a specific reference to the curriculum debate:

At the time the committee commenced this inquiry, it was under the impression that quality standards in school education hinged on curriculum settings.

There is discussion on outcomes based education, a national curriculum, how far we should go and so on. I want to touch on the conclusion of that section before it leads to recommendation 1. It says:

The committee might be reassured by the results of the PISA and TIMSS tests—

and that was noted by Senator Marshall—

which put Australia toward the top of all but the highest category of performance, but it believes that there is a warning in the existence of a long tail of underperformance.

This is a key concern to the committee and to government senators. The report goes on to say:

It notes also that Canada, a country with many points of commonality with Australia, has the same performance but without the tail. In the next two chapters of the report, education quality issues will be discussed in such a way as to explain why this tail exists, and what can be done to shorten it.

The report also notes:

The use of performance indicators should give parents an honest view of how their children are performing against the standards.

Why would you send home to the parents of these children a report that they simply cannot understand, that they simply cannot read? It has to be practical and useful. I commend Brendan Nelson, who started to get things rolling to make the reports more useful, practical and sensible so that children can understand what they are all about. We have had this problem in Tasmania, and I think they are starting to improve those particular outcomes.

I would now like to turn to curriculum and note the government senators’ conclusion at page 84 of the report, which says:

The Commonwealth’s requirement that all states and territories must have some standards based syllabuses ready for the start of the school year in 2009 has resulted in a flurry of activity in several states, particularly those which persisted with outcomes-based documents. The committee believes that this has been among the most worthwhile Commonwealth initiatives in school education.

That is well noted. That is a federal government level initiative which has really got some of the states moving to respond to the needs of students and their families so that they get better outcomes.

Finally, yes, the report does note the involvement of Mr Rudd in the lack of action in Queensland when he was Director-General in the Department of Premier and Cabinet—and it should be noted that he was involved in that. Queensland has a sad record in that regard, particularly during that period when Mr Rudd had that special involvement. This was noted by a number of witnesses, particularly at the Brisbane hearings. We heard Senator Marshall complain about that—but, goodness me, the facts are on the table. Mr Rudd was in that job. He had a most senior position in the Department of Premier and Cabinet and did not deliver for students in Queensland at that time—and that should be well and truly noted. I commend the report to the Senate.

Ruth Webber (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I also rise to take note of the report of the Senate Standing Committee on Employment, Workplace Relations and Education, Quality of school education, and seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.