Steve Hutchins (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Acting Deputy President Parry, and congratulations on your elevation to that role. I am sorry that Senator Bernardi is not here at the moment because I know that Senator Bernardi does like to quote Jesuits and I want to commence my contribution this afternoon by quoting Jesuits. The Jesuits have a saying: give me the boy at seven and I shall give you the man. The essence of this is a recognition that a child’s ideas and knowledge are heavily formulated during their early years. There will always be a remnant of one’s early childhood education lingering in one’s mind, a view that is supported by widely-accepted international evidence.

I wish to outline to the Senate today a number of the challenges facing primary school educators and students in present times—staffing and resourcing, the changing nature of primary school curriculums, and the new responsibilities that primary school educators are having to take on. In doing so, I recognise that education is predominantly a state issue but note that it is incumbent on every elected representative in this country to do the right thing by our children. We must ensure that we are securing their future.

School curriculums have changed significantly in recent times. No longer do they represent the basics, the staples of a primary school education: English, maths, science, and social education. This curriculum has broadened to include areas like music, visual arts, personal development and physical education, languages other than English, information communications and technology, and a renewed emphasis on history and geography. While it would appear that such diversity in our school curriculum is a good thing, the Australian Primary Principals Association disagrees. They argue that this broadening of focus makes it difficult to dedicate the time needed to basic literacy and numeracy skills. They claim that curriculum planners have unrealistic expectations of just how much can be covered in a twenty-five hour school week. They claim that if we want our children to have a successful start to school then the curriculum needs decluttering and the focus needs to be put back on the foundations.

Anyone who saw the results of the national literacy and numeracy tests released last week would surely agree. Although my own state of New South Wales performed better than any other state in both literacy and numeracy, there were a number of alarming figures. One in four year 9 students are reading at the same level as the top 20 per cent of year 3 students. In some states large numbers of children are falling further behind than their classmates, the longer they stay at school. What worried me most was that 20 per cent of students—that is, one in five students—were failing to meet even the minimum expected literacy and numeracy standards. In my view, this result gives a lot of credence to the Primary Principals Association’s desire to have the mandatory components of the school curriculum pared back to the bread-and-butter issues of literacy and numeracy, and allow expansion into other areas to be done in line with the needs of students, the schools’ capacity and resources, and the class time available.

Increasingly, primary school teachers are educating students from a varied range of backgrounds and needs. In the balance: the future of Australia’s primary schools, a report authored by academics from Edith Cowan University and the Australian Council for Educational Research, found that 5.5 per cent of students have medically diagnosed disabilities—more than double the 1995 figures. For the most part, these students participate in regular classes. Another 16.2 per cent of students have special learning needs but do not qualify for disability funding. All up, more than one in five students require additional learning assistance, leaving teachers to take on the extra workload with very little additional support.

In schools servicing low socioeconomic communities, poor classroom behaviour is becoming an endemic problem. Higher proportions of disruptive students, higher suspension rates, and higher rates of students who perform at or below the literacy and numeracy benchmarks are characteristics of these schools. With better support for these high-needs children, primary teaching environments could become more productive and the rewards would be reaped by all children.

The increasing cost-of-living pressures on working families—a legacy of the Howard government—are forcing parents to work longer and harder. I have been provided with anecdotal evidence of students staying up until 1 am to have dinner because a parent has not gotten home from work until midnight. It is hard for students to be engaged in their learning when the pressures on their parents are being passed on to them.

For a number of years teachers have been reporting a shift in the types of additional skills and values that they have to teach. Meeting with a group of teachers recently, I was informed of an alarming trend of parents focusing on being their children’s friends—avoiding fights and the need for discipline. As a result, the burden is being left with the primary school teachers to teach their students core values and lessons about healthy eating and personal safety. I do not rise in this place today to pass judgement one way or another on trends like this, but if we are going to expect our primary school teachers to assume these sorts of roles we need to be giving them the support they need. At the present time we are not.

In the balancethe report I referred to earlier—found that more than 40 per cent of principals have serious difficulties recruiting the kinds of teachers they need. More than half of the principals surveyed reported major problems in finding suitable relief teachers, as well. Without adequate staffing, our primary education system cannot cope with the new burdens and responsibilities it is being faced with. To compound this, only six per cent of primary school principals reported that they had sufficient funding and resources.

Let me return to what the Jesuits said in that adage, ‘Give me the boy at seven and I shall give you the man.’ They knew—as a number of economists, including the Rand Group, do—that it is cheaper and more effective to address problems in the primary education years than it is to try to tackle them later on in life. This requires recognition from government in the form of funding priorities that we are not currently providing. Yet the lowest per-student funding level occurs in the middle years of primary school.

I am pleased by the positive steps that the Rudd government has taken in recent times with the implementation of the education revolution that we promised working families at last year’s election. Through the Even Start National Tuition program we are providing tuition assistance to students in years 3, 5, and 7 who did not meet the 2007 national benchmarks. This will combat one of the key issues raised in the 2005 National report on schooling in Australia, where it noted that more targeted literacy and numeracy assistance was needed for students in the middle years of schooling.

Through the education tax refund, we are providing working families with extra money to assist their children’s learning through rebates on computer expenses and laptops, school textbooks and materials, stationery, and educational software. These measures are a step in the right direction to ensuring that our children are getting the best possible start. With the 2009-12 schools funding agreement being negotiated at the moment, I would urge all those involved to consider the increased burdens faced by primary schools and to provide a funding model that adequately recognises this. Ensuring that our primary school students—public or private—are getting the best education possible is the responsibility of everybody in this place.