Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will commence by saying that the opposition will support the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority Bill 2008but not without some lingering doubts. For the last 12 months I have had to get my head around the idea that the Minister for Education, Ms Gillard, and Ms Gillard’s representative in the Senate, my good friend Senator Carr, are both economic conservatives. I am just starting, after 12 months, to get my head around this paradox, and now the new paradox is that Ms Gillard and my good friend Senator Carr will put the education of Australian students, young Australians, ahead of the teacher unions. That also I have had to grapple with. Interests sometimes clash between teacher unions and the education of our children. But they have said they are going to put the education of our young people first. It is another paradox, from past behaviour, but I am coming to terms with it.

We agree with the Labor government on the principle of this bill, but one of the concerns I have is about implementation. I have spoken—indeed many on the coalition side have spoken—much about the implementation of government policy over the last 12 months. In the sphere of education there has been much talk—much of it taken from New York and from Tony Blair’s website—but the implementation of policy has been third-rate. I speak of an issue I have raised many times in this chamber—the computers in schools policy in the Digital Education Revolution, and trade training centres. The policy is not necessarily bad; the implementation of the policy has been a shambles.

The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority Bill establishes a new Commonwealth body, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, ACARA, which will replace the interim National Curriculum Board. ACARA will develop and administer the new national curriculum and collect data, providing analysis and research to governments. Its main role, however, will be the development of a national curriculum. The opposition sincerely hopes that ACARA will develop a world-class curriculum free from ideological bias and with a strong foundation in the basics that have been neglected to the detriment of too many children in recent decades—a sad legacy of the infatuation of the education establishment in this country with trendy foreign ideas.

Another great paradox in this country is that so many public intellectuals say Australia suffers from a cultural cringe, yet the same people adopt often pathetic foreign educational fads uncritically, to the detriment of too many Australian students for too long. When I used to teach at university, nearly everyone was a postmodernist. They would talk about deconstructing the text; it was terrific stuff. But you have to be able to read before you can deconstruct. That has been the basic problem that we have seen over the last 20 years in this country.

I have said we are going to support the bill, and we do hope it works. But we will be carefully studying the progress in relation to issues such as the timing of the curriculum’s introduction and its connection with school funding, and the place in the system of existing curricula, such as those at the University of Cambridge International Examinations schools, the Montessori schools, the Steiner schools, the Christian schools, the Islamic schools and the Jewish schools. We will also pursue with great interest the issue of potential future additions to the four core curriculum subjects at the moment, such as languages and music. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the opposition will carefully study the final product to make sure that it serves students rather than some ideological agenda or some new intellectual fad.

Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to make some comments in relation to the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority Bill 2008.I note that the establishment of the authority was agreed in October at the Council of Australian Governments meeting and that this bill establishes the authority as an independent body corporate with a number of functions. These include: developing and administering a national school curriculum for school subjects specified in the charter, which is determined by the Ministerial Council for Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs; developing and administering national assessments; collecting and analysing student assessment data and other data relating to schools and comparative school performance; facilitating information-sharing arrangements between Australian government bodies; publishing information relating to school education, including information relating to comparative school performance; providing curriculum resource services, including education research services; and providing resources, support and guidance to the teaching profession.

So this is a very interesting and, I have to say, a huge responsibility for the authority that is being set up. I note that its initial budget is some $37.2 million over four years, $20 million committed to the National Curriculum Board and $17.2 committed to the independent National Schools Assessment Data Centre. The bill provides for a board to be made up of a chairman; a deputy chair; a representative each from the Commonwealth, states and territories; a representative from the Independent Schools Council of Australia; and another one from the National Catholic Education Commission. A board member is appointed by the minister if agreed to by the ministerial council and if the person has certain professional expertise.

I particularly want to note here that the membership of the board does not include any representative of public education except for state governments. The non-government sector is independently represented on the authority in two positions. I know that the government would presumably argue that, because the state governments and territories have a position on the board, public education will be taken care of. However, I think that public school education should be independently represented on the board because governments have an interest in the entire education system in their states and not just public schools. I am concerned by the fact that there will not be an independent public education expert on the board but there will be two from the non-government schools and just the state government representatives, which in fact will perpetuate the divisions in Australia between private education and public education as they currently stand.

I do not intend to move an amendment to that effect. I have certainly canvassed that but I would hope that the government would take it on board. In looking at the appointments that it makes to the board, recognising there will be nominations from state governments and so on, I hope that people with serious expertise in public education will be put forward as nominees to the board so that that does not occur. It is something that I feel very strongly about. I cannot see why it could not happen because the determination to say people have to have professional expertise suggests that they will have that background, so it is not a significant shift. I would like to see somebody independent of state governments, who is an expert in public education, appointed to the board.

The assessment and reporting scheme is one of the most contentious elements of the government’s education proposals. That was very clear from the Senate inquiry that we conducted into the bill. The framework for the assessment and reporting requirements will be decided by COAG and, as I have indicated before, the role of the authority will be to collect, analyse and publish the data. Already there is extreme nervousness around the country about what that means in terms of what exactly will be collected, how it will be used and how it will be presented to the community so that we do not end up with a league table analysis. The fact that the government has flagged the sacking of principals or the closing of low-performing schools makes the community even more nervous about what data will be collected, how it will be presented, how it will be used and whether the data collected will all be publicly available so that other people can run that data through various models and actually use it in a way that perhaps had not been contemplated by the authority at the time of the data collection.

There is nothing more divisive than stories out in the community about one school performing poorly on this, that or something else, and people saying that they would not send their kids to that school or the other school and so on. Once you get that kind of league table mentality happening in the community then you get the community responding by asking, ‘What is the measurement that we are being asked to report on?’ and then schools start teaching to the measurement and not educating in the manner which they think is the most appropriate. Essentially you get a ‘teaching to the test’ mentality. That is not a good way to go in education.

If you get the performance of teachers tied to the performance of schools in a league table context, how are you going to get your best teachers to teach in the most difficult and most challenging educational environments? If you are going to reward teachers with performance bonuses tied to school performance outcomes then what you are inevitably going to get is a move by people to the schools which are performing better against the analysis. So you are going to find it harder and harder to staff some of those difficult schools, which will be to the detriment of those students. As we all know, the most challenging students and the most challenging school environments deserve the best teachers in order to make up those gaps in educational success that we clearly know are there for one reason or another.

I am very concerned about Mr Joel Klein and about what he advocates from his New York model. And I am rather concerned as well about the evidence that has been coming out of England. Just as Australia seems to be heading down the track of adopting this kind of approach, there are considerable doubts as to its effectiveness in raising standards and, in fact, there have been unintended consequences coming out of the way that these models have been implemented overseas. I must say it always seems that, just as some of these new processes are being discredited overseas, Australia gets around to adopting them. I am really concerned about this. Unless performance pay for teachers tied to school performance is managed in a sensitive way—frankly, I cannot see how it is going to be managed in a sensitive way—we are going to have some unintended consequences for those people in communities who are the most adversely affected and who do not have choices about where they might want to send their kids to school. They are going to be the ones suffering the greatest consequences.

I put the government on notice here that what is needed in public education is a regime that is fair to teachers. There are a myriad of reasons why a school may be performing or not performing against a set of data. I want to make sure that the best approach to lifting standards in schools and improving the attractiveness of teaching as a profession is adopted. Frankly, the best way of doing that is to fund public education adequately. If you support teachers in their work, if you put in additional resources to assist teachers and to assist students who are struggling for various reasons, then you get better outcomes. The fact of the matter is that Australia has underfunded public education for more than a decade. The problem we have got in this country is that the state governments’ underfunding of education, with the lift in funding that the federal government has given, particularly to the non-government sector, has increased the gap between performance in public education and what private schools or non-government schools have been able to offer, particularly in terms of resourcing.

It is absolutely critical that this weekend’s COAG meeting takes account of that, because what I fear with the global economic downturn is that state governments are going to cut back on their education funding, just as the Commonwealth brings in its league tables and its performance criteria for teachers and so on, and that teachers are going to be expected to do the impossible with fewer and fewer resources and less and less money. Then the Commonwealth may bring in new schemes to attract the best graduates into teaching by way of some arrangement with industry, saying ‘We’ll bring these graduates into teaching, they’ll be there for two years and then they can go back to industry.’ That is really just a small step. Yes, you might get some of those outstanding graduates, but to be a good teacher you not only have to be intelligent and insightful but you also need experience. The more experienced you become, the better you become at teaching. If we are going to just bring people in for two years and then allow them to go off again, then we are not going to have the permanent benefit to the education system of getting those teachers.

If you want your best graduates to go into teaching, you have to pay them. You have to pay teachers decent wages because, in a comparative sense, teachers are poorly paid. That is why you are not getting your best graduates going into teaching. It is a challenging profession and if it is poorly paid people do not go into it. You can set up any number of arrangements you like for a two-year experience of teaching, but you need those people to stay in the education system. The way to do that is to fund schools, to educate students and to pay teachers a wage that is attractive in comparison with other options that they might have upon leaving educational institutions, tertiary institutions, around the country.

The final point that I would like to make is in relation to the protection of data that is collected by the authority. I alluded to that before. As I said, while the minister may or may not want to produce league tables, league tables will be able to be produced if the data is all released by the authority. I want to ensure that the regulations or protocols that are going to be used to protect the data are very, very well designed and thought through and that we do not have an unintended consequence of the collection of the data being that that data can be run through anybody’s models—with anybody’s assumptions going into those models—to be used for whatever purpose anyone might choose to use it for.

In terms of the national curriculum itself, there has been for a long time a discussion around the country about what happens when students move from state to state and have difficulties or otherwise integrating into systems. At the University of Tasmania just this week I was listening to an honours student’s presentation about an analysis of the experience of students moving from interstate to Tasmania and the difficulties they may or may not have encountered in entering the school system. What was interesting about that honours student’s analysis was that the issue was not so much of what was taught in the curriculum; it was first of all the different age structures. For example, a student may come from one state where they are going into grade 7 and go to another state and be put back to grade 6, or however it might operate. That issue of getting some consistency around the country is a critical issue in terms of childhood development.

The other issue is to support those students in their social integration into the schools, so that they are not isolated and going for weeks without having any friends or any real interaction in their school. It was suggested that just a buddy system is not enough. There need to be programs developed to sort of force the integration of the new students into the existing programs of the school in various ways so that we do that better. I think it is an interesting point that the national curriculum will not overcome some of the social issues associated with moving from state to state and some of the issues around age, for example.

On the content of the national curriculum, we heard a lot from the previous government about political correctness, but over the Howard years there was a major attack on public education—a suggestion that public education is not a values based education. I want to reiterate here that a national curriculum is important, but the values of public education have always been there and they remain, and they are values about equity, equal opportunity, excellence, compassion, tolerance, inclusiveness and innovation. All of those things are in public education, have always been in public education and will continue to be there, but they can be better demonstrated by a larger investment in public education.

I hope that the Commonwealth’s negotiations with the states make sure that the states do not get away with cutting the education funding and therefore increasing the gap between the funding of non-government schools and the funding of government schools. Fund education and fund teachers properly and you will attract the best graduates and you will get a better performance in schools.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.