Marielle Smith (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

A letter has been received from Senator Tyrrell:

Pursuant to standing order 75, I propose that the following matter of public importance be submitted to the Senate for discussion:

With Australia in the grip of a cost of living crisis, now is the time to focus on providing good numeracy and literacy education so our children are equipped to make fiscally responsible decisions.

Is consideration of the proposal supported?

More than the number of senators required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

With the concurrence of the Senate, the clerks will set the clock in line with the informal arrangements made by the whips.

Tammy Tyrrell (Tasmania, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

With Australia in the grip of a cost-of-living crisis, now is the time to focus on providing good numeracy and literacy education so our children are equipped to make fiscally responsible decisions. 'Cost-of-living crisis' is a phrase we hear a lot in this place, and the government says it is working to provide relief for people, but it's also told us to make more fiscally responsible decisions.

If we've struggled to learn the basics of numeracy and literacy, how can we make better decisions about how to budget? Numeracy is not a nice-to-have; numeracy is a must-have. We use numeracy every day to pay for a coffee, to cook, to read the parliamentary sitting calendar and to solve problems. Numeracy is essential. It helps us make sense of life, but so many in Tassie struggle when it comes to numbers. This isn't a new problem. Tasmanian numeracy results have fallen below the national minimum standard for a very long time. The most recent NAPLAN results showed 43 per cent of Tasmanian grade 9 students fell into the bottom two proficiency levels, and that means two out of five students in my state need extra support or development in working towards where they need to be when it comes to their numbers skills.

But, on a recent visit to Burnie High School in the state's north-west, I saw how this community has worked together to improve the numeracy results of their students, and they're winning. The Burnie counts project has helped prepare primary school students as they move to high school, and it's starting to turn around NAPLAN results. It's developed by the Burnie Counts collective to improve numeracy outcomes and has been trialled at five primary schools that feed to Burnie High. Twenty-eight teachers from these schools took on extraprofessional development in the maths curriculum to develop consistent teaching methods and assessment across grades 5 to 8. They also worked with parents to get them more engaged in numeracy lessons. The Burnie Counts students survey shows improvements in students' enjoyment of maths and their confidence when it comes to doing well in maths. When parents were surveyed, the number who said they felt fear around maths halved, and the parents who said they liked maths increased by 13 per cent, showing parents were reinforcing the work done at the five Burnie schools. Teachers raved about the program too. Over the past two years, they have found better ways to teach maths and are more confident in teaching math concepts now.

But let's look at the numbers that go with this, because that's what we're really here to look at. The 2024 NAPLAN results for grade 9 students at Burnie High School showed 89 per cent of students achieved medium to high growth in numeracy, which is significantly above Tasmania's grade 9 average of 75 per cent. To give you a little more insight into how Burnie High School numeracy stats have developed, in 2019 74 per cent of Burnie grade 9 students recorded medium to high growth, and this grew to 77 per cent in 2021, 87 per cent in 2023 and 89 per cent now. The number of students falling into the strong proficiency category has grown from 59 per cent in 2023 to 64.2 per cent this year. This is above the national average of 63.4 per cent. Go Burnie kids!

Besides helping build more confident kids, Burnie Counts has helped the wider community engage with numbers too. You can walk along the Burnie foreshore and join in fun maths activities. Yes, maths apparently can be fun! Check the direction and distance from Burnie to cities around the world with a supersize compass, compare your height against Tasmanian Olympian Ariarne Titmus and other role models or play human-size snakes and ladders. These activities have been rolled out in the community through collaboration between the schools involved with the Burnie Counts Collective, Australian Schools Plus, Burnie City Council and the Tasmanian Community Fund.

Not only is this an example of a community helping itself; it shows how everyone benefits through collaboration. Burnie Counts is a great example of how a well-planned and tested program can help our kids do better at school. This program has already helped hundreds of kids in Burnie, and I feel confident the stats will continue to go up in future testing.

But what about the kids on Tasmania's west coast and all those struggling with numbers in Launceston, Hobart or even your electorates? We need programs like Burnie Counts to be rolled out to communities struggling with numeracy across the country. I call on the government to take kids' education seriously and commit to improving numeracy. I call on this government to commit to improving numeracy in Tasmania and across the country. Without a good understanding of numbers, our kids will miss out on the skills they need to make good money decisions.

Sarah Henderson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'd like to thank Senator Tyrrell for raising the critical issue of improving literacy and numeracy in Australian schools. With one in three students failing NAPLAN, evidence based teaching reforms must be urgently mandated in every classroom. Getting back to basics is critical, and there is no excuse for any more delays. Failure to deliver what works in the classroom—the teaching of phonics, explicit instruction and other proven teaching methods—has damaged a generation of Australians. Consigning students to a lifetime of functional illiteracy or a failure to reach proficiency in numeracy is akin to child neglect.

The Albanese government has failed to deliver these critical national reforms for more than two years, and that is shameful. Education minister Jason Clare has talked a big game. There is a draft agreement, but so far the Albanese government has not delivered the national reforms promised. Instead, the Albanese government has delivered a school funding war, which culminated in state Labor education ministers coming to Canberra and protesting against the Albanese government, with the Victorian education minister, Ben Carroll, declaring that the Liberals, when in government, did a better job funding public schools than this government is doing.

Failure to teach children to read and write and to be numerate fuels disengagement, dysfunction and even youth crime. That was the finding of the National Children's Commissioner, Anne Hollonds, who warned that, unless schools do more to help struggling students, things will go from bad to worse. She told the Australian's education editor, Natasha Bita:

The fact that kids have to wait to be in prison to get one-on-one intensive learning support that they need is just abominable.

In the Northern Territory the situation is particularly dire. The Albanese government conducted a mad scramble to sign a funding agreement in the dying days of the Territory Labor government. But this shows that Australians will not be fooled by any government that has big spending plans and no real plan. The CLP's win in the Northern Territory election shows that Australians want schools funding to deliver real improvements in the classroom, not wasted on all the wrong priorities. I applaud Lia Finocchiaro's determination to get children off the streets and back to school, learning to read and write, which is critical to combating youth crime in the Northern Territory.

I have to say, given that Australia is among the worst in the world for classroom disruption, Minister Clare's failure to include a behaviour curriculum in the draft National School Reform Agreement is a major oversight. This must be remedied. We know that children cannot learn in chaos, in classrooms that are disrupted, or where they are disengaged and not focused on the important work of our teachers. And of course so many teachers are leaving the profession—hardworking, dedicated teachers—because of violence and aggression in many classrooms across this country.

That said, as Senator Tyrrell referenced, there is amazing work happening in so many classrooms and school systems, and we are seeing a real move in our states and territories. More and more teachers are looking at the evidence, are looking at what works: evidence based teaching, explicit instruction. I saw a great example at a Catholic school just outside Hobart which is using the latest evidence based teaching. The children are absolutely thriving. They are children in a low-SES area and are doing incredibly well.

So, while we are seeing some real moves in Tasmania, with a focus from the Tasmanian government on explicit instruction and literacy, and the New South Wales government has rewritten its syllabus, and the Victorian government has made important announcements in relation to moving to the teaching of phonics, we do need to see more action. For instance, it's going to take another three years for the New South Wales syllabus to be properly rolled out. As I said, the coalition is determined that in every classroom we must have evidence based teaching mandated. We must get back to basics. Australian parents deserve no less. (Time expired)

Jana Stewart (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

High-quality education is fundamental to unlocking opportunities and to success in life. I feel that the evidence is very well known to support that. The Albanese Labor government is determined to make our education system better and fairer, no matter how much your family earns or where you come from. We know education opens the doors of opportunity for every Australian, and I want to thank Senator Tyrrell for bringing forward this motion this afternoon and raising this topic.

We are committed to strengthening our education system to ensure that all students are prepared for the modern world by ensuring that every student has the skills they need. Our littlest deserve no less. I know Victorians are doing it tough right now. The Albanese Labor government's primary focus is on easing the cost-of-living pressures facing Australians, at the same time as fighting inflation in our economy. From 1 July we have delivered: a tax cut for every Australian taxpayer, not just some; $300 energy bill relief for every Australian household and $325 for small businesses; a freeze on the cost of PBS medicines for every Australian; a third consecutive pay rise for 2.6 million workers; and more funding to build more homes in every part of the country. We're also delivering cheaper child care, fee-free TAFE and the biggest investment ever in expanding bulk-billing. We're planning for the long term while helping Australians right now, working to bring down inflation and planning a future made in Australia. We know there's more to do, and we'll continue every day to deliver for every Australian.

Those on the other side have opposed every single one of these measures. They've said they will cut $315 billion from the budget, and we know that the cost-of-living measures that we put in place, every single one of them, are under threat from those opposite. They left us with $3 trillion of debt and nothing to show for it. They left us with debt and deficits, and now they want to create more chaos. I guess the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. It breaks my heart to think about the impact of 10 years of a coalition government on students, schools, teachers and families. They ripped more than $20 billion out of public schools across the country—$20 billion. It was absolutely heartbreaking for our kids, for our families and for our teachers. What this meant in a practical sense was that attendance rates declined, high-school completion rates declined, teacher shortages grew and the gap between the rich and poor got bigger.

Through the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement, the Albanese Labor government has put $16 billion on the table to ensure students and young people are equipped with the skills required to make responsible decisions in all aspects of their lives. This will be the biggest increase in Australian government funding for public schools ever delivered. The Better and Fairer Schools Agreement ties funding to reforms to help lift student outcomes, improving numeracy and literacy education in our schools. It's great to see that Western Australia and the Northern Territory have signed up to the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement to fund these important reforms. We know that a good, solid education can set you up for life. Let's work together to give our young people the best start in life.

Penny Allman-Payne (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to say thank you very much to Senator Tyrrell for bringing on this motion. I know that Senator Tyrrell values education and takes a keen interest in this area, and I appreciate the advocacy that she does on behalf of our young people both in Tasmania and across the country. Furthermore, this motion deals with two issues that I care deeply about—that is, how we alleviate poverty and help people who are in a cost-of-living crisis, and primary and secondary education. I agree wholeheartedly with Senator Tyrrell that we are in a cost-of-living crisis, but I would go one step further and say that the cost-of-living crisis is actually impacting our ability to provide a quality education for our young people and to improve their literacy and numeracy, and it's doing that in two ways.

The first way is the impact that the cost-of-living crisis is having on our school communities. At the moment we have young people coming to our public schools who are housing insecure—and, let's be real, the majority of young people who are either in housing stress or experiencing other forms of poverty and insecurity are, by and large, attending our public schools. So we have young people coming to our public schools who are housing insecure. That impacts their ability to learn. I've taught senior students who were couch surfing. It's really hard to get your assignments done if you don't know where you're going to be sleeping that night.

Yet the government could take steps to tackle that. They could freeze rents and they could put a cap on rents, and that would help more people into secure housing. They could also increase the build of public, affordable, good-quality housing. The government used to build one in four homes. We don't do that anymore. That would be a concrete and substantive way that we could make a meaningful difference to the lives of the families and young people that form our public school communities that would enable students to engage in their learning and to do better in their literacy and numeracy.

We could make supermarket price gouging illegal. I'm certain there won't be a public-school teacher in the country who didn't have a young person in their classroom today who was hungry—who either came to school without having breakfast or didn't bring lunch or had neither. I remember talking to a young person in the playground one day. They were walking down the steps with a can of soft drink in their hand, and I made the comment, 'Is that the best thing that you should be having for lunch?' They told me how grateful they were that someone had given it to them because they hadn't had breakfast or lunch that week, and it was Friday. Try getting a young person to engage in what's going on in a classroom to improve their literacy and numeracy if they're starving. If the government took action to tackle grocery prices, that would make a huge difference for the young people who are coming into our schools.

We could raise the rate of income support. Before we even started the cost-of-living crisis, one in six young people in this country was living in poverty. That was before we saw the massive increases in the cost of living. Those are the young people who come to a classroom who don't have a notebook or a pen and whose parents haven't got a hope of buying them a laptop or an iPad. Once upon a time governments and schools provided the technology and the resources that kids needed to learn, and now we just cost-shift all of that onto families. If you're a family that is struggling with the cost of living and your young person attends a public school and you don't have all those resources provided for you, it's hardly surprising that it's a challenge for you to engage in the curriculum and do the things that you need to do to improve your literacy and numeracy. Let's not forget teachers, who are making up the shortfall in our public schools in terms of the lack of funding and resources and who, on average, spend $800 to $1,000 per year out of their own pockets to resource those schools. Now they're experiencing a cost-of-living crisis, so the people who were filling in the gaps and plugging the holes are less able to do so. The government can take action on both these things. They can tackle the cost of living, and they can fully fund public education. They really need to get on with the job.

Lisa Darmanin (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the urgency motion on education brought forward by Senator Tyrrell. I'm really glad that Senator Tyrrell has brought this topic before the Senate, because a quality education truly sets our young people up for the best possible start in life. It is absolutely an issue of national importance. Now more than ever, we must focus on equipping the next generation with the skills they need to succeed. Sadly, 10 years of the coalition government were absolutely terrible for students, teachers and families across this country. That's because more than $20 billion was ripped out of our public schools, as already highlighted by Senator Stewart, and no surprises who was sitting on the Expenditure Review Committee at that time—none other than Peter Dutton. The coalition failed our students. Attendance rates declined, high school completion rates fell, teacher shortages grew and the gap between rich and poor widened. In contrast, Labor value education because it opens the doors of opportunity, which is why we are committed to building a better and fairer education system that prepares students for the modern world.

Our children deserve the chance to develop the skills they need to succeed, as Senator Tyrrell outlined, and the building blocks of this are, of course, solid literacy and numeracy foundations. How are we going to do this? The Albanese government's Better and Fairer Schools Agreement is a significant step towards this. It ties funding to important reforms designed to lift student outcomes. Among those reforms are essential measures to improve numeracy and literacy. For instance, we're introducing the year 1 phonics check and an early years numeracy check to identify as early as possible students who need additional support. Senator Tyrrell outlined an example from Burnie where improvements in maths education were evidenced. The Albanese government believe in evidence based teaching, and we are backing that up with targeted, intensive interventions like small group or catch-up tutoring for students who fall behind. These are proven methods that work, and they're aimed at ensuring no student gets left behind.

These are critical reforms to enable our young people, when they go into the world, to make their own way and to be as prepared as they can be to make fiscally responsible decisions, but none of this can happen without our teachers. Teachers are the backbone of our education system, and they do one of the most important jobs in the world. I am reminded of this by my husband, Luke, who, as a teacher at a secondary school in northern Melbourne, has this year been teaching many year 12 students to prepare them for their futures. That's why our reforms also include initiatives to attract and retain teachers, particularly experienced ones, by rewarding their hard work and incentivising them to work in schools that need the most support.

These reforms aren't just about lifting up individual students; they're about lifting up the whole system. We're setting clear targets, like getting more students out of the lowest NAPLAN bands and into the higher levels for numeracy and reading. There are reforms to assist young people in making fiscally responsible decisions—skills that are required for all young people, as Senator Tyrrell has rightly identified. We're focusing on improving school attendance because school is where the learning happens, and we're committed to ensuring the proportion of First Nations students completing year 12 goes up, as part of our dedication to closing the gap. This isn't just talk.

These reforms are backed by real funding commitments. Western Australia and the Northern Territory have already signed up to the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement. In the Northern Territory, this means their schools will go from being the lowest funded in the country to some of the best funded. Over the next five years, their schools will be nearly $1 billion better off. In Western Australia, the agreement means every student will attend a fully funded school by the first day of term in 2026. That's the kind of transformative funding we want to see in every state and territory.

The Australian government have put $16 billion on the table to close the funding gap and drive these reforms, but we can't do this alone. The Commonwealth are ready to contribute, but we need the states and territories to step up and meet us halfway. From day one of being in government, education has been a key priority, and we are taking real action in a way that balances ambition with responsibility.

Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Education systems are failing our children right across Australia, yet we have fundamental solutions, and I will get to these. Firstly, I want to thank Senator Tyrrell for her MPI today. Secondly, I want to define the problem.

Instead of focusing on the basics, children are forced to learn from the latest list of woke obsessions and distortions. That's no way to develop students and to guide students. Consider the fact that some schools consider Bruce Pascoe's book Dark Emu to satisfy the Indigenous history curriculum. Anthropologists have utterly debunked his fiction as cherry-picked nonsense, yet in many schools this is taught as history as if it's undisputed history.

A Sydney primary school has sparked debate after telling pupils to place their hands on the ground and repeat in unison, 'Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land,' before each assembly. That completely contradicts the High Court ruling. At some schools, allowing schoolchildren to identify as animals like cats and even providing litter boxes in classrooms is starting to become accepted. Can you see how this erodes respect for teachers? Boys and girls at a very young age know the difference between men and women and between cats and humans. Agreeing to their fancies is just nonsense. They know that, when a teacher says that girls can be boys, that's ridiculous. It completely undermines respect.

All of this is happening as Australia's education rankings are plummeting, and parents aren't stupid. They know that schools are not doing their job. They really woke up when children came home and started homeschooling and doing lessons over Zoom. That's when the parents realised that schools were not doing their job.

Parents know also that schools are more interested in ideological rubbish than the basics of reading, writing and numeracy. This plagues not only public schools but also some private schools. That's why the rate of homeschooling is exploding. Parents are taking responsibility for their children's education. Between 2019 and 2024, Queensland homeschool registrations surged by 229 per cent. They more than tripled.

While I support homeschooling, parents shouldn't have to take schooling into their own hands to give children what they need. They pay good money in the taxation system, and they should get what they need for their children. The basics of reading, writing and numeracy must be the No. 1 priority.

One Nation supports the concept of charter schools. At the very least, government funding should follow the child, not be doled out on conditional grants that suit some bureaucrat. If parents want to send their children to a particular school or a particular type of school, the funding should go there. It should follow the children. That would return control to principals and parents. This is a hallmark of schools that take responsibility and a hallmark of children who take responsibility in such schools.

We have a federal education department in our country costing $184 million each year in bureaucrat wages alone, and it doesn't operate a single school. Sure, it has some responsibilities for universities, but it doesn't operate a single school, yet it interferes in state school curriculums. So much for our federal systems of education and governance! We need to disband and shut down the federal education department and, while we're at it, the federal health department. We need to restore competitive federalism, because that's a marketplace in governance. States that are better run will see people coming to them.

I also want to call out Maria Montessori, the greatest studier of human behaviour and development. After a lifetime of writing books, reading and meticulous observations, she said, 'The critical years for the formation of both character and intellect are birth to six,' and she got it absolutely right, along with so many other observations that she had. Children go through sensitive periods. They need guides, not teachers. That's how people develop responsibility, and that's the key thing that comes out of Montessori schools. Having been on the board of a Montessori school, a parent at a Montessori school and on the International Montessori Council advisory board, I know she got it right. Get rid of the waste and get back to the basics of the four Rs: reading, writing, arithmetic and responsibility.