Page 3477 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 23 November 2021
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86 per cent of students agreeing that they were worried about incidents of bullying. It is not good enough.
The fourth was more support for schools through better funding and governance. This is one of the core failings we identified early—the need for more funding and better governance. We said that we need to ensure that funding is spent on what works. We noted comments from the Auditor-General on governance, and we recommended a rebalancing for a stronger government school system and building policy and programs based on evidence and review. As we noted at the time, workload expectations and stress were taking a significant toll. The ACT government school leader survey of 2019 said that school principals reported the quantity of work, lack of time to focus on teaching and learning, and student mental health as their main sources of stress.
The fifth was fixing overcrowded schools and ageing infrastructure. That is subject to an inquiry that is ongoing in the Assembly. We called for immediate attention to the problems of overcrowding and school capacity. I pointed out at the time that this is to meet not just existing but future demand proactively.
I was very proud of the document when it was published. It was fully researched and fact-checked as a proposal. I was pleased by a lot of the feedback that I got from teachers, parents and the community. In a RiotACT article headed “ACT government needs to learn from its mistakes on schools”, Ian Bushnell wrote:
The Canberra Liberals’ new Education Strategy will resonate with the many Canberra parents who have growing misgivings about the direction of ACT Government schools.
It covers many of the sore points and suspicions held by parents that all is not well despite the efforts of teachers, principals and their school communities, and calls for a review of the system.
It is disappointing that we heard comments from both the Labor Party and the Greens disagreeing and ignoring what was in the report. Ms Berry said at the time:
… every single one of our ACT public schools goes through an independent school improvement review every five years … These reviews show that the ACT’s public schools are consistently performing at high levels …
That is not what we heard from any of the independent sources that were saying this at the time. Let me quote what they were saying. I quote from the Auditor-General. The Auditor-General, who is one of our most fiercely apolitical and independent reviewers, made comprehensive findings in a report on teacher quality. The report said:
The Education Directorate does not centrally plan or monitor the distribution of experienced teachers across the ACT public school system …
The teacher performance development process is not effective in supporting teaching quality, and does not effectively support teaching appraisals … The performance management process for teaching staff is not implemented effectively …
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