Page 781 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 24 March 1993
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DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
Annual Report
Debate resumed from 18 November 1992, on motion by Mr Berry:
That the Assembly takes note of the paper.
MR CORNWELL (4.54): Madam Speaker, members might recall that this annual report of the Department of Education and Training for 1991-92 was tabled in November of last year, so we are addressing it some four months down the track. I might add that November is about three months later than it should be tabled, but this is a general problem with annual reports and I hope that the Government will address that in future for all portfolios.
It was as a result of this late tabling that much of the 1991-92 annual management report was examined and reviewed in the 1992 estimates hearings. Some of the points raised then, I regret to say, remain either as unresolved issues or as plainly misleading comments. As an example of the latter I instance at page 5 of the report what are referred to as pupil-teacher ratios and average school sizes. These are shown, respectively, as a comforting 18.9 in pupil-teacher ratios in government primary schools and as 439 pupils per unnamed public school. I submit that the 18.9 pupil-teacher ratio is misleading to parents who might read this annual report because it does not refer to pupil-teacher class size ratios - what we might term the front-line troops and the figure parents are interested in knowing, I suggest. The second figure of 439 pupils is totally meaningless, covering colleges, high schools and primary schools, from Cook and Lyons, with 112 and 111 students respectively, to Gordon and Conder, with projected enrolments of up to 750 primary students. Neither the statistics on pupil-teacher ratios nor those on average school sizes do credit to an annual report and inevitably cast doubt upon other statistics presented therein.
As an example of unresolved issues arising from the estimates, I refer to the police-in-schools program, mentioned fleetingly at page 19. This program was welcomed by every member attending the education estimates hearings. In fact, the police-in-schools program covers only two school areas in the ACT. I hope that funds can be found in future budgets to extend the initiative from these two clusters of northside schools; but, given the police budget cuts, I am not very confident. I hope, however, that the Minister will fight hard for what I regard as a very important initiative.
Fortunately, not all is doom and gloom in the 1991-92 annual report. I welcome the continuing development and, I hope, success of the reading recovery program now operating in 57 of our 64 primary schools. I recognise that on a one-to-one basis this program is probably the ultimate in labour intensity, yet it is crucial to any decent chance in life that one can read and write competently - an observation endorsed by Federal Labor's recent report, "The Literacy Challenge". This investment at the primary school level will pay very handsome dividends in future resource and financial savings further along the education road and into the work force - a factor not recognised as yet by all governments.
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