Page 2723 - Week 09 - Thursday, 25 August 1994
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MR CORNWELL: Mr Wood has been saying that for some time too. I have no disagreement with those comments. However, I am still concerned about the costs involved in the large schools and in the small schools, Minister. I do not believe that a small school of 124 students can provide the same range of educational opportunities as a large school without some additional financial input, and that additional financial input must come from elsewhere in the education budget and thus is not allocated to other schools, perhaps even larger schools. That is my basic concern. Therefore, I would hope, if you are subsidising, as I suspect you are, the very small schools in our system, that you will also take cognisance of what we recommended last year and what I am reiterating this year. If you are going to have larger schools, up to 750 pupils in a primary school and 1,000 in a high school, then please also provide sufficient resources so that they too are not disadvantaged.
MR WOOD (Minister for Education and Training, Minister for the Arts and Heritage and Minister for the Environment, Land and Planning) (4.07): Madam Speaker, Mr Cornwell raises two matters. My memory of that Federal parliamentary report and the 19 per cent seeking reading recovery and the 13 per cent getting it is that that was a Department of Education submission, so it has some official status. Nevertheless, it was based on a survey of schools and teachers' views. They would be views that I would respect. I suppose that that 19 per cent would represent the lowest percentiles in terms of reading achievement. But let me point out that reading recovery, that particular program, is not the only thing that is done in our primary schools and other schools to assist students with reading. I persistently make a point to teachers that they must accommodate to all children in their classes - all ranges, all abilities and all difficulties - and teachers do that, I believe, very well.
We allocate the resources, I think, to the level of about 26 reading recovery teachers in our primary schools. It is a one to one program between teacher and student. It is intensive and the reports I get are that it is quite successful. But beyond that there are other measures. We are reviewing those measures this year with a pilot program. There are measures for the learning advancement program, for the learning assistance program, and in some pilots we are wrapping those together to see whether we can deliver a better product, or whether we need to do things differently. So do not think that reading recovery is the be-all and end-all of help given to students in reading, in this case, in our schools, although that pilot program, of course, covers learning disabilities generally. A great deal of activity happens in schools. The simple statistics, of 19 per cent for whom assistance is sought and 13 per cent who get it, do not really reflect the situation as it occurs in schools. My general statement would be that we teach our kids very well in our schools. We have outstanding success. But, given the pattern of human behaviour, human development, there are some children who will always develop at a slower rate and will always need particular assistance.
To come back to this question of school numbers, I have said before that I am not impressed by arguments that say that we must look too closely at numbers. There seems to be a fixation sometimes in thinking that small schools are not desirable or that large schools are not desirable. I have repeated often enough the comment that Mr Cornwell made, namely, that it is what happens in the school that is important.
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