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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 5 Hansard (8 May) . . Page.. 1695 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

you worry about sex education. Sex education information is what creates young people who think about the issue much more carefully, and the evidence is there to support that.

The other point I would make is that, if young people are engaging in sex, it is quite possible that there are other issues in their lives, and those issues need to be dealt with. Schools can of course have a role in this, but they cannot carry the full responsibility. We have made a lot of recommendations in this report about how we think the health of the students, and also their relationship with their school and families, needs to be supported and developed.

I am sorry I have had to spend so much time on that particular issue, but I know it will be focused on in this debate. I want to briefly talk about what I see as extremely important recommendations of this report, which are on the social environment of schools. If we are going to talk about the health of school-age children, we have to understand that the social environment they are brought up in is absolutely critical. (Extension of time granted.)

We are still operating within a shame-and-blame culture where people are expected to take responsibility for circumstances affecting their health, such as poverty and low educational attainment, and make changes to these circumstances without being provided with skills to do so. This is particularly difficult for young people, who may have neither skills learned at home nor life experience. School performance has been shown to strongly correlate with family, economic and social disadvantage.

Socio-economic status is the strongest predictor of educational outcomes. Research shows that as parental income declines poor academic outcomes increases. Poor education outcomes in turn lead to lower income generating capacity and the maintenance of socio-economic disadvantage, creating a continuum of the cycle of economic disadvantage, which becomes difficult to improve upon.

There is a fundamental societal issue here, which we have to address through the public school system and the independent school system. It has to be recognised as a fundamental issue in educational and health outcomes, and it has to be integrated into any response from any school.

We have the health promoting schools model in the ACT, and that has been very well supported in this committee. But the committee submitted concern that it was not properly supported and that how well it was implemented really depended on the individuals in schools. There is also, of course, the resourcing issue.

We have made recommendations about what is called the Gatehouse project, which is related to the social environment question. It is a practical, whole-of-school strategy, which can be used in individual schools or whole school systems. The project identified three priority areas for action: building a sense of security and trust, enhancing skills and opportunities for communication and social connectedness and building a sense of positive regard through valued participation in school life.

The project recognised that health outcomes are compromised in situations where students feel victimised, socially isolated, bored and not noticed or valued. The Gatehouse project, plus our recommendations about values education, are the exciting

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