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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 04 Hansard (Tuesday, 30 March 2004) . . Page.. 1263 ..

non-government sector and vice versa. We want to see a two-way flow. We seek uniformity of standards across the entire ACT education system. I am confident that the non-government sector will be able to conform with the government sector without compromising the individuality which is a characteristic of the non-government sector.

Finally, Mr Speaker, we believe in a strong, diverse education system which offers choice. We would like to see individuality in our schools, including within the government sector, and offer families this choice. All schools must be given the opportunity to grow. We therefore seek to build mechanisms into the bill supporting growth in every school and in all of our various education sectors.

Against this requirement, we also seek to have departmental mechanisms in place to support those schools which are doing it tough in both the government and the non-government sectors. We do not believe that the bill reflects that. We want to see the bill enshrining mechanisms which give guidance to the department and make sure that it can go out and support those schools doing it tough, be they Catholic systemic or government sector schools.

In conclusion, it is our desire today to add value to this bill. We think that this bill is an adequate bill. We think that this bill will certainly benefit education. We think that this bill has come a long way in the last couple of years. We do seek to add value to the bill because we think that the most important things that the ACT community expects of its education system are transparency, accountability and high standards.

We think that the community also requires that the education system do more than just teach students in accordance with the curriculum. We believe that the community wants an education system which ensures that the schools and the department backing up those schools will reach out to the students and undertake character development of them, impart values to make those students good citizens, and pick up those students who are falling by the wayside. We do not think that the bill has enough principles in there to make sure that those requirements are met.

I will detail the amendments to the bill later. I would ask the government and the crossbenchers to take on board what we are suggesting and support those amendments to add value to this bill.

MS TUCKER (11.59): It needs to be said at the outset that this bill is the outcome of significant developmental work spanning a number of years, several incarnations and two governments. There has been extensive consultation between a range of interested parties, including key stakeholder groups such as the P&C, the Independent Schools Association, the Australian Education Union and HENCAST, the home educators network.

The bill provides a coherent framework in which the responsibility of the territory to ensure a high-quality education of all school-age children is spelt out, with specific sections addressing the principles, procedures and accountability mechanisms as they apply to all government and non-government schools and home educators.

We have before us the result of considerable painstaking work by government officers and stakeholder representatives. Given that, I do think that, unless we have fundamental

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