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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Wednesday, 30 June 2004) . . Page.. 3094 ..

trust; second, enhancing skills and opportunities for communication and social connectivity; and, third, building a sense of positive regard through valued participation in school life. The strategy, which draws on the health-promoting schools framework, seeks to support schools to make changes in social and learning environments, to introduce relevant and important skills through the curriculum and to strengthen structures and processes that promote links between schools and their communities.

Ten guidelines will assist schools in planning, implementing and evaluating a whole school strategy to reduce risk factors and to enhance protective factors—that is, protective versus risk factors—that affect students’ health and educational outcomes. We need to establish just how well we are supporting Canberra schools to develop that social environment. Health promoting schools are important and they are a good basis for work. The government has picked that up to a degree but I would like to see it picked up a lot more. I still have major concerns about how we are doing that, in particular, for students at risk and I have made clear those concerns in various presentations to the Assembly.

I give credit to the government for acknowledging, accepting and understanding where the research is leading us. It is not about going back to poor values and making discipline obvious; it is about understanding that many children who come to school have problems in their lives. When we prepared the report entitled “Adolescence: Some young adults at risks of not achieving satisfactory education and training outcomes” we looked at about 4,000 kids who were at risk of not completing their education. Most of them deserved a medal for even coming to school. So let us not talk about discipline and about going back to core values. Let us talk about the reality of the lives of children in our schools and the teachers who are trying to support them. That is positive and that is about values.

MS GALLAGHER (Minister for Education and Training, Minister for Children, Youth and Family Support, Minister for Women and Minister for Industrial Relations) (6.28): The government does not support this motion. I looked carefully at the wording of the motion because the government supports values being taught in schools. I looked at the motion from the point of view of supporting it or amending it to reflect what is going on and what work is being done. But the motion has been written to reflect that values education is not being taught in schools and it is not reflected in school culture.

The motion states that there is a piecemeal approach to the teaching of values education and that something has to be done to centralise values education across the ACT education system. It is a negative motion and a difficult one to amend. It is an attack on the education system and an attack on teachers. It is an attack on parents and an attack on students, which is unfortunate. I look to the shadow minister for education occasionally to introduce motions and business in the Assembly that progress work in the ACT education system. Unfortunately, that is not something on which this shadow minister has concentrated; rather he has concentrated on wedge politics—a political debate that the Prime Minister started in January and that the shadow minister decided to pick up and run with.

I repeat what other speakers have said in relation to core values. At no point during Mr Pratt’s presentation did he mention how the Liberal opposition defines core values. He mentioned discipline at one stage but that was in relation to core values and discipline. A number of values spring to mind—values to which other speakers referred—for example, tolerance, trust, mutual respect, courage, compassion, honesty,

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