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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Thursday, 26 August 2004) . . Page.. 4307 ..

We need good teachers to do one of the most important jobs in the ACT—teaching, nurturing and developing the character of our young people. We must retain these good teachers. We must try to support them in their quest to make teaching a vocation and not simply a job. We must support them. We must equip them to cope with the stresses. I believe that this inquiry, which was well chaired by Ms MacDonald, has gone a long way towards pulling out some very interesting indicators that we in this place all need to take a close look at.

I thank the chair of the committee, Ms MacDonald, and my other colleague, Ms Dundas. I thank Ms McGlinn, who may be lurking behind the window over there. She worked quite smartly and worked with great industry to help us put this report together. Like Ms MacDonald, I commend this report to the Assembly.

MS DUNDAS (11.48): Mr Speaker, Teaching in the ACT: Shaping the future, the fifth report of the Standing Committee on Education, is the result of a wide-ranging inquiry that looked at what is happening to teaching in the ACT—how we are going with recruitment, how we are going with retention, what we are doing to enable our teachers to make sure that they are the best teachers that they can be, that they are focused on supporting the young people in our the schools.

We had the opportunity in the course of this inquiry to visit schools and talk with teachers and principals about how they were going and about what they needed to see happen in the future. That was very helpful. I thank all the people who participated in those visits for taking time out of their already busy days to allow us to view classes in action, to talk to new and continuing teachers and to mull over with some principals where things were happening in our schools.

Like other members of this committee, I would like to thank the secretary of the committee, Kerry McGlinn, for the work that she has done in pulling all of this evidence together and making this report one that is quite clear in its intention. I thank Ms MacDonald for her work as chair and Mr Pratt for his contributions to this inquiry. Of course, I thank the people who took the time to put in submissions. They were very detailed and very helpful. I think that we have been able, in a way that has not been done before, to consolidate what is actually happening round Australia in relation to teacher recruitment and how the ACT fits into that broader picture.

I would like to touch on some specific issues. The other members of the committee have already touched on the great bulk of the report, but I wish to refer to a few things that I thought were of particular interest. In terms of how we train our teachers and the work that they do in universities, we heard some interesting evidence in relation to the practical component of that teacher training. Training teachers go and spend some time in schools to see how things actually work on the ground.

Without doubt, everybody agrees that this is an incredibly important part of teacher training practices. However, there is some concern that maybe our training teachers are not getting enough of the practical component and that that needs to be expanded. An interesting thing that happens at the Australian Catholic University is that it makes it mandatory for training teachers to do community participation. As well as spending time in schools, they have to spend time with a community organisation.

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