Page 1877 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 22 August 2007
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conviction that the current system of moderation and assessment in the ACT duds our students.
Mr Barr is not prepared to say to the people of the ACT, to the parents of students in years 11 and 12, that there is doubt. There is doubt. It is possible that some of your UAI scores are up to five points lower than they could be if we did the maths a slightly different way. How many children in the ACT in the past few years have missed out on courses because the UAI assessment has dropped them up to five points?
It was interesting the other day when I looked at the figures that were put together by this man and discovered that if the assessment had been done differently, in some of the years the UAI score for some of my children would have been up to five points higher than they were awarded. How many children in the ACT have been in that situation? We know that some have been so vocal that their UAI scores have been changed in the past few years. Under the threat of legal action the Board of Senior Secondary Studies has changed them.
We should be having a debate today about the future of our senior secondary system. How do we carry it forward so that we can ensure, in the words of this review, that we have the best 21st century system that meets the needs of all of our children? But no, what we have today is another petty partisan debate. Ms MacDonald is not interested in the educational outcomes of the people in the ACT. If she were she would be taking up the words on page 15 of the review:
Meeting the challenges and seizing the opportunities will be critical if the college model is to fully and effectively meet the needs of children in the 21st Century.
This report is replete with both praise and pointers to things that are wrong and which need to be fixed. But Mr Barr is content to allow Ms MacDonald to rest on our laurels, to continue to say we have a great system and we do not need to do anything about it; let us just put it under resin, put it under amber, and keep it like that and we will be able to say that education in 2005 looked like this—was it not pretty? But it will not be doing our children any good in 2010.
I have circulated an amendment that I would like to move. This amendment sets out what this debate should be about. It should be about ensuring that this government carefully looks at the review and follows its advice and recommendations—not just the formal recommendations, but the other advice that is littered through it—so that we have a better system in the future; that we do not just have an HSC system or an either/or system, and that we will have a system that meets the needs of our children.
In many ways, and this report says it, the college system meets the needs of those children who want to go on to university and much of what is done in the system is directed towards that. The proposal that Ms Bishop has put forward only relates to those children who want to go on to university; it does not affect the 60 per cent or so in year 12 who are doing non-T courses.
Mr Barr: No, I think you will find it is a requirement for a year 12 certificate, Mrs Dunne.
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