Page 3162 - Week 10 - Thursday, 18 October 2007
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MRS DUNNE: It was very interesting to hear Mr Gentleman put forward the usual “commonwealth government bad, state Labor governments good” approach in relation to the final assessments at the end of year 12. What we have actually got here is, again, the misleading of the community by the Labor Party in saying, “If Minister Bishop has her way we will be forced to do away with continuous assessment in the ACT.” That is rubbish. That is to mislead the community. That is not the case at all.
We have this ridiculous proposal where we have Mr Gentleman saying, “Our poor children will be stressed by doing final year exams.” Mr Gentleman needs to get real and start talking to some college students about how stressful continuous assessment is and how the stress of the workload, and sometimes the uneven workload, really wears them down. What we should be doing is collaborating, talking to the students, talking to the parent bodies, talking to the teachers and talking to business and coming up with something that addresses those issues. All that we have seen from this minister is a decision to close 23 schools, added to the decision of the previous minister to close another school.
We can always talk about bricks and mortar, but there is more to a teaching environment than bricks and mortar. They are important, but bricks and mortar do not make the school. What makes the school is the teaching environment. And where is the collaboration with the teachers to address some considerable behavioural problems that we see in schools in the ACT? I spend as much time as I can talking to teachers. I do not get everyday access to government schools in the way that Mr Barr and Mr Gentleman do, but every time I talk to teachers they talk to me—and Mr Gentleman will remember this—about the problems that they have in addressing bad behaviour in the schools, bad behaviour from a very small number of children who have a whole lot of deep-seated problems, who are a disruption not just to their own education but to the education of all the children around them, and are a threat to the safety of themselves, their own friends and colleagues and the teachers.
There are many teachers who want to leave the system because they do not have the means or the mechanism to deal with this. And all Mr Barr can do is say, “Unprecedented $300 million investment.” What we need is some investment in those children because, if we do not make an investment in those children, they will not succeed in the education system, they will end up in jail or worse, and that will be a great cost to us as a community.
We hear nothing about the collaboration that is needed between us here and the parent bodies and the teachers about addressing those things. We hear nothing except the cutting of staff from high schools and colleges when the high schools and colleges are crying out, saying that we need more staff. We need specialised staff. We need people who can help us address these problems, not put them away in a corner but to actually turn them around so that they will become productive, collaborative members of the school community, learn something and go on to make something for themselves rather than just acquire a prison number.
While ever this government spends its time posturing, saying, “We cannot deal with the commonwealth; the commonwealth is mean to us,” it is an excuse and a distraction from the main game. The main game is our kids, and the main game is our
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