Page 3837 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 4 December 2007
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the road and the fact that there is no crash barrier between the two. I am sure that a crash barrier would upset the artistic integrity of this piece of public art but I am really more concerned about the safety of the drivers who may come into contact with it.
I would like to spend most of the time allotted to me on looking at the initiatives in the Department of Education and Training. I suppose here again it is one of those mixed bag things; it is a curate’s egg. We welcome the student welfare package. I have had some things to say about the student welfare package, although I was actually overseas on CPA business when the package first came out. It is interesting to see that this is pretty much what the Canberra Liberals proposed at the last election, so I suppose Mr Pratt must be feeling pleased to see Liberal policy being introduced by the Stanhope government.
The student welfare package is good enough as far as it goes, but it needs to be put in the context that this was a commitment of roughly $14 million over the outyears. This is roughly the commitment that the Stanhope government made at the last election, and we are getting to the very death knell of their term in office before we actually see it come. We also have to take into account that, in the time that we have been waiting for these extra 17 teachers to come on board, the ACT government has taken in excess of 25 teachers out of the government high school system, so we are still behind where we were a few years ago in relation to the staffing establishment in the government high school system.
There is a lot that needs to be done in relation to student welfare and it is one of the areas that I think—and I am saying I think because I do not know, because no-one in the ACT has done the research—that separates government high schools from non-government high schools and is one of the things that I think causes people to choose non-government high schools over government high schools. It is in relation to student welfare and the perception that if you are going to a government high school you are more on your own, there is less supervision of you as a student, and especially in those vulnerable years 7 to 10, than would be the case if you were going to a non-government high school. Sometimes that perception is unfair but also from time to time there is a falling down in the government high school system in relation to truancy, behaviour and some of the issues that go with this.
Over the last five or so years we have seen a winding back of a lot of the programs available for people in the government school system or in the school system generally who have difficult and challenging behaviour. It really is the case that if you have got a troublesome child they just have to keep going to school and into a conventional classroom, and sometimes that conventional classroom is not the place where a troublesome child with challenging behaviour needs to be. Sometimes these children with challenging behaviour have a range of problems; they may have mental health problems as well as having not been appropriately disciplined and given some rigour, structure and substance to their lives. They present to teachers, to the school authorities, to their parents and to the wider community a whole range of troublesome issues.
There are many people who say that the school is not supposed to be a social worker. But there are things that have changed in the structure of our society, and for some
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