Page 3838 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 4 December 2007
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people school is the only place where they can come in contact with people who can provide them with the strength and the capacity to turn their lives around. The pastoral care initiatives are good as far as they go but they do not go far enough. I want to see more provisions to address truancy problems up front.
I will relate briefly a conversation I had with a parent the other day who was talking to me about the problems she was having with one of her children who had essentially run away from home. She was having contact with the ACT Office for Children, Youth and Family Support, and she said to me, “It is three weeks and I am still waiting for the school to ring me and tell me that my son is not at school.” This is a major falling down, and if it is happening once in this school it is possibly happening more than once. I know that that boy from time to time turns up to school, gets his name marked off the roll, wanders in and out and leaves again. This is a child in year 9. He should not be able to wander in and out and leave again and not have anyone say: “Hey, you are at school today. We haven’t seen you for two weeks. Perhaps we should sit down and see if we can work through some of these problems.” They need to help the parents, be in contact with the parents.
One of the things I am particularly concerned about is the truancy system. Parents are apparently contacted by SMS. Technology is a great thing. As Dr Foskey said, it is great for the buses: you can find out when the buses are coming. But when we are talking about truancy we are talking about our children. They are people and it seems to me that it is a means by which the school authorities can avoid the difficult conversations that they need to have with parents if a child is truanting. They have met their absolute minimal responsibility by sending someone a text message but they never have to have that difficult conversation: “Mrs Smith, why do you think that your son or daughter is truanting? What can we do to help? Is there anything that we can do to help?” Instead it is: “No, we have met our responsibility, we have told you and we move on.”
I want to see much more, much better pastoral care. This system is the beginning but it does not go into the college system—once you graduate from the high school system your problems are not solved—and it does not address the emerging problems in our primary school system. This is a start but there is much more that needs to be done.
We have the issue with Harrison primary school and the $1.4 million cost overrun which is well addressed by the appropriation report. It does beg the question that we have a whole lot of other schools coming on line—the Gungahlin college, West Belconnen high school, a superschool being built in Kambah. How much are we going to see the cost overruns and how good are the cost estimators at getting this right? I think the minister said, “It’s a $28 million budget so $1.4 million isn’t very much.” But it is, and when you replicate that in every project that this minister is talking about—we are having $2 million spent there, and $2 million spent elsewhere—it all adds up to $300 million on capital upgrades. If we get it that wrong for every one of those, we are going to end up with a lot less or it is going to cost us a lot more. The minister and his department need to be much better attuned to the actual costs of things.
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