Page 3901 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 4 December 2007
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frontline services and not have a bloated bureaucracy.” Yet, when we make those particular changes and look to alter the structure of government and how we deliver services, we are criticised for cutting these areas and that this is somehow a bad thing. Yet the focus is, as it should be, on frontline service delivery.
As I say, that applies no more than in the education portfolio where those opposite seem to be arguing that the priority should be around maintaining empty school buildings and not putting resources into improving the quality of our education system. The range of initiatives that feature in this second appropriation in the education sector seek to target those key areas where we know we need to improve the quality of service delivery within our school system or where we have targeted particular initiatives to address particular concerns, be it under performance in certain areas of student population or be it to enhance the ability, for example, in areas of physical education for the school system to respond to broader societal needs.
The bill provides over $23 million in additional expenditure in education over the next four years. The range of initiatives that are funded include $14.6 million for pastoral care and student welfare in our government high schools. Members would, indeed, be aware that at the 2004 election the government indicated that during this term of government we would provide an additional $12 million for pastoral care and student welfare services in high schools. This is an upgrading of that package to elevate the positions to school leader positions, to make them executive positions within our public schools and to provide a team of non-teacher professionals, such as social workers and community nurses to assist the pastoral care coordinators who will be in place in each of our public high schools from 2008.
Mrs Burke during her speech alluded to timing issues and why we would fund certain items in a budget or, in this instance, in a second appropriation. Clearly, for these educational issues to be in place for the beginning of the 2008 school year, they needed to be funded through this second appropriation.
We seek to implement a range of priorities in the education portfolio where we have the ability, the funds and the capacity. Of course, it should be noted that there are a range of constraints on the ability of a government to deliver everything in the first budget of a four-year term, not least of which is that in the provision of services within the education sector, a large part—70 per cent—of expenditure is on wages and salaries. It is around having the capacity to deliver all of the programs and having the people and the ability to recruit into the positions that we are looking to fill.
This particular appropriation, as I have indicated, includes the commitment that we gave in the 2004 election to provide additional resources for high schools. We have upgraded the positions. We have taken them from standard teacher classification up to executive level, school leader C positions and provided $14.6 million towards this initiative. There is an additional $3.3 million over the next four years committed to improve the outcomes for Indigenous students in our public schools.
There is $1.2 million to fund three additional specialist PE teachers at the school leader C level to coordinate physical education activities in the north, central and south parts of the city to work with primary schools to deliver enhanced physical
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