Page 3942 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 5 December 2007
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People are trying desperately to avoid driving their cars. On one hand, we have got a government that says it is creating a public transport system to get people out of their cars. On the other hand, it is closing schools and making it certain that people have to use their cars.
The shift to non-government schools was another argument cited. There has been work done that shows that, of the eight states and territories, the ACT did not actually have the highest proportion of students in non-government schools. In fact, the comparison that the government has used is quite meaningless because the comparison is not a valid comparing of like with like.
We are a small and relatively wealthy city state, with a socioeconomic status matched only by a minority fraction of the other states and the Northern Territory. We should be comparing ourselves with more similar places. It does look very much as though the ACT’s non-government school enrolment levels are quite low. There is not time to go into that, and I am very happy to give Mr Barr the paper.
Finally, there was a program on Background briefing recently—it is always worth having a look at—about the future of primary schools. It indicated we might be looking at the death of primary schools. The P-10 thing is effectively killing primary schools, and the superschools are another way.
Let us listen to what Ian Townsend, who is one of the experts who are looking at this area—and I can give the government this reference later—says:
Big business, for instance, has found a market in public schools and schools are becoming more businesslike themselves.
Imagine public super-schools of 3,000 children or more, from kindergarten to Year 12—
in our case, year 10—
with front offices that look more like the head office of a corporation. Schools that compete with other schools for the best students and for private as well as public dollars, schools with brand names that specialise in the arts, or in environmental studies, and that have budgets of perhaps $30-million or $40-million.
That’s where the public school system is heading.
In this push for bigger and more corporate schools though, the primary school’s being left behind.
When policymakers talk about schools these days, they talk about the early years, from kindergarten to year 4 or, in our case, preschool to year 2; the middle years, from year 5 to about year 9; and senior years. You do not hear primary schools mentioned much any more. I would be very interested in hearing the government’s thoughts about the future of primary schools, on the understanding that they are still the way that our education system is modelled.
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