Page 4980 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 26 October 2010
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through the in pursuit of excellence program; nearly $700,000 to increase the number of Indigenous teachers and teachers assistants working in ACT public schools through 10 scholarships for year 11 and 12 students who wish to pursue a career in teaching; more than $3 million to provide more support staff to assist students with English as a second language; $200,000 over four years to improve language education in the ACT by building closer relationships with embassies and cultural institutions to support language delivery in our schools; and almost $1.5 million to allow students to undertake industry-based training whilst remaining at school under the Australian school-based apprenticeships program; and we have also provided students at risk of dropping out with extra support through the SPICE program, which has received more than $800,000 in additional funding.
Our investments in human capital in our schools continued in the most recent budget. This has included more than $9 million for productivity places and skills, nearly $4 million over four years to establish the ACT Quality Teacher Institute, $1.6 million over four years to support students with a disability, $1.1 million over four years in support of our earn or learn policy, $600,000 over two years for the implementation of the school-based management review, and $300,000 over four years to enhance swimming and survival skills in ACT schools.
We continue to invest in ICT, ensuring teachers and students have access to tools that are the basis of literacy in the 21st century. This has supported the rollout of the virtual learning environment. This system will give students added and remote access to features such as podcast lessons, homework requirements and video conferencing for language practice. Through the parent portal, it will also give parents and carers a convenient and effective way to further help their son or daughter succeed at school.
We have invested in pastoral care coordinators to help students through the challenges that can arise, to ensure, as far as possible, they do not derail their studies. These are all massive investments in the people in our schools.
Naturally, we are targeting investment and policy reform to help ensure the most important part of our education system is as effective as possible. In short, we are investing to support our teachers. We have placed an extra 70 teachers into our classrooms to further reduce student to teacher ratios that are already amongst the lowest in the country. We have hired literacy and numeracy coordinators to help our teachers better help those students struggling with reading, writing and maths. We are establishing new accomplished teacher and leading teacher classifications. These classifications will pave the way for career paths which encourage our top teachers to stay in the classroom.
We are investing to free up teachers so that they can spend less time on red tape and more time either in the classroom or preparing for the next day’s lessons. We are giving principals more say over how they run their school—more say and clearer accountability. That is why we are moving away from staffing points to introduce real-world single-line budgeting in ACT schools.
Beyond this, we are fully engaging in the national education reforms being driven by the federal government. Because of this work that we have already done in developing
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