Page 5208 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 27 October 2010
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truth, shows that this government does not understand education but sure knows how to spend.
NAPLAN is neither a government KPI nor a balanced scorecard target and should never be used as such. The litmus test is: what is the government going to do with these test results? This motion, again, misses the point, with its emphasis on the government’s investments that, it purports, led to this outcome. Mr Hargreaves is backward looking rather than forward looking. To borrow from his party’s parlance, Mr Hargreaves needs to be moving forward.
In essence, this motion takes what might be considered a diagnostic tool to monitor an individual student’s performance and turns it into a vacuous, high-stakes, high-pressure game of point-scoring, with jurisdictional pride and prestige at stake. The fact that there were allegations of cheating and teacher coaching leading up to the test, whether this occurred or not, shows that the intention on NAPLAN has been mutated to an unhealthy degree.
Again, Mr Hargreaves’s motion serves nothing more than to throw kerosene to the flames, not to mention the fact that trying to draw a direct correlation between investing in the education system and NAPLAN results is fallacious. It does neither capture nor understand the multifarious factors that go into learning. It has been little noted that this test is significant, as it represents the first cohort of students taking the test for a second time. Year 3 students in 2008 are now year 5, year 5 are now year 7 and year 7 are now year 9 students.
I ask this question again: what will the government do with these test results? At the moment, what we have is the typical flurry of media releases by Minister Barr on the day the results were announced, a belated congratulatory motion by the minister’s former boss and the government’s axing of vital school support services affecting the most vulnerable students in our school system, not to mention yesterday’s bagging of the teaching profession which the minister likened to the Soviet system where people got paid for doing nothing. No doubt things can be made better but the cynicism and antagonism are something that the majority of our school system should not have to put up with, especially in light of the fact that the government is in negotiations with the AEU on accelerated progression arrangements.
Simply put, there is still room for improvement in the ACT education system. And the government needs to work better with parents and school groups on NAPLAN and its corresponding My School website which might also have an added benefit of reversing its present track record of not properly consulting key stakeholders. Hence, although seemingly innocuous on the surface, this motion is laden with baggage that smacks of unfinished business on the part of the government.
Equally, in light of the ongoing dividend cuts and the belated untimely nature of this motion, we feel that this motion does not sincerely pay proper acknowledgement that students, parents and the ACT public service truly deserve. In light of the context in which this motion has been put forward, the Canberra Liberals believe that this Assembly should not use the students, parents or the public service as pawns for political gain. As such, we will not be supporting Mr Hargreaves’s motion as it stands. I move:
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