Page 3338 - Week 09 - Thursday, 22 August 2019
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Whatever the reason the minister is co-sponsoring this motion, I find it strange that the education minister would think that students missing school at what is the business end of the year is a good thing. But wait. School students who do not go to these protests still get the opportunity to be sat in a school hall and lectured about the importance of climate change and the climate emergency that is ever present so that they can be in attendance at the protest next time around. That was the experience of a number of students in various schools when the protest rallies occurred this year.
The future of education refers to supporting community and parental values, but this is a galling example of supporting only community and parental values that are in line with the government of the day. Then again, if I had the track record and educational success of the current minister and the current government, I too might be looking for anything outside what is happening inside our schools to distract parents and the general public from those issues.
We do not have to go very far back in this education minister’s tenure to build a very convincing case for F-grade failure that has been presided over. There is such a richness of mistakes, poor performance and lack of understanding that it is hard to decide what the highlights of the failings are. Perhaps at the top of the pile might be the often-discussed buzzword-packed future of education strategy that I suspect is bemusing parents, teachers and educators alike, as it is those in the opposition, trying to figure out what exactly the minister is trying to achieve.
The education minister manages to include an aspect of the future of education strategy and its multitude of buzzwords in just about every answer that is delivered to the Assembly. While she talks about equity and strong communities, we have schools where children are too scared to attend classes and where teachers know that they are likely to be physically injured. When she says that there is even more evidence that we are on the right track, I have to ask: is the right track the same track that is seeing children being strangled, choked and terrorised in classrooms? Is the right track the ever-growing number of injuries being reported by employees of the Education Directorate?
When the minister was asked last week about the significant increase in reports of teacher abuse, she suggested that it was because the system was working so much better now and teachers were reporting incidents more often. The fact that we still have in excess of 2,000 instances of occupational violence in our schools is a bleak reflection on the minister and the actions she has taken so far. There is no embarrassment either that this government is under an enforceable undertaking by WorkSafe because of violence in schools towards teachers, assistants and principals. This happens to be in spite of the so-called “nation-leading” workplace health and safety policy put in place last October. There is no embarrassment that teachers are still coming to us advising us of their incidents. And the worst part is that the reports that they are submitting go unanswered or ignored.
In all of this, there is no sign of a revised suspension, transfer and exclusion policy that was to be delivered earlier this year after some time under review. Maybe that is something that the minister might like to put her mind to instead of encouraging students to take the day off school.
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