MINISTERIAL STATEMENTS

Senator ALLMAN-PAYNE (Queensland) (18:18): I rise to take note of the minister's statement. There are many things that I want to comment on, and I won't comment on them all today, but I do want to make a few key points. First of all, it's 15 years since the Gonski review was handed down and, as we speak today, public schools in this country are not fully funded.

By 2034, when the better and fairer schools agreements come to their end, public schools will still not be fully funded, because, as the analysis by Trevor Cobbold has shown, there are still loopholes in the better and fairer schools agreements which allow states to claim things like buses, teacher registration bodies and capital depreciation as part of their school funding contribution.

That is money that is not flowing to classrooms. Let me remind everyone: the Gonski formula was calculated on getting 80 per cent of our students to the minimum benchmark—not 100 per cent but 80. So the fact that we have a government patting themselves on the back for saying that they are going to fully fund public schools by 2034 should not be the celebration that they're making it out to be, because a kid in public school today will still finish school without getting a fully funded public education.

The people of this country deserve to know that that is the case. It is both sides of this chamber that are responsible for that. It was a Gillard government that commissioned the Gonski review and then never did the job.

They took it to an election rather than actually get it done. Here we are, 15 years later, still waiting. Banging on about NAPLAN scores—yes, the mean is going up, but the tail is getting further and further behind.

We have an equity issue in this country when it comes to education. We have one of the widest equity gaps in the OECD, and that equity gap is getting wider and wider. That is a failure of government policy on both sides of the chamber.

Teachers and school leaders deserve to have a full seat at the table when decisions about what is going on in our schools are made. Right now, we have a reform of a new teaching and learning commission, and we do not have school leaders with a fully engaged collaborative seat at the table. These people are in our schools every day, leading the work that people on this side of the chamber and that side of the chamber love to tell us is so important.

Teachers are so valued that teachers in Victoria had to go out on strike yesterday because their teaching and learning conditions are so bad. Teachers in Tasmanian public schools are also taking industrial action because their teaching and learning conditions are so bad. Teachers in Queensland are currently before the Queensland Industrial Relations Commission because their teaching and learning conditions are not good enough.

So don't come into this place and tell us it's job done, because it's not. One in five teachers in our public schools right now say they do not intend to be there until retirement. That is an indictment.

People stand up in this place and give platitudes about how much they value their work, but they then say, 'We're going to make you report, report, comply.' There is nowhere on this Earth where mass universal testing, mass external testing, has improved the results of our young people, yet we keep on hearing that we've got to improve NAPLAN. But what about the whole child?

There is a reason why school refusal is on the rise. I should say that it should be called 'school can't'. We had an inquiry into that in my first year in this place, and that committee made numerous recommendations about how to address that.

Not one of them was accepted by the government; they were noted. Young people want an education that is engaging, that excites them, that allows them to be curious and to explore. Teachers want to engage in teaching that does the same.

Instead, they are drowning in data and NAPLAN scores. I met with academics and researchers here this week who are doing incredible work in schools and with teachers. There is incredible evidence about innovative ways we can do things better, and yet it would seem there is only one type of evidence that we count in this place for evidence based teaching, and that's the evidence that comes out of AERO.

The fact is that you all stand in here and bang on about explicit instruction like it's the be all and end all. But let me tell you, as a teacher, it is one tool in the toolkit of pedagogy. It is not a framework.

Every single teacher does evidence based instruction every single day. And we have academics who are telling us this, who come in and say that there is only one way to do this. It shows a complete disregard for the broad range of evidence out there about what works in education.

Nobody goes and tells doctors how to do surgeries. Nobody goes and tells an engineer, 'This is how you need to do your job.' But governments spend an awful lot of time telling teachers how to do their work instead of inviting them in to have a proper collaborative seat at the table and listening to them about what works. Finland had an education system that was woeful.

They had bipartisan support for coming together, inviting teachers in and working with them on how to transform that system, and they now have one of the best education systems in the world. They don't do mass external testing, and they don't only focus on and bang on about explicit instruction. I bet half of you don't even know the difference between explicit instruction and direct instruction; they are very different.

Please don't tell teachers and school leaders that they need to do better, when you are still underfunding them in their public schools, when you are still not addressing teaching and learning conditions, when we have oversized classes, when we are not at 100 per cent of the Schooling Resource Standard, when we don't have proper support for kids who are experiencing 'school can't' or when we have one in six kids living in poverty who are overwhelmingly in our public schools.

You try to engage in your education when you're hungry or un-housed. Then it's teachers that are going out and buying lunch for kids or making sure that they have somewhere to stay. There is no world in which more money is bad.

I am not disregarding the fact that this government has put some more money into public schooling, but please don't keep saying that you have fully funded public schools, because you have not, and, by 2034, you still will have not. So, at the very least, tell people the truth. I'm going to leave it there for today.

I seek leave to continue my remarks later. Leave granted.