Julia Gillard at National Press Club
National Press Club Address 24 February 2010 Delivering the Education Revolution.Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to you today and to share my passion about the future of Australian schooling. Of course, this subject has recently generated intense public debate, triggered by the launch of the My School website. My School has been a revelation. A senior colleague of mine reported walking through the Press Gallery on the day it was launched and feeling puzzled that every single correspondent was apparently writing a news story about My School. It took him a minute to realise that the whole Gallery was in fact on My School looking for information about their schools – the ones that their children attend or that they had attended years ago.
We expected it to be popular, but the level of interest has been beyond expectation.
Everywhere I have been since January 28th, people have told me stories about the conversations that My School has sparked.
Conversations in workplaces and kitchens.
Conversations between parents and school principals.
Conversations between teachers in staff rooms.
Conversations between parents and their children.
There is no doubt that this new era of school transparency is a landmark in Australian education reform.
My School has shone a national light on our schools.
And the initial findings are, indeed, illuminating.
My School has shown us how much the performance of schools varies across our nation and that their performance is not determined by simple dividing lines like location or sector.
For the first time, it is allowing crucial aspects of school organisation and performance to be analysed and compared in a systematic way.
For example, around 27 percent of schools have 70 percent or more of their literacy and numeracy results above, or substantially above, the national average.
At the same time, some 20 percent of schools have 70 percent or more of their literacy and numeracy results below or substantially below the national average.
Using the ICSEA, the Index of Socio-Educational Advantage, developed by the ACARA (the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority) experts, we can also look at the picture of school performance in context through comparison of statistically similar schools, that is those serving similar student populations.
My School shows us that some 12 percent of schools have 70 percent or more of their literacy and numeracy results below or substantially below the average of their statistically similar schools.
This proves that there are schools, including schools teaching the most disadvantaged children, that can do better.
This variation exists among the schools serving the least advantaged and most advantaged communities.
So among the approximately 750 schools in the lowest 10 percent on the ICSEA scale, 420 had 20 percent or more of their test results above or substantially above the average of their statistically similar schools. Thirty-four had 20 percent or more test results that were above or substantially above the national average across those domains tested.
Unexpectedly good results.
These are schools to celebrate and schools to learn from.
They show that it is possible to overcome challenging circumstances and that every child in every school can be stretched, challenged and supported to achieve.
These are the schools that prove demography is not destiny.
But the lessons of My School are also lessons for advantaged communities. Around 850 schools are in the top 10% on the ICSEA scale. Of these, some 460 had 20 percent or more of their test results below or substantially below the average of statistically similar schools. Forty-four had 20% or more test results that were below or substantially below the national average. These are unexpectedly poor results.
These results are in very different communities but the message is the same. We can improve standards and school results for children. And if we know we can do it then we must do it.
My School is telling us that, as a nation, we have developed a status quo which is not in the best interests of all Australians, especially those young Australians with most to gain from educational excellence.
That is what fuels my passion for education reform in this nation.
I believe that every child is entitled to a world class education, regardless of their background or their family circumstances.
And for too long, we have let children down.
Let them down by allowing school reform in this country be distracted by an ideological debate about competition between sectors, at the expense of actually doing anything about the quality of schooling.
Let them down by allowing the quality debate to be stymied by the orthodoxy that what teachers did in the classroom was largely up to them and that external scrutiny of schooling and accountability for student outcomes was somehow not appropriate.
The most damaging consequence of this ideological conflict and dominant orthodoxy was felt by young people. If young people did not achieve highly in whatever schools they went to, the adult world did not respond with outrage. National leaders did not stand up to argue that, if young people are not achieving, it is the adults who are responsible for taking action.
The result has been that in recent years we have allowed our expectations and our performance to slip.
The Education Revolution is about rejecting that failure.
Delivering the Education Revolution
The Education Revolution is about transforming schools today and driving the reforms of the future.
It is transforming schools with new capital and equipment.
Today, a new $5.5 million Trade Training Centre is being built at Manjimup Senior High School in Western Australia for students from a cross-sector group of six local schools. By working together, these schools can create a bigger centre where their students will be able to gain qualifications in carpentry, automotive mechanical technology and engineering.
It is part of our ten year Trades Training Centre Program, which is being delivered exactly as promised at the election. 46 projects are now under construction and 5 are already completed.
Today at Erina High School on the New South Wales Central Coast, the students have 198 new laptops which are being used in all areas of student learning. These laptops are just some of the 220,000 computers already in schools around Australia.
By the end of 2011, the Digital Education Revolution, will achieve exactly what was promised, a one to one ratio of students to computers in senior secondary school.
And today, around Australia, jobs and skills are being created in the delivery of Building the Education Revolution, the largest school building program in Australia’s history. More than 24,000 projects. New investment in every school. More than 500 science and language centres in secondary schools.
This investment is transformational. For example, at Bellaire Primary School in Geelong, Victoria, $3 million is funding a new learning facility that allows flexible, state of the art teaching and learning strategies. The school has won a national award for this new way of teaching and learning in the senior primary years. The new building will allow it to expand to the middle years students. When I visited the school the principal, Jane Warren, explained how BER is helping them to integrate teaching, curriculum, new technology and social relationships to support children’s achievement.
Quality teaching
We know that the tools and the facilities matter.
But we also know that the heart of quality schooling is quality teaching.
The Education Revolution is delivering new resources and reforms to teaching through our $2.5 billion National Partnerships for Smarter Schools.
What’s happening today at Merewether Public School in the Hunter is a great example. Today, Debbie Ross is at work in that school as a Highly Accomplished Teacher and earning more than $100,000 per annum. Debbie is a former Maths consultant, classroom teacher and literacy consultant with a special interest in phonics-based approaches to teaching reading. She is both teaching children and her fellow teachers.
Another example is Teach for Australia, which is bringing high achieving graduates to disadvantaged schools. Today at Mill Park Secondary College in Victoria, Shaun Isbister is teaching business studies as one of the first group of Teach for Australia associates. Shaun was the first person in his family to attend university. He ended up with first class honours in economics and was working as a business analyst before joining Teach for Australia.
Now, after an intensive introduction to teaching, he is in his first weeks teaching kids with similar backgrounds to his own.
Sean’s class motto is "results, not excuses."
And the reforms go on, including through our direct investment in schools in low socio-economic status communities. Enabling full service schools with extended school hours, additional teachers, teacher aides, welfare officers, literacy and numeracy coaches and new community connections, this investment is about local empowerment and local solutions.
As a result of this investment, today, at Ingleburn Public School in south western Sydney, teachers are working together on a school improvement plan to lift literacy performance using individual student learning plans and phonics-based instruction methods.
What is happening today is all part of our long-term agenda to transform the quality of teachers and teaching.
Next month will see the release of draft standards defining what is expected of graduate teachers. Of competent teachers. Of highly accomplished teachers. And of school leaders.
For the first time, explicit standards written according to the best evidence and expert knowledge, negotiated between jurisdictions, open for scrutiny and further development.
These standards will inform the way teachers are hired, developed and promoted.
An Australian curriculum
The Education Revolution as it is being experienced today already amounts to the most concerted national reform agenda for school education ever seen in this nation.
But there is more to do.
For teachers to deliver excellent teaching, they must know what they are teaching.
Every student, every parent and every teacher should be able to know with confidence what is expected at every stage of schooling.
As a community, we should be confident about the essential knowledge and skills that every student can learn.
That is why, as the next step in the Education Revolution, we are delivering an Australian national curriculum.
Today I can announce that the draft curriculum in the first four subjects, maths, English, science and history, will be released next Monday March 1st.
It is world class, setting out not just the essential content for each year of learning but also the achievement standards against which students should be expected to perform.
This will not be a curriculum ‘guide’ or a supplement to what states and territories currently teach. It will be a comprehensive new curriculum, providing a platform for the highest quality teaching.
The drafts will be refined through an open national consultation process in the coming months. Everybody can contribute to the debate. Schools will try out the draft curriculum in practice.
From Monday, the Australian curriculum will be available through a fully interactive website that allows anyone to search the whole text for key topics and content.
It is already prompting fierce debate and provoking great interest. I can tell you, I learned a few things myself when I read it.
It has been developed by experts, not politicians, but I have to say I am glad that grammar makes a strong appearance. For the first time ever, grammar will be set out explicitly at every year level from kindergarten through to year 12; the content, the ways in which it should be used, and the other areas of language and literature to which understanding of grammar can contribute.
I urge Australians to view this website at www.australiancurriculum.edu.au.
For too long, what is taught in schools has been a mystery to Australian parents and employers. From next Monday the first tranche of the Australian national curriculum will be there for all to see.
For too long, parents and employers have been anxious that students will leave school lacking the skills they need for life and work including proficiency in reading, writing and mathematics. As a nation we are about to move to a national curriculum of true rigour.
For too long, families have feared moving interstate because they know their child would not only have to confront a new school but a new curriculum. Next Monday is the beginning of the end of those days.
Continuing the Revolution
But this new achievement will not stop my drive and passion to continue lifting standards and addressing equity in Australia’s schools for Australia’s children.
As we continue to deliver our current Education Revolution commitments, we will also debate and develop the next generation of reforms. Reforms that become possible because of what we have already put in place. Reforms that will further embed high expectations in our education system and build the knowledge and the actions that will deliver higher quality and better outcomes.
Individual value added measures
My School shows the value of providing school level results, in context, to analyse how each school is performing. Just looking at how students in years 3 and 5 or in years 7 and 9 are performing at a given school can provide important indicators of student progress.
But after this year’s national test we will for the first time be in a position to see how the same children are progressing two years later, for example seeing how the grade 3 students tested in 2008 are now doing in grade 5 in 2010.
Obviously, children move schools so to track progress systematically, to focus on the progress made by each student, and to evaluate the performance of schools and teachers with full rigour, we need to be able to analyse the gains made by individual students from year to year.
That’s why we need a single number that will remain with a student throughout their schooling so we can ensure that each student's individual improvement, or where they are struggling, can be accurately followed across schools, systems or states.
The Rudd Government will introduce a ‘unique student identifier’ across Australia as soon as possible, so that the most rigorous measures of school improvement and valued added are developed.
I have asked ACARA to identify how, before the introduction of a unique student identifier, we can use existing records to measure the progress of students from year to year in the existing national testing data. With the cooperation of education authorities, and without identifying individual students, it should be possible to link national testing records so that student progress can be identified from year to year once the 2010 national test tests have been taken.
Future reform priorities
And building on our current reforms, we will examine and debate the next stages of quality improvement
We will examine, for example, how every school can get the right support and scrutiny to make sure it is performing well and improving in the areas where it needs to improve. This may involve external assessment and inspection of schools and it will certainly involve strengthening school-based performance management of individual teachers, as some jurisdictions are already trialling through our National Partnerships.
We will examine how to make sure that every new teacher is able and ready to teach to the highest standards, by reforming initial teacher education and recruiting high quality candidates in every jurisdiction.
We will examine whether every secondary student can access the pathway they need to ensure they achieve and excel beyond the school years as we further lift year 12 achievement in line with our agreed national target of 90 percent. In my view this means examining the vocational pathways on offer and how they can be strengthened and expanded, for example through high quality school-based apprenticeships.
Our reform agenda is already broad, deep and challenging.
In its further development, I will build on the approach I have taken so far of publicly raising reform ideas, testing those ideas in public debate and then doggedly pursuing those reforms that stand out as the best.
As Australians we have an obligation to the future, an obligation to ensure the Australian school students of today and tomorrow each get a world class education. They should be stretched and extended into being the best that they can be so they have the best chance to achieve and succeed in life.
Through the Education Revolution, as a nation we are finally shouldering that obligation and making progress.
I am confident that together we will succeed in building a stronger, fairer nation by becoming one of the world’s most skilled and best educated nations.
Thank you.
Q&A SESSION
NATIONAL PRESS CLUB ADDRESS
ISSUES: My School website; Unique student identifier; Child care; Economic Stimulus; NAPLAN; Industrial relations; Award modernisation; Trade Training Centres; Work Choices.
JOURNALIST: Louise Dodson, Financial Review. Ms Gillard, I have to confess I’m a big user of My School, I’m just wondering if down the track there are plans to have a similar model in relations to TAFES and universities? Could we have a My Uni or My College sort of website down the track?
JULIA GILLARD: Thanks Louise and thanks for outing yourself as a big user of My School website, nothing to be ashamed of.
Look, I’m for transparency. I’m for transparency generally and that’s why we brought it to schools. We brought it to schools because shining a light on performance drives improvement and we’re going to take the same approach in vocational education and training and in universities.
If you’ve looked what enables us to do My School, what enables us to do it is we’ve brokered the agreements with states and territories, wasn’t easy, we built the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority to guide the development of My School and then we delivered it.
We have of course now overwhelmingly got the agreement of states and territories to create a new tertiary quality agency, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Authority and I can imagine it becoming the custodian of the same sort of transparency agenda.
JOURNALIST: Mark Kenny from the Adelaide Advertiser. Ms Gillard, back in the 80s Labor tried to bring in the Australia card, that didn’t go down so well, you’ve now introduced this idea of the unique student identifier and of course there are already plans for fully electronic health records. What assurances can you give to people who are worried about the, sort of, Orwellian aspect of this?
Tony Abbot for example has already said he doesn’t understand why simple names can’t be used to track students, what do you say to those concerns?
JULIA GILLARD: Well I’d say first and foremost, vintage Tony Abbott because he has spoken first and presumably he will think some time later, perhaps on very long delay, the reason we need the number is so as a government we don’t need the names. The number is a privacy protection.
The other piece of advice I’d give to Tony Abbott is I think, stand to be corrected, but I think there are probably two Sue Smiths amongst Australian students today, there are probably more than one Tim Williams amongst Australian students today and so the list would go on. So obviously the unique identifier is about a way of having the data that isn’t visibly linked in the eyes of those who are using it to people’s individual names.
And I would also say that between state education authorities and ACARA we are already the custodian of national testing data, there are privacy arrangements, the privacy act and privacy protocols which means that that data is held in a way that does not jeopardise individual privacy.
At the national level we do not have anything that would enable us to identify individual student results and for the work we need to do, the statistical work for My School, we don’t need individual student names. But the unique number would mean that we can track, without knowing the individual students names, we can track movement between schools and school systems and it can obviously be a linking number so when children move between schools, school systems and states their educational records can easily go with them. Great benefit for parents, great benefit to enable us to do the next value added metrics for My School.
This is a reform that has been talked about by education experts for a long period of time. I’m determined to do it and at the risk of, you know, channelling Jack Nicholson, the problem with Tony Abbott and Christopher Pyne and others is they can’t handle the truth. They didn’t make any endeavours in government to find out where the thousand most disadvantaged schools are in this country, didn’t even try, didn’t want to know, we had to do that, we built that. Well, we need more information to keep driving school improvement.
JOURNALIST: Phillip Hudson from the Herald Sun. I was wondering, do you believe that the best teachers should be paid more even if it means that they get paid more than some of their longer serving, perhaps longer serving colleagues and in your speech you said that you hoped there could be external assessments and visits to schools, who would conduct that and would they be without notice?
JULIA GILLARD: In order, question number one; yes I do believe highly accomplished teachers should be paid more and we’re already delivering that. I, in the speech, talked about the example of Debbie who’s teaching today. She’s a highly accomplished teacher, she’s getting paid more and we’ve made that reform possible through our national partnership arrangements. The best teachers being paid more to go to the schools that need them the most, a groundbreaking reform already delivered through the Education Revolution.
On the external assessment, I believe that you’ve got to have the doors open. Gone are the days when we could have teachers in classrooms with the door closed and whatever happened, happened and no one independently assessed the quality of learning. National testing and My School is part of that. I obviously want to see a debate about what more we need to do, whether physical inspections, whether quality audits are another layer of that and I’m very open to a community debate about how that best be done.
JOURNALIST: Hi Minister, Matthew Franklin from the Australian. I’m sorry to ask you this question but I did ask the Prime Minister yesterday and I didn’t get quite an answer; however, it is in your area. During the election campaign you and Kevin Rudd promised that you would end the double drop-off by building 260 child care centres on school campuses. As I understand you have committed to build 38 by 2012.
Isn’t that a pretty clear breach of an election promise and what’s the problem? Is there something wrong with the way it was proposed, you had an alternative if it’s not working properly?
And secondly on a similar theme, do you think that in the election Labor will have a difficulty countering a campaign from the Opposition that’s already begun that you haven’t been very good at delivering your promises?
JULIA GILLARD: Thanks for that question, Matthew. I’m just starting where you ended with the election campaign.
Matthew, I’ll back my record in as Education Minister against anybody who served with the former Liberal Government, indeed I’ll back my record in two and a bit years over the whole 12. So, you know, if we want to debate promises made and promises delivered bring it on is what I say.
Number two, on the question of the 222 remaining child care centres and I note that the Minister who works with me directly responsible for the area, Kate Ellis, is here. We promised 260 childcare centres, we promised 38 very specifically in locations, those 38 are being delivered.
Then with the 222 what we saw was a huge shake-up in the child care market because of the collapse of ABC Learning. Now, to be absolutely frank with you, I didn’t know, Kate didn’t know, Kevin didn’t know when we were campaigning in the 2007 election that the biggest private child care provider in this country was going to collapse. Now maybe some Liberal Party members might have known that – there were a few on the board – but I didn’t know.
So when that happened and I remember it very well, we were standing on the brink of the biggest child care provider in this country slamming its doors shut, tossing away the keys with parents turning up the next day with all of the obligations about work and caring responsibilities parents have and why they need child care not being able to get a place for their child. And I think frankly it’s a great unsung success story of this Government and I pay credit here to Kate Ellis and to Maxine McKew in this position before her, a great unsung success story of this Government that we managed that frightening, ginormous collapse with minimal disruption for parents.
Yes, there were some closures, that’s true but the level of continuity of care around the country was very high indeed and we’ve now managed that to a circumstance where we’ve got a more diversified child care market as a result. That is we’ve got a stronger presence of not-for-profit players in the child care market.
So yes, we had to turn our hands to urgently doing that. The child care market is still settling and in those circumstances it has obviously made sense to allow the childcare market to settle before we engage in further activity in that market. That’s the state that we’re in now.
JOURNALIST: Hi Ms Gillard, Phil Coorey from the Herald. The school buildings project, part of the stimulus, Reserve Bank Governor last night said the GFC is well and truly over, another big mining boom about to start or we’re in the midst of. The picture is definitely a lot better than it was when you devised that stimulus package. The Opposition is saying that all the unspent money on school buildings is still a waste. Can you tell us why it is still justified economically and you’re not politically trapped into spending that money for fear of a backlash if you withdraw promises from schools?
JULIA GILLARD: Thanks for that question. I’m not sure that I’m going to accept your complete characterisation of the Reserve Bank Governor’s edifying words. I’m not sure that they easily boil down to a two or three word snapshot but obviously we acted to stimulate the economy to support jobs.
We saw the unemployment rate fall to 5.3 per cent in the most recent numbers. We are obviously going to get further information about unemployment but we continue to caution people that unemployment is, in the language of economists, a lag indicator. That is you often hit the worst of unemployment after, long after, an economic crisis not in the midst of the economic crisis.
And then if you take a spatial analysis there are many parts of this country that still have very high unemployment rates and throughout the country we continue to have very high youth unemployment rates so we’ve still got to be out there supporting jobs, supporting apprenticeships as the economy makes its way through to a more normal time period and hopefully back to stronger growth.
So in those circumstances we continue to roll out economic stimulus and the economic advisors around the world, IMF and all the rest, have been very, very strong on not engaging in an early withdrawal of stimulus in a way which would jeopardise economies strengthening. So we continue to deliver the economic stimulus as promised.
Then on the question of the Opposition’s position on this, I’ll take it seriously the day Tony Abbott hands over to me in the Parliament or, you know, wherever he’d like to do it, perhaps on national television, the day that he hands over to me the list of school projects he as Prime Minister would cancel. Until then it’s just, to coin a phrase, all talk, no action.
JOURNALIST: Emma Chalmers from the Courier Mail. The NAPLAN tests are just one test from one day, shouldn’t you be tracking a student’s performance over a whole year and in other areas as well, for example many parents value scores for things like effort?
JULIA GILLARD: Of course, national testing is not the only measure of a child’s performance. Schools measure children’s performance every day. They do it with their own assessment methods, we have a number of other external assessment points that students hit particularly and after secondary schooling where they hit something like the VCE, speaking as a Victorian.
So, you know, children are getting tested and assessed through schools’ own mechanisms but it’s vital for us to have a nationally comparable data set and that’s what national testing is about.
Does it measure everything, effort, character, sports ability, artistic flair, action to help community members who need assistance? No it doesn’t. It measures reading and writing and mathematics but my point here is a very simple one; whatever else kids are learning and doing at school, they need to come out of school able to read, write and do mathematics.
So the things we test aren’t an optional extra, the things we test are the necessary foundation stones.
JOURNALIST: Minister Scott Hannaford from the Canberra Times. We’ve heard about funding being posted on the My School website, we’ve heard also talk about uni placings being made available with that information. We’re also hearing about individual identifier numbers for students. What’s you end goal for that website and when will we reach it?
JULIA GILLARD: Well I’m not sure that I’m going to define an end goal. You know, to quote former Prime Minister Paul Keating, a reform is a race without a finishing line and so we will continue to develop My School as fulsomely as possible. So I don’t think we’re ever going to say, you know, it’s perfect now and walk away. We’re going to say it’s got this much and now we want to do more with it and now we want to do more with it.
So what’s there now will continue because we want people to be able to see the continuity of that information, so 2010 national results will go on and then people will be able to see the journey from grade 3 to grade 5 to grade 7, grade 9 etc.
But we’re certainly going to add to the website with the funding by school. We’re certainly going to develop parental survey satisfaction measures which we will add to the website and the unique student identifier will make possible some value added metrics in terms of, you know, following children’s journeys through school that are not possible now because you can’t mechanically say all the kids in grade 3 are in grade 5 on the day of national testing, some have come and gone and that’s what the unique identifier is going to help us with.
JOURNALIST: Andrew Tillett from the West Australian.
Minister, an IR question with your other hat on. We’ve had a bit of industrial action over in the West recently which I’m sure you’re aware of. Do you acknowledge that you’ll probably have to take a tougher line against unions like the CFMEU and the MUA so that the country enjoys the full benefits of the mining boom and prevent a wages breakout affecting the rest of the economy?
JULIA GILLARD: I think I’m taking a continuing tough line against unlawful industrial action and as you would have seen from time to time I get a free character assessment because of it from officials of the CFMEU and other places so we’ll continue to take a tough line and the line here is very clear. Unlawful industrial action is wrong. People should expect to be punished; they should expect to feel the full force of the law; no apologies, no excuses, full stop. So we’ll continue to take that approach.
On the question of wages growth, I would draw people’s attention to the fact that today there has been the release of the wages data for the December quarter last year which now therefore gives you the calendar result for last year and if you look at that calendar result for last year in the private sector, it’s the lowest wages growth since records were kept.
Now that is obviously reflecting the weakness of the economy as a result of the global financial crisis and global recession but it should also cause a moments pause for those who have been involved in the hysteria campaign about our workplace relations system. Our new bargaining system has been on stream since July 1 last year and so the hysterical talk of wages explosions because of Fair Work was going to manifest, you may have expected to see some manifestation of it in those numbers and there’s precisely none.
JOURNALIST: Minister, Steven Johnson from Australian Associated Press and like Andrew I’d also like to ask an industrial relations question.
Late last year during the award modernisation process you had intervened with Fair Work Australia because the retail sector has problems with penalty rates in certain states being imposed on them so my two part question is as Minister, do you see a stroke for further intervention on your behalf with the award modernisation process? And also on the minimum hours provision, Kevin Rudd’s defended it, you’ve defended it, that clearly mean teenagers can’t work after school because they can’t do shifts shorter than three hours, are you having a rethink about your position on the minimum hours provision of Fair Work Australia?
JULIA GILLARD: Well on award modernisation, if I can just say this; award modernisation was done as a result of my request and my legislation by our industrial umpire and overwhelmingly this hugely complex job was done very, very well indeed by the Australian Industrial Commission.
And if I could remind people because I think it gets a little bit lost in some of the reporting about how profound a reform this is. It is employers who for over 30-odd years have asked for awards to be simplified and modernised because it would be better for them in terms of compliance costs and over all of those years there have been successive governments, including the Howard Government, that periodically have said we’re going to get this done and never got it done, never got it done and we grasped the metal and got it done and it hasn’t been easy.
But there we are now, we have around 120 simple modern awards replacing more than 4000 old industrial instruments together with the benefits of a uniform workplace relations system for the private sector which Access Economics tells us is a benefit to the national economy of $4.8 billion so this is big reform, big picture stuff.
On those occasions where I thought the Commission needed to look at something again I did ask them to do that. Award modernisation is now overwhelmingly basically concluded. The Commission is still dealing with some ambiguity and uncertainty questions.
On the question of the employment of young Australians because there has been a lot of talk about his lately and I can understand why people are concerned, I genuinely can. Most awards, retail awards in most states for example my state of Victoria, had a two hour minimum provision. So someone employing a school child for 1½ hours already had a problem with the old award.
The new award has obviously gone to a three hour provision. Now there is a question whether that is appropriate or whether we should do something to facilitate the employment of children for the time period, obviously secondary kids not small kids, secondary kids for the time period that they’ve got after school. The Fair Work Australia is now looking at that question on the application of the relevant employer organisations.
On award modernisation, no employer organisation raised that question. It has been raised now and it will be worked through now.
JOURNALIST: Minister, Dan Harrison from the Age and Sydney Morning Herald. After the launch of My School there was some criticism of the mechanism that was used to group schools that serve students from similar backgrounds and part of that criticism was that the index was based on the average socioeconomic circumstances of the census district where students lived rather than the actual socioeconomic circumstances of the individual families that sent their children to that school. Could this unique student identifier be linked to socioeconomic information to gain a more accurate picture of the circumstances of students that are given school teachers?
JULIA GILLARD: Thanks for that question. We have had obviously public debate about the ICSEA index, the index that you refer to. I do have a standing offer to any journalist who has read Barry McGaw’s book on meta-analysis and would like to sit through and work through the regression equations with him, anybody who wants to do that, standing invitation to come to my office for the number of days necessary to get that done. So if you want a fully informed debate here I know I will see all of you for all of next week.
But where we’ve got to is we do work off geographic data, census collector districts which are around 200-odd households. There is no data set that would enable us to get the individual results, there isn’t data in all states, all territories, all school systems of the kind of things that ACARA needs, our experts need to generate the index and if you did ask parents to fill in those sorts of surveys you would get a significant noncompliance problem.
Not in the sense that people would refuse to do it, but obviously when we’re talking particularly about very disadvantaged parents, about parents who are perhaps homeless, itinerant, non-English speaking, all the rest of it to get that kind of sophisticated data set out of each and every mother and father who is the parent of a child in an Australian school would be an enormously difficult thing to do. The advice from our experts is that the error rate, in that kind of data collection means you are not necessarily going to get a more accurate picture than you do using the ABS data of the census collector district model, so it’s a technical question.
JOURNALIST: Steven Scott from the Financial Review. Minister, you mentioned that today there’s a Trade Training Centre being built in WA I think it was, but there have been some delays to the roll out of the Trade Training Centres. Is there anything the Government is going to do to address that and do you stand by your earlier targets for increasing the number of students who finish Year 12 and targets for meeting skill shortages in key trades?
JULIA GILLARD: I’m happy to address that. There’s been some media reporting of some silly Opposition statements about delay. There is no delay in this program. It’s been rolled out in accordance with the timeframes that we set ourselves. This is 10 year program.
So I get that we’re in a phase where for whatever reason the Opposition reinterprets the Government’s election commitment as if we said, you know, the day after we were sworn in somehow there would be Trade Training Centres for every secondary school and if that didn’t happen in 24 hours somehow there is a breach of an election commitment.
Let’s do a little bit of a reality check; 10 year program being delivered exactly as we promised it would be delivered, word by word. Get out the policy document, feel free to check it and the change that has been made from our initial announcements about this program is in the interests of economic stimulus. We’ve expedited the funding of an additional $110 million. So against where we started we’re actually doing some things more quickly than we originally announced.
On the question of trade attainment and Year 12 attainment, I think to get us to the national goals that we’ve set ourselves for 2020, the goals of lifting attainment of students generally, of lifting attainment of Indigenous students particularly to the end of secondary school, those goals are what I would refer to as a climber’s reach. They’re meant to stretch us, the will stretch us, they’re not easy and part of ensuring that we can achieve those goals is having vocational education and training pathways that hold kids into education. That’s why the new Trade Trading Centres being rolled out are so vital because we can hold kids in to do a trade, they need to be doing it in a facility that isn’t dusty, falling around their ears and that offered them opportunity to work on the kind of equipment they will see in the world of work. So trade is very important.
As I indicated in my speech we are obviously open to doing more work in the area of school based apprenticeships to lift attainment and to lift the supply of skilled tradespeople.
JOURNALIST: Dennis Atkins from the Courier Mail, Deputy Prime Minister. There’s been a fair bit of discussion in recent weeks about the Government’s ability to communicate its message and its achievements. I was wondering what your view on that is and also what you think the Government might be able to do better or different?
JULIA GILLARD: Dennis, I’m not sure, whilst we’re talking about My School and rigorous external assessment, I’m not sure that it’s appropriate for me to give either me or the Government a self-assessment. We’ve got plenty of people who are only too expert in writing about how well the Government is doing so I’ll leave that to you.
I presume the next iteration will be MyPolitican.com and after each question time you’ll all load in an assessment result and we’ll be able to compare similar politicians. How you’re going to work out those groupings, you might need Barry McGaw to give you a bit of help so I can make him available for that if you’d like.
JOURNALIST: Steve Lewis from News Limited. Just further on the question of IR, when the Fair Work bills were being debated in the Parliament in 2008 you gave a commitment or undertaking that no worker will be worse off. A number of the unions have brought forward cases of workers in their areas, particularly in New South Wales and Queensland where workers are worse off.
If it’s good enough for Tony Abbott to admit that the Coalition went too far with Work Choices, do you now admit that it was a mistake for you to make that commitment back then? And what do you say to workers like Dave Clarke, a union organiser in the South Coast of New South Wales, who has written to his local member, Mike Kelly, claiming he will be about $6000 worse off as a result of the changes your Government introduced?
JULIA GILLARD: Steve, what I would say to Dave or to any other working person who feels that they are in that position is that we have legislated a take home pay guarantee model. So just to make that really, really simple for people, we are going from more than 4000 old awards to around 120 simple streamlined modern awards, changes as we move in, changes are being phased in over a full five year period.
For employees who are continuing employees and award dependant – let’s remember there are large, large slabs of the workforce who are not award dependant for their salary, they have enterprise agreements or they are paid above the award, you for example are not award dependant for your salary – but for those workers who are award dependant, who feel that in some way they have suffered a disadvantage because of that change, we have legislated their ability to go to Fair Work Australia, to get an order which means their take home pay has to be maintained. That is, they cannot lose a dollar of take home pay.
So I’m happy to look at the individual example you’ve raised with me but from what you’ve said, my advice would be let’s talk about how you get to Fair Work Australia to get the take home pay order.
JOURNALIST: Minister Chris Uhlmann from the ABC. There are two parts to what you said carrying on from Steve Lewis’ question. The second part was that the objective was also no employer be any worse off. Now I appreciate that there’s a five year transition period but you said when you were asked about this last year that the aim was being met, that no employer also would be worse off. Isn’t it clear now that some employers will be paying more money?
JULIA GILLARD: What I would say, Chris, is we took into account – and when I say we, the independent umpire that put award modernisation together – took into account the transitions for employers through the full five year period. So there are changes over the five years and they will be slowly phased in.
What I would also say for employers and this is undoubtedly true is that the compliance burden for them has been lifted off their shoulders by the new Fair Work system and by having a uniform system for the private sector and that happens in two ways.
Number one - under the old Work Choices regime you had to send your agreement in and it got at the back of the queue at the Workplace Authority, the authority that was overseen by Ms Bennett, Barbara Bennett and it got a place at the back of the queue with 100,000-odd agreements in front of it and you waited months and months and months and months to know whether or not your agreement got the tick, got the cross, whatever happened next. All of that’s gone now. All of that red tape is gone.
And then the other red tape that’s gone is under Work Choices you started a small business, started as a sole trader, engage your first employee, got a bit bigger, entered a partnership with your husband or wife, engaged your second employee, got a bit bigger, decided you’d incorporate a company; you would in that journey move from a state system to a federal system and you wouldn’t even know you’d done it. Now that compliance burden is off the shoulders of employers and it’s the eradication of that compliance burden that Access Economics tells us is worth $4.8 billion to the economy as a result of cutting red tape.
So there are benefits in the system here that need to be weighed as well.
