Andrea Dawkins On tomorrow to move -
That this House notes:
1. That this week, from the 26th of October to the 1st of November, is Gonski week 2015;
2. That the Gonski funding model is designed to ensure that every Australian child, no matter what their background, can get a high quality education, and that such a model seems almost custom in design for the fledgling Tasmanian education system;
3. That where Gonski funding has been provided to schools around the country, it is making a huge difference, but that still too many schools are missing out and that, sadly, many of those schools are in Tasmania;
4. That the Federal Coalition Government is refusing to honour, in full, the Gonski agreements signed with, among others, the State of Tasmania;
5. The statement by the Mitchell Institute that education is the main avenue through which to ensure Australia is “… a fair and egalitarian place in which opportunities exist for all to get ahead and succeed in building secure futures”;
6. That the report prepared for the Mitchell Institute, Educational Opportunity in Australia: Who Succeeds and Who Misses Out, indicated that compared with other jurisdictions for early to middle years of schooling, Tasmanian levels actually worsened over a five-year period;
7. That, perhaps most damming of all, the statistics indicating that Tasmania’s rate for completion of Year 12 or equivalent by age 19 sits at just 59.5 per cent, second only to the Northern Territory as the worst in the country;
8. That the same statistics indicated Tasmania and the Northern Territory again have the worst achievement rate in mathematics in the country, averages which are well below the OECD averages;
9. That the report indicates more than 75 per cent of the between-school variation in performance is accounted for by the socioeconomic background of the students and schools in Tasmania;
Further, that this House:
10. Calls on Minister for Education, Jeremy Rockliff MP, to immediately lobby his federal counterpart to provide and rollout funding recommended by Gonski to Tasmanian schools, in view of these damming results, to ensure our students have the opportunities they need to develop and succeed on into the future.