LABOR TO TAKE POLITICS OUT OF THE SCHOOL CLASSROOM

Labor believes it’s time to put an end to decades of ideological battles about school education.

 

Parents and teachers are sick of it.

 

We have some of the most outstanding teachers in the world.  They are experienced professionals who just want access to the latest new research about what works in the classroom, so our children get the best possible education.

That’s why a Labor Government will establish a $280 million research institute – the Evidence Institute for Schools.  The investment over the first four years is $73.4 million.

The Institute will help improve schools and early childhood education centres by ensuring teachers and parents have high quality research at their fingertips.

This is about ensuring we have the right research to inform teachers and early educators, and to help them refine and improve what they do together in schools, and individually in the classroom.

Armed with the best and latest evidence in digestible, easily applicable formats, teachers and principals will be able to exercise their professional judgement about how to best help their students.

 

Just as doctors draw on the best new research when they are deciding how to treat their patients, we want to better support teachers do the same for their students.

 

The Institute will be independent of government.  Politicians shouldn’t tell teachers how to do their jobs, or be using schools as ideological battlegrounds.

 

The Institute will:

 

Commission new research – involving thousands of schools in ground breaking research, and include teachers as researchers. The research priorities will be determined by principals, teachers, and parents’ key concerns.

Help teachers and early educators stay up-to-date – free toolkits, implementation resources, and practice guides will be available summarising evidence and making it easily applicable to the classroom setting.

 Save money and lift standards – with independent program reviews that assess the many programs being promoted and sold into schools. Thousands of products are being promoted that claim to improve educational outcomes.  Schools shouldn’t waste money on ones that don’t work.

 Help schools doing excellent work to share their success with other schools – we want to makebest practice common practice. Schools will be identified and supported in collaboration with states and territories and the non-government sector.  Australia already has some of the best schools, principals, and teachers.  We don’t need to go overseas to find out what works.

 

Labor will restore every dollar of the $17 billion Malcolm Turnbull and the Liberals have cut from schools.   

 

We will properly fund schools so teachers have the resources they need in the classroom, and good ongoing training.

 

Our Institute will help make sure Labor’s extra investment achieves better results for our kids, so we can quickly scale up programs that work, and dump those that don’t.

 

The Liberals are in their fifth year of government, and not only are they cutting funding for schools, they still have no real plan to improve school performance either.  They junked the targets Labor set in place for improving literacy and numeracy.
 
 Only Labor believes that Australian kids deserve the world’s best schools, and the world’s best teaching.