AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION UNION CONFERENCE

I acknowledge the Wurundjeri people who are the traditional custodians of the land on which we are meeting and I pay my respects to the elders of the Kulin Nation both past and present.

I extend this respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in attendance today.

I would also like to acknowledge:                                         

Correna Haythorpe – Federal President

Susan Hopgood – Federal Secretary

Richard Di Natale – Leader of the Australian Greens

Federal Conference Delegates, Observers and Guests

And of course Bill Shorten, Leader of the Labor Party.

Thanks so very much for allowing Bill and I to speak to you today.

Bill and I are exceptionally proud of Labor’s strong record when it comes to education reform.

That of course is demonstrated by our instant commitment to restore every dollar of the $17 billion cut by the Federal Government from school education.

It’s not just the size of this cut that is the problem, it’s the way this cut falls.

We recently received data from the Parliamentary Budget Office and the National Catholic Education Commission showing the difference between our school funding plan and the Liberals’ new regime in 2018 and 2019.

In these two years alone, the year we are in now and next year, the difference between our plan and what the Liberals legislated, was $2.19 billion. $2.19 billion over two years alone.

And a whopping 86 per cent of that cut is to public schools.

$1.88 billion cut from public schools.

The reason the cuts fall so disproportionately on public schools is because unfairness is baked into this model. It’s legislated in.

This model is unfair at its core.

Because the Australian Government, under this model, funds eighty per cent of the cost of educating a child in a non-Government school and twenty percent of the Schooling Resource Standard for a kid in a public school. How is that fair?

The legislation as it was originally proposed, meant that eighty-five per cent of public schools would never reach the Schooling Resource Standard. Eighty-five per cent would never reach the Schooling Resource Standard.

There’s no justification for that, there’s no basis for that.

It means that the funding model is not fair, it’s not sector blind, it’s not needs based.

I know your previous speaker was Richard di Natale. It actually is shocking that the Greens were considering voting for this legislation and they engaged in debate with the Government about it, because there is no way that this kind of model could have been made fair, and I want to thank Senator Lee Rhiannon and the New South Wales Greens for standing up against this unfair model. It’s a shame isn’t it that the penalty for that is her disendorsement.

The very best schools systems don’t just fund their schools adequately, they support teachers through professional development, autonomy and respect.

And yet in Australia a shockingly low 39 per cent of teachers feel that teaching is valued as a profession by our society.

That’s not acceptable.

It’s not easily fixed but it’s not acceptable.

It requires substantial cultural change.

Raising the status of the profession requires frank examination of the candidates being allowed to undertake initial teacher education.  

In 2005, one in three entrants to teaching at university had an ATAR of 80 or above

In 2015, that had fallen to one in five entrants.

So from one in three – a third – to twenty percent – one in five – over the course of ten years.

I want our new recruits to teaching to be drawn from our top performers.

Now of course there should be alternate pathways. If someone bombs out in high school it doesn’t mean they are hopeless forever – absolutely not.
 But as a principle we should be targeting kids who achieve well or have the capacity to achieve well, to go into teaching.

We have to respect teachers, appreciate the complexity of your roles, and the way you use your skills in using professional judgement to determine what will work the best for the particular needs of your students.

That acknowledgement of the complexity of your work I think is a critical element of attracting high performers to initial teacher training.

And in the same way that kids are competing to get into medicine, I want them to compete to get into teaching, because it’s rewarding. Because it’s respected.

We respect your profession and we respect your union as the voice of your profession.

That is why I am delighted today to announce today that if Labor is elected we will restore teacher representatives to the Board of the Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership.

Because no one is more committed to excellence in the teaching profession than teachers.

Now the skill level of teaching – I know I keep comparing to medicine, you’ve got to forgive me as the former Health Minister for doing that – but in the same way that doctors diagnose a problem and apply all of their knowledge, their professional learning, new research to what is the best way to deal with the issue that I have in front of me – so do teachers have to understand the individuality of every child and what the research tells us about the best way to teach that child.

Yet, in Australia we allocate about $600 million a year to health research each year and about $20 million a year to educational research.

Now I am the first one to defend spending on medical research. It’s life saving, it’s life changing, it’s not an either/or, but we have to do better when it comes to education research too.

And that is why I was very pleased last week to announce that if elected Labor will establish a National Schools Evidence Institute – a $280 million education evidence initiative.

The body will be independent of government, and will cover early childhood and schooling.

The Evidence Institute will be research done by teachers for teachers.

Of course it will need collaboration with universities and other people who are interested, but what matters is that this is driven by the questions that teachers are asking in the classroom.

It’s driven by the experience of teachers in the classroom. And the research is done in partnership with teachers in the classroom to benefit other teachers in the classroom.

I want principals, teachers and parents to drive that research agenda – not politicians.

There are constantly new discoveries in the way that children learn, the way their brains develop, and what works best in different circumstances.

And I know that it is hard when you’re teaching on class, you’re juggling all the demands of teaching, to be pouring deep into academic journals as well.

That’s why we want to make this new research, new breakthroughs, as long as we are doing more if it, we want to make it more easily accessible and more easily digestible, so you can apply it more easily in the classroom.

The Evidence Institute will provide free toolkits and practice guides, summarising evidence and making it easily applicable to the classroom setting.

I also know that there’s all these different products, interventions and assessment tools are being promoted to schools as some silver bullet.

The Evidence Institute will provide independent program reviews that assess the multitude of these programs being promoted and sold into schools.

Because if we know one thing, it’s that some things work great, some things don’t. But the evidence base for what does and doesn’t, it just is not easily accessible at the moment.

If we think of the future, we need to ensure that kids in our classrooms today have the opportunity of a world-class post-secondary school education system.

It has to be a system in which we prepare the next generation for the jobs of the future, and provide life-long learning opportunities.

We know that jobs are emerging that we can’t picture today, can’t imagine.

How do we prepare our young people for these changes?

Earlier today I announced that a Labor Government will undertake a once in a generation inquiry into Australia’s post-secondary school education system.

So many of you in this room have seen our TAFE system under threat, under attack.

And while thanks to Labor’s reforms we’ve seen significant growth in enrolments in universities, participation rates are still very patchy.

Some groups in our community – Indigenous Australians, non-English speaking background people, people who grow up in remote, regional areas – are much less likely still to go to university than if your grow up in the city.

So we’ve got to get that piece of the puzzle right too.

Our vision for a reinvigorated post-secondary education system will have a strong and vibrant public TAFE at its centre as an equal to, not as a second-class to Australian universities.

We will work closely with unions, with business and educators to look at the scale and scope of this inquiry, and I know that your union will be an excellent participant in it.

And Labor will continue to fight too for early education – so that all children can access prior to school learning that is good quality.

It’s not just about workforce participation for their parents, but about early learning opportunities for the children.

Bill and I want to lead a Labor Government that delivers the world’s best education system – from early childhood right through school, TAFE and university.

We can do it, but we have to do it in two ways. We have to make sure that the funding is adequate and we have to make sure that our reforms are done in cooperation and collaboration with the people who know the system best – the teachers.

I would now like to introduce the Leader of the Labor Party, the son of a school teacher, Bill Shorten.