Opposition Leader announced the Liberals’ schools package at Denman Prospect, which included $98m to implement the literacy and numeracy inquiry recommendations. Photo: Ian Bushnell.
Education Minister Yvette Berry may rue the time it took for her to respond to growing concerns about ACT public school standards.
The Canberra Liberals are running hard on education, feeling vindicated by the findings and recommendations of the Expert Panel who investigated literacy and numeracy teaching.
The government accepted the panel’s verdict, budgeting $24.9 million for implementing the recommendations over a four-year period.
But Opposition Leader Elizabeth has well and truly upped the ante by committing to spending $98m, adding $200 supplies vouchers for teachers into the bargain, no doubt to highlight the plight of classrooms as schools scramble for resources.
Ms Lee also zeroed in on concerns about behaviour in government schools offering teachers access to the Classroom Master program Catholic schools are piloting, if they want it.
For good measure, she has also criticised Ms Berry for not getting on with it sooner, saying there was no need to wait to introduce Year 1 phonics checks for reading.
It all serves to contrast the government’s initial reluctance and then relatively pedestrian approach with the Liberals sense of urgency and the weight by sheer number of dollars it will give to an issue that most Canberrans have experience of.
Just about everybody has an opinion on schools and parents can be galvanised when it comes to the future of their children, which is why education could be a such a potent weapon for Liberals.
They can argue with some justification that the party has fought the good fight, often in the face of a defensive Minister who appeared to be in constant denial about slipping standards, behaviourial as well as academic, in government schools.
Ms Berry has said that she has simply followed the evidence but the evidence has changed.
That will be hard argument to sustain, given the number of reports and amount of data pointing to something systemically wrong, and the growing evidence that explicit instruction, to use the term broadly, should have a greater role, especially in the early years.
To be clear, the government has committed to changes in the teaching mix, a more centralised curriculim to ease burdens on teachers, and an overhaul of school autonomy to provide more consistency across government schools.
But the Liberals are sowing seeds of doubt about the seriousness of the commitment. This is a government, they say, that presided over the decline in standards. How can it be trusted to fix it?
If you want it done properly then elect a party that was waving the red flags all along and will put money where its mouth is?
This isn’t a single-issue election but, again, education is one that can cross party lines and have so many touch points with the community. And for some the government’s realisation will come too late for their children.
It could well be that the government’s record on education could come back to haunt it at the ballot box in October.
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