SUE NAPIER, Shadow Minister for Education, MR Saturday 22 August, 2009
Premier Bartlett will need to start listening to parents and teacher as well as match the resources of the ACT if Tasmania is to have the best education results in the country by 2016 as promised today.

That includes recognising the much higher resources they put into school psychologists, social workers and speech pathology.

He will also need to put more time into being the Minister for Education to get it right. Currently he spends most of his time cleaning up other portfolios. The Premier didn’t even get to the Catholic Parents and Friends conference last week and didn’t stay to listen to the concerns of those at the State School Parents and Friends today.

We need a fulltime Minister for Education who doesn’t rely on the “big bang” theory of education reform as one of his own education bureaucrats referred to it today.

One of the key failings of this 11 year old Government is that literacy and numeracy standards and basic attendance standards in high schools have never been so low.

He not only needs to help close the gap for underachievers and those with special needs he must also do more to help our children excel and that includes the talented and gifted.

Instead, Labor has experimented on Tasmania’s students with the bungled Essential Learnings shake up, which had to be scrapped and the disastrous Tasmania Tomorrow changes, referred to today as the ‘big bang’ approach, which will set Tasmania back and take decades to untangle.

Again today the feeling was that we need to put the Tasmania Tomorrow reforms on hold, make sure no more colleges to go over until we know the outcomes and make sure that we are getting it right.

Unlike Labor, the Tasmanian Liberals’ vision is more than just spin and empty announcements. A Hodgman Liberal Government would invest more in teachers, support students and remove the barriers to education that currently exist. Investing in our High Schools will be a vital component of that which labor has been blind to This is the way to deliver the education system that will deliver results for Tasmanians.