Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth Speaks to the AEU. (January 18, 2011)

The Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth, Peter Garrett, addressed delegates at the Australian Education Union conference in Melbourne yesterday.

While matters of severe shortages of adequately trained individuals in STEM subjects and how to overcome them  were scarcely and only indirectly touched upon the national curriculum was mentioned twice:

We are taking action on delivering the best student education and the best teaching environment possible across the nation and on a number of fronts. This includes: a national curriculum to help teachers work anywhere in Australia and allow the sharing of teacher support materials nationally...

And later: The first stage of the National Curriculum will be fully implemented over the next three years and monitored to ensure it is working effectively.

One the other hand the subject of funding came up some dozen times, whether it indicated much more than a federal government committed to drip feeding -- you be the judge:

We already have in train a significant education reform agenda, a very significant agenda; the most significant I would argue, in living memory.
We also have the independent review of funding for schooling chaired by David Gonski underway... this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to produce a transparent, fair, equitable and financially sustainable funding system for all schools.

[the government will provide] more targeted funding across the board including our $2.5 billion investment in National Partnerships for improving teacher quality, supporting low SES schools and improving literacy and numeracy...

For the first time ever anyone will be able to see how much income every school in Australia receives—public, Catholic and independent. And they will be able to see the source of that income, be it federal or state government, parents or from other private sources. This information naturally will be an invaluable source for the public discussion we will all be having about school funding this year, one of the most significant reforms the Gillard Government will bring forward. We promised a review of funding for schooling and it is underway, already generating a lot of interest from the AEU and a range of other stakeholders.

We have begun a constructive and open approach to the address the questions of school funding and a key part of that approach is ensuring everyone in the community has an opportunity to have their say and you would have heard from David Gonski, the chair of the panel, yesterday, they’ve already consulted with some 70 or more stakeholders— including the federal AEU and state and territory branches.

Complementing the review of funding is a set of system-wide reforms that aim to support teachers throughout their careers.
As you know we have the $550 million Teacher Quality National Partnership, targeting critical points in the teacher ‘life cycle’ to attract, train, place, develop and retain quality teachers and school leaders.

It’s essential to the country that we keep populating staff rooms with new talent and maintain the vast pool of talent we already have. As one example, we will be pursuing reward payments for great teachers based on a consistent national approach to performance assessment and working with education authorities around the country to ensure that happens.

 the Government does think it’s important to have new pathways into teaching for graduates, and we’re confident the Teach For Australia model ensures that those graduates have the training and professional support they need to do the job.

As you’d know, Indigenous students have already been benefiting through funding from the low-SES Schools National Partnership and there are some promising early results from that initiative.

We’ve opened up the central question of funding for schools... and we’re putting more data of school funding in the public domain than ever before.