SCHOOLS, BEHAVIOURAL CENTRES

Ms FOX (Bright) (14:34): My question is to the Minister for Education.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! The Leader of the Opposition and the Minister for Water: stop quarrelling across the chamber!

Ms FOX: My question is to the Minister for Education. Will the minister advise the house how the government is supporting schools to address behaviour and attendance issues?

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL (Cheltenham—Minister for Education, Minister for Early Childhood Development, Minister for Science and Information Economy) (14:35): I thank the honourable member for her question. As she knows as a former teacher, our schools teach the values of respect, tolerance and non-violence but, occasionally, behaviour which is not consistent with those values is brought into our schools. We know that managing that aggressive and disrespectful behaviour in schools is a massive strain on our teachers and also it is not fair on the kids in the class who are trying to learn.

So, during the last election campaign the Rann Labor government promised that it would establish six better behaviour centres to help schools manage disruptive or unruly students. I am pleased to advise the house that the first two of those promised centres are up and running—one at Salisbury Downs Primary School and one at Murray Bridge Primary School.

The centre at Salisbury Downs will provide a different model than we currently have in South Australia. The centre, along with three of the other new metropolitan centres, will focus on primary school age children who are showing signs of disengaging or bad behaviour. The idea is to intervene early because we know that the patterns are set very early on and they remain enduring patterns. So, if we intervene early, we are likely to nip this behaviour in the bud.

Rather than excluding the children altogether, the centre will work with children to address their behaviour. The idea is that they will attend the centre for two days a week and on the other three days they will be back in mainstream classes practising the techniques they have learnt to manage their anger, and also relate to their fellow students and respect their teachers using the strategies they have learnt in these centres.

One day a week staff in the centre will work with these students in mainstream classrooms to ensure that the skills they have learnt in the centre are being translated in the classroom. In addition, family counsellors will work in these centres to add an extra dimension to the support that these young people and their families need. The centre and the staff will work closely with parents and caregivers, because we know that the family environment is often at the heart of some of these behavioural issues.

The centre at Murray Bridge, along with another regional centre to be established, will operate on the more traditional model, that is, for high school students. These are students where the behaviour is just utterly unacceptable and inconsistent with the sort of behaviour we would accept in a mainstream school. That is a question of working very intensively with these students.

Sadly, for some of these students who have got to high school and continue to have these entrenched behaviours, we know it is difficult to get them back into a mainstream setting, but we also need to be alert for the fact that some of these young people may have missed out on the foundations that allow them to succeed at high school. We know that for some of these young people it is a fact that high school is a daily humiliation because they have not received that grounding they need to succeed in high school, so the way to avoid being humiliated is to get yourself kicked out of school by acting up. We need to be alert to that and meet the needs of those students as well.

During the election campaign we also promised 12 new truancy officers, to double the number of truancy officers in this state to deal with the causes of truancy and unauthorised absence. Almost all those staff are now employed, and the focus of these new attendance officers will be on early intervention and the early years of schooling. Once again, unashamedly, we are putting our resources in the front end—the early years—to make sure we stop this behaviour escalating. We know that the patterns are set very early and it is crucial that we respond at that early stage. Again, the new staff will work closely with families to identify the reasons for the causes of the absences and get to the bottom of them.

There is an enormous amount of good work that is going on in our schools but they also have to tackle these difficult issues. At the heart of what we are doing is responding to the great charter that we have in public education to meet the needs of every individual child in our public schooling system.