Specialist Education Grants

Ms DIGANCE (Elder) (14:47): My question is to the Minister for Education and Child Development. Minister, could you update the house on how the government is supporting schools to offer specialist programs for students?

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Minister for Education and Child Development, Minister for Higher Education and Skills) (14:48): I am very pleased to talk about this. We have in South Australia an interesting mixed approach to the extent to which schools in the public system are in many ways quite autonomous but are nonetheless part of a very big system. Some 170,000 students go to public schools. It is important that we allow both diversity to flourish but also that we encourage equality of a similar standard to sit across all of our schools.

One of the ways in which we have been recently promoting diversity to enable schools, in consultation with their school communities, to determine what kind of specialist education their students will be offered is to have a program of specialisation grants, that is, about $3 million over four years for some 60 schools to be able to offer specialist education in particular subjects, some of which will be new to that school and some of which the school is already doing but they would like to have the grants to further deepen and enhance the program being offered.

We have recently been able to confirm the latest round, which is some 15 schools, and they are schools that are both primary and high schools, and metro and country, of course. The grant is a one-off grant of $50,000 to enable the school to invest in that specialisation. The specialisation can be remarkably diverse, including STEM, business, languages—and languages include Auslan—sports or professional development for teachers.

I will just give the house three examples of schools within this latest round. One is Port Augusta Secondary School, which is planning to nurture the entrepreneurs of the future through its existing business and enterprise program. The grant will help it to develop the program further to support students' development of business skills. Another example is Edwardstown Primary School, which is establishing a new specialty program in digital technologies across subject areas, including science and maths. I am extremely pleased to see a primary school investing in digital technologies and investing in science and maths. I think it's a very good example of the strength of our primary schools that their minds turn to that as their desired specialisation.

A third example I will give you is Norwood Morialta High School. They already have an Italian immersion program, which they have been doing in cooperation with the Italian government, in fact. They have been successful in this grant in order to prolong and deepen that program, and they are also going to be building in a modern Greek language immersion program. The idea is that we encourage all schools to have the entire Australian curriculum, all schools to teach well and all schools to have similar quality, but to permit and encourage the communities of those schools to identify areas in which they would like to see their students have the opportunity to specialise.