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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2022-11-01 Daily Xml
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Education Workforce

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER (Morialta—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (15:28): I would like to take the opportunity, on the day after the release of the NAPLAN results and several days after we have celebrated World Teachers' Day here in South Australia, to commend and to thank our South Australian education workforce, numbering over 40,000 people across all sectors. They dedicate their lives to serving our children and young people, to giving them the foundation and skills they need to prosper through their schooling and to succeed and thrive in life.

Teaching is a calling. It is a profession that many people admire. It is a profession filled with people who are good, who work hard, who despite 2½ years of pandemic have kept children and young people's needs at the focus and at the centre of what they do, and it has not necessarily been an easy time for many. Indeed, as I know the minister would observe if he was speaking at this moment, when many people were able to work from home, we asked of our teachers that they continue to go to school and give our children their support. That was what the health advice said, that was what the scientific advice said, but it was certainly a time of great anxiety throughout 2020 and 2021.

In 2022, when the rest of the community has enjoyed the benefits of removed restrictions, reduced restrictions and more freedoms, the consequential effect in our schools has been inversely disruptive. I would suggest that in the experience of many students and many teachers in South Australia 2022 has been easily the most disruptive and difficult year of the pandemic.

Despite three years of those complex challenges facing our teaching workforce, they have maintained a focus on supporting our children to be everything they can be and they have maintained a focus on standards, giving our children and young people the skills that they need. World Teachers' Day was a wonderful celebration. I commend Educators SA and, indeed, everyone involved from all the professional associations in education for the celebrations on Friday, and thank all our schools and preschools who marked it as well.

Yesterday, the NAPLAN results came out, and there have been a range of different public commentary on those results. I have taken the time to study those results in depth and I offer some reflections, which I am sure our teaching workforce would be interested in. Can I say to the house and to the people of South Australia that there are some things to be celebrated. It is a mixed bag, but there are some things to be very strongly celebrated.

Our year 3 and year 5 students in South Australia had the best ever scores in the history of NAPLAN in South Australia in their reading and their writing, and our year 3 students had the best ever scores in the history of NAPLAN in South Australia for their spelling. We have been doing this test since 2008, and the people setting the test at ACARA endeavour to have the same standard throughout so that one year is comparable more or less with the year before. Therefore, the mean score for South Australian students in each of those environments went up in the last year to the point where it is better than it has ever been.

That is intentional work that has been done by teachers in our education department and work that was inspired by reforms of the Marshall Liberal government with help from a trial that was offered when the Deputy Premier was the education minister, in 2017 to be sure. It was a commitment from the Liberal Party at the time, implemented in government, to have a year 1 phonics check for all our year 1 students to check that they were not slipping through the gap.

More than a check, it was an entire body of work and professional development and training and introduction of a new unit in the Department for Education's learning improvement division, now curriculum and learning division, called the Literacy Guarantee unit—a unit that has been described by advocates, such as Sandra Marshall from Dyslexia SA and many others, as the envy of other states around Australia.

The introduction of decodable readers and the abolition of the running records program, which was based on the outdated whole language approach to teaching reading, were undertaken during the four years of reforms. Many people were concerned about them and many people were against them. In ensuring that we were able to undertake those reforms, reforms which I congratulate the new government on their commitment to continuing, we have put our youngest children in schools in the best position to get effective reading instruction, and it is showing in those NAPLAN tests.

That foundation provides confidence, now that reading reforms are embedded in our education department, that those students will be able to access the range of the curriculum through their primary years. Our results in NAPLAN should continue improving—they must—and that is the basis on which the government will be judged. Indeed, as we work now to enhance numeracy skills and other skills, those reforms will, too, have a chance to succeed because we have the basics right in the early years.

I congratulate all those teachers who have worked so hard to change their practice over the last four years and, even more, those who have always been doing world's best practice. It is a good set of results from that point of view.

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