FRAN KELLY: Let's move on to a couple of other issues quickly. It's 11 minutes to 8 on Radio National Breakfast.Sadly reminiscent of the fumbles with the Australia Card Lite under the Howard Government ... an interesting and potentially valuable mechanism vitiated by weak recognition of community concerns (or the ability of opponents to beat up concerns) and problematical assurances such as "of course there would be proper privacy protections".
Julia Gillard, in your education portfolio too in terms of schools, a report today in the Sydney Morning Herald says that you have a plan to assign every school child an identity number so that parents and teachers will be able to track their progress throughout their school life. Now the SMH says that you say concerned parties will have access to that number. Who would they be, concerned parties, and what limits would there be?
JULIA GILLARD: Fran, of course there would be proper privacy protections and as a public policy question, I’m not interested in individual child’s results. But what I am interested in is if we look now at this year of national testing, this will be the first year that we are re-testing students how have participated in earlier national tests so to make that more simple, we test grades 3, 5, 7 and 9. We first tested in 2008 so this is the first year that say a child in grade 3 is retested again.
Now that gives us the ability to measure what’s happened in that child’s learning between grade 3 and grade 5 – how well has the school done in extending that child over two years of learning.
Now, Fran, kids move school, they move school between the state system and Catholic system, they move interstate, they move suburbs, they might live in the same suburb but still change schools, so if we have a way of tracking then we can obviously have better measures of how schools are going in developing student performance.
And then for individual parents and teachers, it obviously would be of assistance to be able to track the records of a child’s schooling if they need to move school several times during schooling and many children do, children of defence force families for example routinely move at least once every two years and sometimes more frequently, so being able to seamlessly track how that child has gone throughout education when they get to a new school is vitally important.
Do we need to tag every child in order to assess the effectiveness of teaching at the school level? Just because we can tag does not mean that tagging is the best or only mechanism.
