Call for major intervention on schooling

Josh Willie says Tasmania cannot keep drifting along thinking everything is OK

A WHILE back I visited some constituents at the Glenorchy Showgrounds. They had nowhere to go. They struggled through the day living in tents.

I often think about the children living with their families in these conditions. The pressure on their parents was beyond imagining as they tried to make their lives seem normal in far-from-normal circumstances. Each morning the children set off for school. Each afternoon they returned and did their homework in the Ferret Pavilion.

I was fortunate to have a career as a teacher before I became an MP. I think about children such as these, and there are many, turning up to class carrying such a burden.

Everyone agrees we need to do better to deliver education outcomes that children need. Everyone agrees they should be given the opportunity to lead better and fairer lives.

We should not just accept poor literacy levels, poor educational attainment and allow kids to leave school when they are not ready for the workplace. We should not accept there are children who will slip through the system because it’s too hard to address.

We should aspire to more than just pork barrelling school infrastructure and accepting lists of election promises without any clearly defined ambition.

But to get to this point we need to agree on some basics.

Pre-conditions for learning are the foundation of successful engagement in school. There are pages and pages of research to tell us this.

Imagine being one of the children at the showgrounds. How would you focus on learning when your life is filled with such uncertainty?

Governments seem unable or unwilling to address the inequalities that children walk through the school gates with every day.

Let’s start with housing. Living conditions impact seriously on children and play a big role in a family’s wellbeing.

Safe, secure housing gives a better chance for participation in social, economic and community aspects of life.

Last year, the Gutwein government raised the social housing stock by a mere five houses. We have 3600 families languishing on a social housing waiting list and priority families alone wait an average of 64 weeks.

Other needs like hunger, health and public transport need to be addressed too.

When children are supported they can learn.

Literacy underpins all education. You cannot learn if you cannot read. Yet 48 per cent of Tasmanians are functionally illiterate. That means the reading and writing skills of half of all Tasmanians are not developed enough to read and understand the documents people engage with on a daily basis.

Conservative estimates say each year in Tasmania about 500 children start high school unable to read and another 1000 have extremely poor reading skills. In all cases the literacy skills of students had been identified but not addressed before completion of primary school. Tasmanian students have the lowest reading and math literacy in the country and second lowest science literacy.

Tasmania’s Year 12 attainment rate is well below the national average of 79 per cent at 59 per cent.

Just 48 per cent of school leavers here engage in further education, training or get a job, well below the national average of 68 per cent and a shocking deterioration on the figure of 79 per cent in 2014.

Thousands of children are being deprived of a good education. What if we treated the issue of poor literacy as an emergency and intervened with evidence-based highquality instruction?

What if parents like Dr Lisa Denny didn’t have to move interstate to get their children the education they deserve?

What if each child started the day without feeling shame and the stress of living in homelessness?

The costs of intervention on this scale are considerable but not unrealistic. The cost of not acting is a cost the children at the showgrounds already know too well.