The education minister pointed to the earmarked $16 billion offered to the public school system.
As the NAPLAN results revealed cracks in education levels, the presiding minister said the government would look to introduce “practical” reforms to improve results with its promised $16 billion for public schools.
“I want to table it here. Our proposal includes practical reforms like phonics checks and numeracy checks in year one to identify kids early who are falling behind,” Minister Jason Clare told Parliament.
He emphasised that the budget would not be a “blank cheque” and was tied to “practical reforms.”
The NAPLAN data released on the morning of Aug. 14 revealed that one in three Australian school students were performing below literacy and numeracy benchmarks.
It sparked an hour-long Question Time session with the opposition demanding the education minister explain the situation.
Clare said the problem could not be dealt with at the school gate.
“It starts before that. This isn’t just about children who fall behind at primary school. It’s about kids who start behind when they begin school in kindergarten or prep,” he said.
Linking this to the recent wage increase for early educators, Clare said that a strong workforce was necessary to build a genuinely universal early education and care system.
“And that’s what the 15 percent pay rise that we announced for early educators is all about, opposed by the Liberal Party,” he said.
The report also highlighted a stark difference between metropolitan and non-metropolitan students.
For literacy, 24 percent of students from very remote schools were categorised as “strong” or “exceeding” compared to 70.7 percent of students from major cities. Numeracy statistics were almost identical.
Students whose parents held a bachelor’s degree or higher, tended to score better than classmates whose parents’ had education levels at Year 11 or lower.
Clare told the House of Representatives that while the Australian education system is sound, it could be “a lot better and a lot fairer.”
He further emphasised that only 20 percent of children who fall behind only catch up when they are in Year Nine in the middle of high school.
“As a result, over the last seven years, we’ve seen a drop in the number of children finishing high school from 85 percent down to 79 percent. That’s what we’ve got to fix.”
Meanwhile, the minister also acknowledged that Indigenous students were falling behind in all five testing domains: numeracy, reading, writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation.
One-third of Indigenous students were categorised by NAPLAN as “needing additional support”—three times the national average.