16 November 2010

Peter Garrett AM
Federal Member for Kingsford Smith
Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth

**CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY** 

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge and very warmly welcome

• US Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, who will shortly be joining us via a live feed from Chicago.
• Ms Lisa Paul, Secretary of the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations
• Dr Michele Bruniges, Deputy Secretary, Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations and Roundtable Chair
• Mr Tony Miller, Deputy Secretary of Education, US Department of Education
• United States and Australian participants
  

It is my great pleasure to open the inaugural Australia–United States Education Roundtable.

I would like to join my fellow Australians in warmly welcoming the very distinguished United States roundtable participants to our nation’s capital.

This landmark event opens a very important chapter in our bilateral relationship, bringing together pre-eminent education policy makers and advisers from our two countries, and providing a theatre for the exchange of ideas and expertise.

It is an initiative spearheaded jointly by Australia’s previous education minister, now our Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, and US Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan some 13 months ago, and it’s great to see it has now come to fruition.

I know that everyone here clearly and fully recognises the transforming power of education not only for individuals, but also for our nations. Everyone here today is an education visionary; it is on your watch that the education future of your country will be shaped.

Both of our countries recognise that the future belongs to those nations that best educate their people. We acknowledge that there is room for significant improvement in the way we deliver education and the results students attain. We know that in education we can no longer afford ‘more of the same’.

So we have pledged to deliver unprecedented reform to close the achievement and opportunity gaps and ensure our global competitiveness continues.

When you look at how our countries are tackling this challenge, you can see there is a remarkable alignment in the reform goals we are pursuing.

Through the Australian Government’s Education Revolution, we are striving to make every school a great school, to ensure equity in delivery and excellence in education for every child — from pre-school to post-school destinations.

In the United States you are ‘incentivising’ reform through a range of  initiatives and it’s positive to see the level of community involvement.

As Secretary Duncan has said on many occasions, it’s being propelled by leaders in statehouses, state superintendents, local lawmakers, district leaders, union heads, school boards, parents, principals, and teachers.

A truly inspirational, concerted effort to turn around underperforming schools and ensure excellence and opportunity for all from cradle to career!

Australia and the US have a shared goal to promote systemic excellence and opportunity in education.

Both our countries are carrying out national reform in education to:

• lift attainment and participation, and improve equity by narrowing the achievement gap for disadvantaged students
• develop new curriculum and professional standards
• create transparency and consistency in the assessment of student progress and school performance
• attract and reward high-performing teachers and school leaders
• reward outstanding performance and improvement by teachers and schools
• spread the systematic use of evidence and innovation to achieve best practice and turn around underperforming schools and colleges, and
• utilise educational infrastructure and technology to improve student achievement.
  

The Agreement for Cooperation signed by Prime Minister Gillard and Secretary Duncan gives us the ideal launching pad, through this roundtable, to work together on this shared agenda.

Let me take just a few minutes to give you a picture of the Australian approach as a backdrop to your discussions.

When the Australian Government came to office in 2007, it embarked on an education reform agenda unparalleled in scope and backed by unprecedented funding.

This agenda is pivotal to driving our economic prosperity and boosting productivity and participation.

It is also crucial to equipping current and future generations with the academic and life skills they need to survive and thrive in an increasingly competitive world, and critical to enabling students to make the fullest contribution to their community and to their nation.

With an emphasis on collaboration between the Commonwealth, our six states and two territories, our new funding framework supports a common set of school performance and transparency requirements relating to national curriculum, assessment and reporting.

Complementing these initiatives, an innovative series of Commonwealth, state and territory National Partnerships will deliver targeted local programs to improve student performance, support teachers and provide new resources to overcome education disadvantage.

A great deal has been achieved in our first term of government.

We have laid the ground for a new national curriculum, which will be rolled out from 2011. This has been on our country’s education wish list for more than 40 years and it is very exciting to be witness to this historical accomplishment.

We look to our national curriculum to set the content and the achievement standards from which we will measure success and to deliver a quality education to all Australian school children—wherever they live, whatever school they attend and regardless of their social or economic background, while at the same time setting high expectations for all.

We have made great strides in student assessment and reporting through NAPLAN — the National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy.

NAPLAN gives us a national picture of student performance in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 in numeracy, reading, writing and the language conventions of spelling, grammar and punctuation.

We have taken this information and made it publicly available through the My School website, covering almost 10 000 schools across Australia.    

My School is a very important aspect of our accountability and transparency agenda. It has nothing to do with ‘naming and shaming’ schools, but everything to do with lifting education standards—identifying best practice, translating that best practice into other schools, and providing more support to schools that need help.

Through the Smarter Schools National Partnerships we have galvanised the collective resources of the Australian Government and state and territory governments to put in place the infrastructure and practices that will deliver sustained improvement in literacy and numeracy results for all students, especially those who are falling behind.

We have started system-wide reforms targeting critical points of the teacher ‘life cycle’ to attract, train, place, develop and retain quality teachers and school leaders.

We are supporting a range of school-level and broader reforms that are tailor-made to address education disadvantage associated with low socioeconomic status, with a particular emphasis on closing the gap on education achievement for Indigenous Australians.
 
A very important aspect of 21st Century teaching and learning is optimising information and communication technology in the classroom. Accordingly, we are rolling out the Digital Education Revolution to ensure our schools have computers and ICT infrastructure to support and enhance student learning and equip them with the skills needed in the workplaces of today and tomorrow.

As the Government moves into its second term, I am very excited to be continuing the reform’s momentum, building on the program of work under way and introducing complementary initiatives to drive change.

In particular, I am committed to ensuring incentives and support are offered to enable further improvement in student achievements by:

• rewarding school improvement and great teachers
• giving principals and parents more power in running their schools
• helping highly skilled professionals from other fields enter teaching, and
• creating online tools for parents, students and teachers to assess student needs.
  

Our new initiatives are ambitious in scope and timing — the challenge is to transform the way almost 10 000 schools and more than 280 000 teachers operate to improve education for nearly three and a half million students.

I know our challenges differ in scale and structure. But I know also that we share much common ground. I’m sure you agree that we can learn a great deal from each other.

The agenda for the roundtable provides an invaluable opportunity to do this, focusing on many of the key challenges in education today—using the evidence base to support teaching and learning, assessing student and teacher performance and lifting teacher quality.

I am confident this roundtable will enable us to share intelligence and brainstorm ideas to further inform and drive our policy approaches.

Though this forum, we have a great opportunity to develop and deepen our bilateral relationship for the benefit of our citizens and our countries.

I wish you a very productive few days and I very much look forward to hearing the result of your discussions.

Thank you for your vision. Thank you for your willingness to exchange ideas and experiences. And thank you for your leadership in helping to advance improvements in our education systems so that every child, and our two great countries, will benefit.