Minister Gillard Addresses Independent Education Union Conference

Address to the Independent Education Union of Australia Conference, The Hon Julia Gillard MP, 2 April 2009; The Age, 3 April 2009

In an address to a conference of the Independent Education Union of Australia, the Australian Government Minister for Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, Ms Julia Gillard, has confirmed that she remains ‘unapologetic’ for demanding that all schools publish performance information that would enable parents to make informed choices about their children’s education.

Ms Gillard stated that ‘I don’t care whether a child is at a public, Catholic or other non-government school. Each child still needs access to the motivated teachers, the quality curriculum and the modern learning resources to achieve everything they can. By adopting common goals for every school, I want to use education to bring the nation together. That means focusing on what really is possible and using transparency and hard data to inform expert judgement…There can be no double standards.‘

The conference heard that the Rudd Government would continue to develop a modern national curriculum to ensure universal excellence for Australian school students.

Ms Gillard reiterated her promise that performance data would be used to determine how best to target government funding and stated that ‘In all these [funding] partnerships, non-government schools will play an important role.We know that there is student disadvantage in every sector.We know that in each sector there is excellence from which to learn and under-performance which must be tackled.’

 

 

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