The Education Minister spoke at Curtin U the other day – it was a classic of a very Labor kind, a speech about the ALP as the party of education and opportunity and by the time Mr Clare was finished who could argue with that?
The Education Minister was there to deliver the annual lecture honouring John Curtin the prime minister the university is named for, with additional applause for Gough Whitlam. It was standard Labor stuff, which the conservatives rarely have the writers to meet.
If Sussan Ley had been there, even she would have been singing “Solidarity Forever.”
And it set the context for Mr Clare to explain why the education angels vote one for what he is doing across the portfolio, including:
- The new guaranteed three-days of childcare for parents not in work or study (no, he did not call it early childhood education)
- Funding in public schools for “small group tutoring,” Year one phonics and numeracy checks plus pilots of learning and psychological support services in state schools
- Teacher ed degrees to include explicit teaching techniques
- Changes to the national curriculum, starting with the first three years of maths
- Establishing the Australian Teaching and Learning Commission, in part to “to oversee and drive the reforms we are making to initial teacher education in our universities” and reverse the decline in high-school completions, down to 74 per cent in the public system
- Uncapped funding for university bridging courses
- Uncapped university places for disadvantaged students and demand driven funding for study support.
And Mr Clare mentioned ATEC (a successor to John Curtin’s Universities Commission) which he claims will “get the sector to work more like a system.”
But he did not mention funding for teaching and research and there was not a word about the all-but-universally-loathed Job Ready Graduates model.
But not to worry; as Mr Clare put it, this Government like every Labor government since Curtin seeks to “build a better and a fairer education system. And through it, a better and a fairer country.”
And how could anyone complain about cost of an arts degree after that?