Davis Kelvin: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Davis Kelvin: Education Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 09 December 2010. Volume:669;Page:16324. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KELVIN DAVIS (Labour) 
: 
 In my opinion the Education Amendment Bill (No 2) represents why we have the tail of underachievement that the Minister in the chair the Hon Anne Tolley often talks about. She talks often about the one in five children who fail at school. If we look at the five general areas in the bill four of those areas would fail to raise achievement in any way in my opinion. It is my ongoing concern that we have Education Amendment bills that actually do not focus on the core purpose of the education system—that is to make sure that children learn. 
One of the areas in this bill deals with secondary-tertiary programmes and I believe that has real merit. I commend the Minister for taking a gamble on this. There is no evidence that this will make a difference to raising student achievement but I think it is something that should be explored. It should have researchers following it along so that in time we can see whether the secondary-tertiary programmes do make a difference. Then if they do not we need to have the courage to do away with them. There is a very simple way that we can check whether they are making a difference. If members refer back to education research such as that by Professor John Hattie they will see that he talks about the effect size of educational initiatives. If a programme has an effect-size of greater than 0.4 then it is making a difference to student learning. 
Just about every initiative or strategy that teachers use in class could be said to work to some effect or another. But it is the strategies and innovations that work the most that we really need to encourage. As I say if over time research goes to show that secondary-tertiary programmes do not have an effect size of over 0.4 then we need to have the courage to try something else. 
I think this part of the bill is a good start. I believe we could go further in terms of the secondary-tertiary programmes. They change the context of a student’s learning. Instead of being stuck in the form rooms of a traditional school setting where students are bound by the school rules—they have to wear their uniform pull their socks up tuck their shirts in and those sort of things—they have the opportunity to move into an educational setting where they are treated more like adults. It is interesting to note that a teacher I used to work with often commented to me that while a child is at a school in the compulsory learning sector they should be called a pupil and it is only when they go into a tertiary setting that they should be called a student. What we have with secondary-tertiary programmes are pupils moving from the old traditional school setting into a more adult setting. I think that is a really good change of context and in itself that could be a motivating factor. 
However secondary-tertiary situations will not make a difference if the lecturers in front of the students are not expert practitioners. That is the crux of what we always have to consider whenever we talk about education legislation that the people in front of the students are highly skilled practitioners. We need to keep focusing on what will make students learn and what will make 100 percent of our school students achieve beyond their potential. Of course it comes down to the expertise in front of the students and whether the strategies teachers are using have an effect size above 0.4. As I have said an initiative with an effect size between 0.4 and zero will be in the bottom half of the strategies that make kids learn. Some strategies would have an effect size of 0.01 which means there is a tiny improvement in students’ achievement .