Northern Territory Second Reading Speeches

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REGISTRATION OF TEACHERS BILL

Mr Speaker, I move that the bill be now read a second time. This bill seeks to establish a teacher registration board for the Northern Territory. It sets out the membership of the board, the rules on which it will function, and the functions that it will take on, on behalf of the Northern Territory Education Department. It is a detailed bill that has been developed out of similar legislation in other states in Australia. Although, I must say that it has been modified fairly heavily to reflect the particular elements of our education system in the Northern Territory.
The necessity to have the bill comes out of certain areas of the current operation of the Northern Territory Education Department and education system where in the view of not only myself but many of the stakeholders that we’ve consulted with on this proposal, that there are insufficient means of dealing with crucial issues to deal with the professional practice of teachers.

If I go through the functions of the proposed teacher registration board, one of the major reasons we believe it should exist is to establish, maintain, and operate a system of registration of teachers. Now, that’s certainly done at one level by the Education Department itself and by some areas of the independent school system in the Territory, but there’s no overarching system of registration here. I can certainly point to three occasions in the recent history of the Territory where unqualified teachers have managed to fraudulently make their way in front of classes. That’s clearly not what we would want to see in our schools, and even with the small number of cases, we want to see the system more systematically and tighter than it is at the moment.

On top of that are the recent moves within education nationally to have criminal checks made on would-be teachers coming into the system and also to look at other aspects of their past history and their competence as teachers. So they’re all areas that potentially could go into this new registration process which would be held at arm’s length from the Education Department itself and would apply equally to the private schools as to the government schools within the Territory. So it’s a one-stop shop, if you want to prove that you’re a fit person with fit qualifications to appear in front of a class in this part of Australia.

Another important function of such a board would be to facilitate systematically professional development of teachers, which is driven by professional priorities, as distinct from other ways in which professional development might be defined. The profession here, as in all places, want to see professional development systematised so that the most useful things to a teacher is developing their career in the profession, are readily available through the professional development programs in the Territory.

The history of professional development seated within the Northern Territory Department of Education itself has been very up and down. At times it’s been very ad hoc. There’s never, from one year to another, an absolute guarantee that there’ll be a consistent effort in consistent areas. It would be better to lift it out and apply much more focus to it, from a body that’s set up specifically to do that.

A very important area of function that the teacher registration board would take on would be to investigate allegations of serious misconduct. I’ve brought to this House on previous occasions debates on the means of dealing with paedophiles and other misconduct in our schools. We had a promise of some protocols for dealing with allegations of paedophilia here on the previous debates. I’m still far from convinced that the Education Department itself, with or without protocols is the appropriate body to take up an investigation of paedophilia.

These matters need to be dealt with very quickly and the need to be dealt at arms’ length from the department. The department itself is one of the entities that could bear liabilities should a paedophile be proven in a school. The duty of care means that the department has to share with the teacher who has committed these sorts of crimes some responsibility to the parents that in many jurisdictions that can lead to civil actions and to have the department investigating the matter in which it bears potential liability is simply a miscarriage of the rights of both the teacher and the parents and communities that might be involved in these episodes. So to have the Teacher Registration Board equipped so that it can recruit and send a flying squad of investigators into a situation where these allegations have been made and clear that up with the balance of the rights of the children foremost, the teacher who is accused equal to the accused whether they be parents teachers or community members. I believe that would be the best and most effective way of us dealing with these incidents into the future. No system of registration or screening can totally guard against the entry of these sort of people into our schools. We need to have effective clear mechanisms for dealing with them. Mechanisms that do not contain vested interests in the form of a departmental section or member or individual who may well ultimately bear some liability, should these crimes be proven.

A further aspect of the Teacher Registration Board would be to facilitate positive community attitudes to the profession. In the Territory we have many awards, we have awards for students and we have awards for teachers. But, the profession itself is probably one of the most under siege of any of the professions out there at the moment. There is constant negative images about the profession in the media and it has become somewhat fashionable to treat schools and teachers as being the thing you do when you have not got a very exciting life. I think that translates into a whole raft of different community developments to do with the misbehaviour of students in the school, lack of respect for teachers, lack of understanding of what the profession is trying to do for our community. So, to have a board that can specifically take on the task of advocating the status and the importance of the profession and the community would be a valuable addition to our education system here in the Territory.

The other aspect to that is there are areas of research which would be specific to the training, recruitment and retention of teachers. Now, there is a lot of academic work done, both within the current Education Department and outside it in higher education institutions that do a lot of research on the methods of teaching in a classroom, the curriculum elements of our education system, particularly in the schools. But there is not a great deal of home grown research to do with how best to recruit, retain and train on teachers in the Northern Territory system as distinct from other places. We have a very unique set of circumstances in education here in the Territory and we need a lot of unique approaches to fully respond to those.

We also, as another adjunct to the profession, ethical issues and professional performance and conduct in the context of the Territory. There may be quite a different style of teaching that would be considered ethical if you happen to be in a remote Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory to one that might be in the inner suburbs of Sydney or Melbourne. You are dealing with quite a different lifestyle, it might have different ways of behaving. I believe to have that systematically defined by a board which is looking after professional issues in the Territory would go a long way to broadening our ideas about the context of education here and the context in which teachers work.

A further task for the board would be to promulgate policy in relation to the cancellation of registrations - what are the rights of a teacher who’s threatened with the removal of their registration, what sort of policies are going to apply to that, not only to government-employed teachers, but to teachers in general within this part of Australia.

A final area of the board’s activities would be to liaise with the teacher training institutions such as Batchelor and Northern Territory University in the Territory, and their parallel institutions elsewhere in Australia with a view to matching the content and output of these teacher training courses to the best needs of the Territory and also to develop recruitment arrangements with particular institutions both here and interstate to ensure that we get a better flow of recruitment into the Territory over time.

I think we can see from that run down of the core functions of the teacher registration board that there’s a considerable scope for this new body to take up its work. I would see, obviously, a rebalancing of these types of functions within existing Northern Territory Department of Education where rather than having to resource this from the ground up, from scratch, additional to the expenditure in the Education Department that there would probably be a transfer of some of the capacity within NTDE into the board to allow them to carry out these new functions.

It’s simply working from a different framework, arms’ length from the department itself so that you can address some of these issues in a more holistic way and without vested interests that can restrict the department’s ability to do it in-house.

I’d like to talk about the consultation process that we’ve been through to arrive at what is a reasonably advanced draft of this bill. Because it won’t be debated until June, I’m expecting that we can go out and continue that process. I’m happy to report that this bill actually came about because of approaches from various stakeholders within the education community here in the Territory, namely the Australian Education Union, COGSO and the Independent Education Union. All of those bodies strongly support the concept and content of this bill as it stands, although I’m sure it will be further refined as we go along.

Other institutions such as Batchelor have reservations about creating too many layers of administration around education. I’ll certainly look forward to talking to Veronica more about issues she’s raised. I believe that this bill does have broad support in the education community, and for that reason, I’d hope that the new minister might look at this exercise in a constructive way, in that I’m more than happy to see the process thus far move on into a more collaborative process, where if forums of the stakeholders that would be involved in this could be brought together, we can all talk about it together and see what merit the overall bill offers.

The membership of the proposed board will probably give some idea of the breadth of the both support and consultation. We’re seeing 2 persons appointed from the Department of Education itself, 3 from the Australian Education Union, working teachers from our schools, 3 indigenous persons appointed on nomination from the Indigenous Education Advisory Council NT, one person from the Northern Territory Principals Association, one person from the Association of Independent Schools, which we would assume would be a teacher or a principal working in one of our private schools, one person appointed from the Independent Education Union, one person from the Catholic Education Office, one person from the Northern Territory University, one person from the Batchelor Institute for Indigenous Tertiary Education, one person from the Council of Government School Organisations. In addition to those 14 standing members, those 14 would then elect the chair and the deputy chair, so it has inhouse and independent chair, and the board would also have the power to co-opt a person from the relevant agency of children’s services and also co-opt a legal practitioner to help it with its affairs. I think that gives a picture of what we’ve got in mind. I hope we can grow this idea and bring it into fruition. I commend this bill to the House.

Debate adjourned.


 

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