Speech - NSW Secondary Deputy Principals' Association - 2024 State Conference
Thank you very much, Ryan and Caroline.
Let me begin by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the land on which we meet and pay my respects to their elders past and present.
I would also like to acknowledge:
• Trent Colley – President of the NSW Secondary Deputy Principals’ Association
• Natalie Martin – Vice President of the NSW Secondary Deputy Principal’s Association
• The organising committee - which this year represent schools from Sydney’s South West, where I grew up
I know not everyone loves high school, but I did.
I also know not everyone remembers who their Deputy Principal was, but I do.
All three of them.
Mr Graham, Mr Kelly and Ms Cuthbert.
A lot of the teachers who taught me also went on to become Deputy Principals. And Principals.
I rang one of them the other day.
His name is Peter. Peter Valenti.
Peter was my history teacher. But he was more than that.
The truth is he is a big part of why I am here right now.
I come from a family where no one had ever finished school. No one had even finished Year 10.
Peter told me I could. And more.
He didn’t just teach me history. He taught me to believe in myself.
When things get tough, I think about him.
We are still friends. We still catch up.
He ended up becoming the Deputy Principal at St Johns Park High School and a Principal at Strathfield South High.
So I asked him for some advice about what to talk about today.
He told that I would be talking to “the glue”. To the people who really make the school run.
The people who connect the dots. The Principal. The Executive. The staff. The students. Parents and the community.
The people who bring it all together.
He also told me I would be talking to a bunch of people with the investigative skills of Sherlock Holmes, and the compassion of Mother Theresa.
People who have the ability to resolve impossible disputes and absorb unwarranted criticism.
He also told me I would be talking to leaders. The people who get teachers to work together, as a team, with a purpose.
And he told me I would be talking to the future.
And so I thought I would talk to you today about that.
The future.
Where we are going and how we are going to get there.
When I was at Canley Vale in the 1980s something incredible was happening.
Not just there.
Right across the country.
It wasn’t just me who was told I could finish school. It was kids like me everywhere.
And in those years, in the 1980s and the 1990s, the percentage of students who finished high school, right across the country, almost doubled.
From 40 percent to almost 80 percent. A lot of those kids are us.
And it changed us. Not just as individuals. But as a country.
We are a different country because of it. The economy is different. Jobs are different.
What we used to call micro-economic reform.
And it was education that did that.
That change is still happening.
By the middle of this century, it won’t just be 80 percent of students finishing school.
80 percent of the workforce will have finished school and gone on to TAFE or uni.
That’s in our lifetime.
That’s up from 60 percent today.
The reason is pretty simple. Not because governments are going to force it, or make it happen.
It’s because the jobs most people do are changing. Fast.
And most of the fastest growing jobs require a TAFE qualification or a uni degree.
50 percent require a uni degree.
40 percent require a TAFE qualification.
Now here’s the scary bit.
At the same time as all of this is happening the number of students finishing high school is dropping.
Not everywhere.
In private schools it’s stable.
In public schools it’s going down.
Seven years ago, 83 percent of students in public high schools finished year 12.
Now it’s about 73 percent.
This is what keeps me up at night.
If the future is what I just described, we have got to turn this around.
If we don’t, the economy won’t stop changing.
It will just mean more people are left behind.
More people from poorer families will stay poor.
The gap between rich and poor will get deeper and wider.
It also means we will be poorer as a nation, because we won’t have the skills or the workforce we need.
Fixing the funding of our public schools is a chance to do something about this.
As you know, most private schools are already funded at or above the Schooling Resource Standard that David Gonski set.
Most public schools aren’t.
They are in the ACT.
Because of the deal I signed a few weeks ago, they will be in the Northern Territory.
That deal means the most underfunded public schools in the country will now become the best funded public schools in the country.
And this week I signed an agreement to do the same in WA.
It includes the Australian Government chipping in and the state government chipping in.
I want to do the same sort of deal across the rest of the country.
And I’ve got $16 billion dollars to do it.
It is not a panacea. It won’t fix everything.
It’s also not a blank cheque. This funding is going to be tied to the sort of things to help turn around the current decline in students finishing high school.
And it won’t happen unless State Governments chip in money too.
There is a lot at stake in the next few months.
Next month I will introduce legislation into the Australian Parliament that will get rid of the cap that stops the Federal Government from providing more funding for public schools.
A cap put in place by the previous Government.
It will get rid of the current cap or ceiling of 20 percent. And make that a floor to build upon.
We can do a deal this year that can lock in extra funding for our public schools and protect it from a future Liberal Government ripping it out.
If we don’t, and there is a change of government next year, the States that don’t sign up will have to fill the gap on their own.
Peter Dutton’s team have made this clear.
They have said, very bluntly and very clearly, they think the federal government shouldn’t put a single extra dollar into public schools.
So there is a lot at stake.
The decisions that governments make, that the Parliament makes, that the Australian people make, in the next few months, will decide what our education system looks like not just in the next few years but in the next few decades.
The education system that you as future principals will inherit.
We owe it the students in your schools today to get this done.
We owe it to the students who haven’t even been born yet.
And we owe it to you.
The people who make it all happen.
The glue.
Thank you very much.