Mr SAWFORD (12:53 PM) —Good speech, Kerry; well done. Given that boys and girls intrinsically have similar intellectual capacities, how can the following discrepancies be acceptable in Australian education? At year 12, current retention rates for girls are 11 per cent higher than for boys; university admission rates are six per cent higher for girls than boys; differentials in the attainment levels over the majority of the curriculum, as the Chairman of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Training has pointed out, are up to 19 percentage points in favour of girls; 80 per cent of suspensions and expulsions from Australian schools are boys; and up to 100,000 could be involved.

Contemporary reporting of education in the media also suggests that everything is not right in education. A couple of months ago, the AdelaideAdvertiser reported that just four per cent of a group of 200 teaching undergraduates could achieve 80 per cent in a year 8 mathematics test. The story did not suggest this crop of young prospective teachers was unintelligent but it certainly did imply that there were significant gaps in teaching and learning occurring in our schools and universities. In last week's edition of the Bulletin, Diana Bagnall reported on the shortcomings of mathematics in Australian schools and universities, with a steady decline in students taking advanced levels of mathematics and a dramatic fall of teaching students specialising in mathematics. The claims of both journalists are correct.

How do these extraordinary happenings occur? If an examination is made of education over the last 50 years, three distinct periods emerge. The first is the period from 1950 to 1970. This was when education was highly structured—there were defined texts, teaching was explicit and assessment was largely by examinations. The social and political attitudes of the day unquestionably favoured boys. Boys had a 10 per cent higher retention rate, higher admission rates to university and higher attainment rates over the majority of the curriculum.

The second period was from 1970 to around 1990. The curriculum structure was more diverse, teaching was both explicit and implicit, and it changed focus from whole class to smaller group and individual approaches. Assessment was a mix of continuous assessment and examinations of various types. In 1976, school retention rates in Australia were the same for boys and girls. In 1981, as the chairman also pointed out, the differentials in attainment levels in New South Wales between year 12 students were less than one percentage point. That is what they should be. In the third period, from 1990 to the present, retention rates of girls are 11 per cent higher than boys, university admission rates are six per cent higher, differentials in attainment levels as they are now measured in year 12 could vary by up to 19 percentage points.

As I said earlier, given that boys and girls intrinsically have a similar intellectual capacity, you would imagine that these statistics would be ringing alarm bells among the educational administrators and academia in each state in Australia. That is not what the committee found. An important small minority of university academia was recognising the problem but the overwhelming view put to the committee by education bureaucrats, academics and representatives of the Australian Education Union was a state of denial. Good principals and good teachers in all states did recognise the problem and they were doing something about it.

How could education have got so out of kilter in this country? How could so many educational professionals fail to recognise the emergence of a serious problem of alienation and disengagement from education of boys and also a significant group of girls. Go round to any shopping centre during the day in any capital city in Australia; you can see it there. If the suspension rates of Western Australia were applied to the rest of Australia, around 100,000 students would be involved each year, a million in 10 years. Eighty per cent would be boys. That we are unable to confirm or deny that 100,000 figure reflects very poorly on the data collection by state government education departments.

Good education is easy to define and describe, even if in practice it is far more difficult to achieve. Good education is the balancing of differences, good education is inclusive and good education realises the potential of all girls and all boys. It is relatively simple to bias schooling in favour of boys or girls. Just as it was wrong to intentionally or otherwise favour boys in the 1950s and 1960s, it is also wrong to intentionally or unintentionally favour girls, as happens in too many schools at present.

Boys and girls learn differently. It is unacceptable that current policies do not recognise that fact. Boys and girls have different strengths and they have been recognised by Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligence. In general, girls have superior verbal linguistic skills; boys have superior mathematical, logical, spatial and reasoning skills. Girls have superior fine motor skills; boys have superior gross motor skills. Girls have greater nurturing strengths and interpersonal skills; boys have greater naturalistic skills in sorting and classifying. As anyone can deduce, it is relatively easy to skew education to favour either boys or girls. But that is not the point. Good education policy, good programs and good assessment build on the inherent strengths and weaknesses of all our boys and all our girls. It is important that boys learn to express themselves but it is just as important to encourage girls to take on higher levels of mathematics.

Witnesses before the committee—these were the teachers—stated that boys and girls favoured different teaching and learning styles. Boys need explicit teaching. They need to be challenged. They need hands-on and active means of instruction within structured educational programs. Some girls are also comfortable with this approach but generally girls respond better to content and group and individual work in unstructured activities, with plenty of self-directed learning. Boys respond more to relationships with teachers and teacher directed learning and need a consistent application and spelling out of the rules. Girls are more likely to just get on with it.

In literacy, girls are more likely to respond to the personal, boys to the physical. In activities, girls are more likely to respond to the verbal, boys to the visual. Boys respond positively to structured challenges and direction; girls respond to encouragement. On average, boys' capacity to process what they hear is considerably slower than girls'; on average, boys' capacity to analyse what they see is considerably faster than girls'. Girls prefer continuous assessment schemes and examinations that consist of essay type responses; boys prefer multiple-choice testing tasks and examinations that get to the point.

There is nothing remarkable in all of this. It is what successful practitioners have told committee members over and over again: different strokes for different folks. What is remarkable is that so much of the balance that makes up a good education system has gone missing. How could anyone suggest that policies that work for girls will work for boys? Yet that is exactly what has occurred in too many schools in the last 12 years.

It is not overstating the case to say that there is too much emphasis on synthesis and expression in our schools and too little on analysis and reason. Who says implicit teaching, collaborative learning and passive self-directed learning are more effective than explicit teaching, fair competition and active teacher directed learning? Where is the evidence? It makes no sense to value intuitive and verbal skills and then undervalue insight and visual skills. Theories of learning that promote nurture are overvalued and those stating nature are discredited. Qualitative research is favoured over quantitative, which is unfashionable. It is simply nonsense to favour one set of educational options over another. Good education for boys and girls has both.

The committee has made many recommendations concerning changes to current educational policy, teacher training and remuneration, research, the collection of data, the promotion of successful teaching strategies, scholarships, the injection of new funding and monitoring mechanisms to account for the expenditure to be carried out by state and Commonwealth governments. The committee unanimously agreed that the gender equity framework introduced into Australian schools in 1997 does not adequately articulate or address the educational needs of all boys, nor indeed all girls.

Professor Faith Trent from Flinders University has pointed out an important set of considerations in relation to the gender equity framework. The gender equity framework is a policy that had its genesis in the report Girls, schools and society. This report had a rationale that girls were invisible in the curriculum and in schools and that girls had restricted career outcomes. However, that is hardly an appropriate policy for boys. The gender equity framework does not separately research and identify boys' needs, and it sets boys' needs solely in the context of what still needs to be achieved for girls.

In a number of states, witnesses were asked to provide evidence of any quantitative research that would support the introduction of the 1997 gender equity framework into Australian schools. It is pertinent to point out that there was not one piece of evidence from one person. The gender equity framework as it is currently stated is not suited to boys and indeed to some girls. As the committee has recommended, this policy should be totally recast. My thanks go to the current chair, Kerry Bartlett, to past chairs, Kay Elson and Brendan Nelson, to James Rees, to the committee secretariat and to my fellow committee members. I commend the report to the House. (Time expired)