Mr LAMING (12:45 PM) —After parenting, as I am sure you would agree, Mr Deputy Speaker Causley, no single career is more vital to the future of Australia than teaching. As role models, teachers shape the lives and the productivity of our nation, so we simply cannot afford what we have seen in the last generation: an aptitude decline in the quality of those who consider teaching as a profession. It is a tragedy that many skilled teachers seek less challenging environments at the expense of the high-needs schools in disadvantaged areas where they are most needed. It defies belief that such a vital profession is one of the last remaining that lacks financial incentives for their best performers, those teachers proven to achieve results. Only financial incentives for teachers based on student gains against national benchmarks can offer the solution to the three problems I have just listed. Far from picking on teachers, this is about knowing what is going on in our schools. It is about identifying and rewarding good teachers, and of course providing that drive to improve.

Extensive American research has shown entrance scores for student teachers have declined over a generation. Obviously, better paying professional opportunities for women have arisen in the last generation but, more importantly, unionised flat salary scales have effectively tied teacher pay to experience rather than performance. Meanwhile it is society that pays the price, and we do not quite know how needy children in tough schools are performing when there is often teaching by inexperienced new graduates. Of course at the other end the truly good teachers are being sucked out of the state system and into other often less challenging environments in the private sector. Likewise, for the sake of our weaker teachers and those they teach, we have to be prepared to intervene before it is too late for our struggling pupils.

The problem is that no-one knows who is doing what to whom and, worse still, we have not begun to look. Like the rest of society in the 21st century, teachers have every reason to expect pay to be linked to performance and productivity. At a state level we do not really know how education systems are performing. Already we have some benchmarks performed at year 3 reading. The findings are alarming: Victorian year 3 students are 20 per cent more likely than their New South Wales counterparts to fail those simple nationwide benchmarks. What is more disturbing is that Queensland and South Australian students are 33 per cent more likely to fail the same benchmark reading test at a similar age. I am sure analysing individual schools and teachers would also find similar variations, variations that in medicine or health we would find appalling and alarming. They would spark outrage.

The plan by the Minister for Education, Science and Training, Dr Nelson, to report to parents in plain English is a start, but if those findings are not benchmarked you are simply reporting junk in plain English. All of this does need to be benchmarked because, after all, one day children will all face a cold, hard figure—a cold, hard number or score—to gain entry into very sought after courses, so we should not pretend until it is too late for anyone to do anything about it that numbers do not count. The solution is to take those two-yearly benchmarking tests that we are doing now, make them end of year and do them annually. Let parents know annually those performances and, most importantly of all, reward teachers for the value that they add above benchmark scores. If they improve students relative to a benchmark, they are rewarded. The gains are going to be greatest in those disadvantaged schools, and that will be a further incentive to address that skew that drives the best teachers in many cases to less challenging environments as they gain seniority in the profession. Before anyone convinces you that this is completely unworkable, keep in mind that state education departments are already collecting this very information. Since 2001, right up to 2004, every single student has been scored along with a teacher identifier to which the score is linked. It is not a hard thing to do but, beholden to the unions, state education departments are simply too timid to use that information in any meaningful way.

Teachers want to know what works. They need to know how students perform at different levels of ability. Consider three teachers: one may be exceptionally skilled at advancing gifted students, another may be fantastic and may shine with those that are disadvantaged or delayed, and the third may be having difficulty and not achieving advances in class mean or at any level. Teachers need to know that; parents need to know that. At the moment that information is lost from a report card. It may be known by the principal vaguely but, most importantly, parents are left completely in the dark. Only when skilled and motivated teachers can be attracted to areas where they can have the greatest gains will the profession begin to advance and the needs of students be addressed. Denying good teachers incentive payments means talent goes unrecognised and children pay the price. The trade union's stranglehold on teaching and wages is to blame because it sees students as simply being there for its members and not the other way round. (Time expired)