He’s a working-class kid made good. But Jason Clare wants more people to be just like him and benefit from the transformational power of education.
Mr Clare, who on Wednesday was unexpectedly handed the education portfolio in the Albanese ministry, will be stepping on and off planes over the coming weeks as he meets with his state and territory counterparts to establish national priorities and nut out a new schools funding agreement which is due to be in place by the end of 2023.
In 2018, the last time the Programme for Student Assessment was fully undertaken, Australian students recorded their worst results ever. The scores were so bad that Australian students fell below theMr Clare said he still hadn’t unpacked his boxes into his new office and was undergoing a series of briefings from the education department.
It’s a theme that is close to his heart. In his maiden speech to parliament in 2008, Mr Clare said that “education is the great equaliser in an unequal world”. Jason Clare reunites with Cathy Fry who taught him at Cabramatta Public School in the 1970s and is still there.“The world is very different today to what it looked in western Sydney as a working-class kid 50 years ago. And that’s partly because of the big reforms of Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke,” Mr Clare said.
It seems that education might just be his dream portfolio. His maiden speech spoke not just of the transformational power of education - “let us be the government that unleashes the potential of the next generation” - but of the importance of pre-school and early childhood education.
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