Eidos Lunch- Julia Gillard
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Julia GillardToday I was lucky enough to go to that rare beastie- a business lunch that was interesting. The lunch, run by the Eidos Institute, had Julia Gillard as the guest speaker.
In front of 400 mainly business types, the Acting PM outlined her vision for schools. Showing the guts that she would have had as a litigation partner with Slater and Gordon, her vision came down to:
- it’s all about measurable outcomes and transparency
- there’ll be a website called myschool
- schools will have to produce buckets of data so that all and sundry, particularly parents, but including the media can compare like with like on the site
- while she’s handing out the money, the schools, State education bureaucracies and the teachers’ unions better get used to it (although of course she was much more diplomatic than that)
- while it is terrible and unacceptable for a child to go to a school with poor outcomes, it is worse when the parents of the child do not have enough information available to them to know that it is a school with poor outcomes.
And the lunch got better than that. I was lucky to sit with a few fellow Twitterers one of whom, Jackie Ewart, has written a book about the Haneef saga, and then maaged to have a yarn with Graham Young, the founder of Online Opinion. All great stimulating stuff for the grey matter.
