Education Revolution

The Australian Government has promised that the majority of secondary school students will have access to a computer within the next 5 years as part of its Education Revolution strategy. The Federal Government has set aside $1.2 billion for the education revolution budget and out of this, $1.1 billion has been invested into the National Secondary Schools Computer Fund which is aiming to provide information and communication technology to students in years 9-12 over the next 5 years.

On June 12 2008, the Minster for Education, Julia Gillard confirmed that during the first round of funding 896 secondary schools across Australia would receive funding for 116,820 computers. Schools have been given grants of $1000 per computer which are being issued by the state and territory governments.

The aim of the first round of grants has been to bring down the computer to student ratio to 1:2 for schools that currently have a ratio of 1:8 or higher. In round two of the grants, the government wants to move all schools to a computer student ratio of 1:2. The Federal Government has also allocated a further $100 million to help set up fiber optic connections which would deliver high speed internet connections of up to 100 megabits per second to Australian schools.

The Federal Opposition have declared that the Education Revolution strategy as being under-funded and under-resourced. They have attacked the Federal Government for not being able to confirm when schools will be connected the high speed internet as outlined in their plans before the election.

Shadow Minister for Human Services, Helen Coonan, has said that providing students with computers without internet is like providing them with typewriters. They have also attacked the government further saying that schools and parents will have to bear the ongoing running costs for the computers such as electricity, internet connections, software and maintenance and that Australia has been conned by a "shrinking Education Revolution package".*


*Source- Liberal Party of Australia