Billions of public dollars were devoted to the Trade Training Centres initiative where students could pursue industry-based courses, taught to industry standard, resulting in industry qualifications. This was aimed at senior students and was for the purpose of adding to the skills of the Australian workforce. The benefits of this initiative include a greater breadth of senior courses available to all senior high school students, an authentic industry experience for students and a clear pathway into further technical study beyond school or the workforce.

The much-maligned Building the Education Revolution was always about saving the Australian economy, supporting the construction industry and its hundreds of thousands of jobs after the GFC. New libraries and halls gave a welcomed injection of infrastructure to schools but little short-term benefit to test scores. While clearly there was waste in this program, the enhanced learning facilities for Australian children will bring benefits well into the future.

Two of the significant innovations of the Rudd/Gillard years were the creation of the My School Website and the Gonski review of school funding. My School has brought transparency and accountability for schools in test scores, strategic planning and finances. Few school principals would deny that My School has not significantly sharpened their school's focus around more effective teaching and learning and its resourcing.

The Gonski review of school funding has firmly established in the minds of most Australians the principle that the public dollar should follow need. The performance of Indigenous students, the rural remote, intellectually, physically or financially disadvantaged needs to be better supported by the public dollar. This would seem to most fair-minded Australians a good thing for those students and for the economic and social cohesion of the country.

Nobody in schools believes Naplan and Pisa scores are, of themselves, much value. St Mary MacKillop College is the largest secondary school in Canberra with well over 30 different primary schools feeding into our Year 7 cohort each year. Our Year 7 Naplan tests, undertaken in early May, reveal nothing about the quality of teaching and learning at MacKillop. Rather, it provides invaluable data about the learning needs and strengths of that cohort. Where the taxpayer gets bang for their Naplan buck is what we and and other schools do with that data.