Early Childhood Education

By John Berger

17 AUGUST 2023

My adjournment is to the Minister for Early Childhood and Pre-Prep, Minister Stitt. Our early childhood educators play a vital role in shaping our next generation, and we owe a great debt to their hard work. That is why I am proud to be a member of a government that is putting its full weight and effort behind supporting them. Our Best Start, Best Life reforms include transitioning four-year-old kindergarten to 30 hours of pre-prep. Free kinder is now available for all three- and four-year-olds at participating facilities in Victoria and has benefited more than 140,000 children and families. I am excited to announce that over 97 per cent of kinders have opted in to this program, and of course we are establishing 50 government owned and operated early learning centres. Thanks to this program we are saving families money while giving more parents the opportunity to get back to work.

We have also introduced many other programs, like the culturally and linguistically diverse outreach initiative grants program. This has distributed $3.5 million in vital funding to councils across Victoria to support children and families from CALD backgrounds to access kindergarten. We are backing in the workforce, investing almost $370 million to attract and retain high-quality teachers and educators. In fact more than 3500 teachers who have joined our kindergarten workforce came to the job through government-funded scholarships. We have also partnered to fund the upskill program. This assists diploma-qualified early childhood educators to become degree-qualified early childhood teachers, and free TAFE has boosted the number of early childhood educators, with thousands of students enrolling. With pre-prep on its way, mark down 2025 in your calendar. It is going to change lives in our community.

I want to associate myself with these remarks yesterday, where Minister Stitt said:

There has never been more support for infrastructure and service provision in our state’s history in early childhood education and care – $1.2 billion of investment in this state budget alone for infrastructure support, a doubling of the capacity grant support for local government and also modular builds delivered fully funded by the Victorian government.

I cannot agree more. Earlier this year I visited the official opening of the Through Road early learning centre in my electorate, in Hawthorn. This fantastic local kinder has served the families of Camberwell for a generation, so it was great to celebrate its opening. I also had the opportunity to meet and listen to staff about what we can do to support their roles. That is why my adjournment to the minister is this: will the minister join me on a visit to a kindergarten in Hawthorn to see the great work our local teachers and educators are doing firsthand?