Education and Training Reform Amendment (Land Powers) Bill 2023

3 October, 2023

Iwan WALTERS (Greenvale) (16:25): It is a pleasure to rise and lend wholehearted support to this really important bill, the Education and Training Reform Amendment (Land Powers) Bill 2023. Investment in early childhood education has been a central tenet of our government’s entire reform program since 2014, but just this week the first Allan ministry also and again put children at the very heart of our government’s policy agenda, with the newly appointed Minister for Children – who I am delighted to work with in her other capacity as Minister for Disability – responsible for all aspects of service delivery that wraps around children. Families and children do not live their lives in disparate silos. We as a government need to optimise the impact of government services, whether it is in the realm of child protection or in early years education, and the new minister’s leadership across all of these domains will help us get to the point of optimisation.

Of course this bill, as we have heard through the debate, provides the Minister for Education and the Minister for Children adequate and appropriate powers to acquire and develop land to implement our expanded $14 billion Best Start, Best Life program – nation-leading reforms that will see that investment of $14 billion over the next decade to completely transform early childhood education and care in Victoria. The bill will amend the Education and Training Reform Act 2006 to expand the minister’s power to acquire land for early childhood and other associated services. It is the co-location of services that I think is a particularly important dimension of this bill and of this government’s approach to early childhood education and social policy more generally. I am going to return to the importance of that co-location later in my contribution, but I first just want to touch on why our government’s $14 billion investment in early childhood education is so important – so important for children, for families, for parents, for productivity and skills, for our economy and, above all, for enabling every young person in Greenvale and every Victorian to thrive and to live the best lives they possibly can.

The Best Start, Best Life reforms that we have brought to this place and implemented across Victoria are driven by a very simple moral imperative: every Victorian deserves the opportunity to thrive throughout their life, and too many have been held back. One in five Victorian children start school behind. They are not getting the best start in life, and that has lifelong consequences. Unfortunately, a child’s family circumstances and their postcode matter. Geography, postcode and socio-economics do matter to outcomes. That is why this bill is so important. It provides the Minister for Children with the levers that she needs to ensure that vital, cost-effective interventions to improve early childhood education can be delivered in the communities where they are most needed. In 2018 more than one in five Australian children started school vulnerable, according to key measures of holistic development, including social, emotional and communication skills and cognitive ability. These vulnerabilities can translate into lifelong negative consequences for individuals, for families, for communities and for governments. Not getting the best start in life and arriving at school behind peers is extremely difficult to overcome. It is not impossible of course, and every single day the wonderful teachers across our education system are working to confront that educational disadvantage and to overcome the barriers that too many children arrive at school with. But extensive research does show that the effect of developmental vulnerability at school entry can persist throughout life, and it does impact children’s ability to succeed at school and thrive throughout their lives. In effect, the compelling research, the unequivocal research, tells us that children who start behind tend to stay behind.

We have led the nation as a government in investing in the capacity and capability of Victoria’s school system through a massive school building program and all of the evidence-based components of the Education State reforms. The many reforms and initiatives that constitute that program and that have been implemented across our school system since 2014 are all about enabling every young person in our state to thrive and to assist those who started school behind to catch up and to reach their potential. But there is more work to be done, and that work is especially important in the earliest years, where policy reforms and interventions can make the most profound differences.

I am reflecting in this debate on my own experience as a teacher in regional Victoria, and the deep and abiding frustration and in a sense the shame that I felt as a teacher seeking to differentiate my instruction and support every single student in my classes when I could not do enough for the children in my classroom who were in effect functionally illiterate, who were developmentally delayed, who had not had the early childhood support that they deserved and needed to ensure that they were not behind their peers. When you are seeking to teach a class of 25 to 30 students and to support each of them, it is a really difficult job in a practical sense to provide the best level of education and care that you can for every single student when they do not have the foundational building blocks in place already. That is why there is, as I say, that moral imperative to do more in the earliest years in those first thousand days and to give every student the opportunity to thrive before they get to school, to augment and support the work that parents do in a loving home and to ensure that every community across the state has access to great early childhood education. The minister needs these powers because that location dimension does matter – we need to be investing in early childhood education where it is needed most.

Children from all backgrounds can have vulnerability in key areas of cognitive, social and physical development, but some children experience far higher rates of vulnerability than others. Family socio-economic status is the most significant factor determining whether a child enters school developmentally on track. In short, across Australia and Victoria, a child’s family circumstance can play an unacceptably large role in determining their outcomes, well before they get to the school gate. As somebody motivated to enter Parliament because of my experience of educational disadvantage and the gaps in opportunity that are based on geography, and with a commitment to addressing and redressing those barriers and ensuring economic and social justice for all Victorians, I am incredibly supportive of empowering the minister to be able to situate new early learning centres in the communities where they will have the greatest impact. I am proud to be part of a government that has an unstinting commitment to equitable access to high-quality early childhood education.

I want to also thank each and every one of the early childhood educators, as the member for Sandringham said, who do a fantastic and tireless job in providing education and care for the children they work with and care for. It has been such a pleasure to visit kindergartens and playgroups across my electorate, to read stories and deliver kinder kits, and I have seen firsthand the wonderful work of centres like Kool Kidz in Greenvale, Pelican Childcare Fairways in Craigieburn, Goodstart Early Learning in Meadow Heights, Learning Nest Early Learning Centre in Meadow Heights, Good Samaritan in Roxburgh Park and so many more.

I do want to talk about the kind of co-located services that exist at Good Samaritan Roxburgh Park and at schools like Bethal Primary School in Meadow Heights, in which this year’s budget invested $10.5 million to comprehensively modernise and upgrade. The co-located kindergarten that is already on that site was delivered by the previous Andrews Labor government, and the Allan Labor government will be continuing that investment in the school precinct. The presence of the kindergarten at the school enables families to have really high-quality education all the way through from the earliest years and enables the single drop-off. It is co-located with a community hub that provides services like job support and English language skills for recently arrived migrants, and it brings together the complex system of social services that provide education and family support across our community. It is what co-location, to me, is all about: enabling families and school communities to be the hub and to provide that great level of support for the families they care for.

The $14 billion that we are investing over the next decade matters immensely. It matters because a child who has attended two years of quality kinder will on average have better cognitive, social and emotional skills when they start school. It matters because that child will on average have more developed social and emotional outcomes at age 18. It matters because those years of early childhood education will help provide that child with better development in language, pre-reading, early number concepts, non-verbal reasoning, independence, concentration and social skills.

This is a government whose approach is guided by evidence and focused on outcomes. We have heard that 90 per cent of a child’s brain develops before the age of five, so early education has profound effects on the way that children develop. We have also heard about the economic dimensions of these reforms. Every dollar invested in early childhood yields a $2 dividend back over a child’s life through higher productivity and earning capacity, reduced crime and lower levels of government services being called upon. This is not just positive social reform, it is a landmark macro-economic reform that will set us up for the future, and I commend the bill to the house.