Thursday, 6 February 2020

Ministers statements: early childhood education

Mr MERLINO (Monbulk—Minister for Education) (11:04): Last week at Leongatha Children’s Centre we celebrated the very first day of an Australian first: funded three-year-old kindergarten. We are investing $5 billion for universal subsidised kinder for three-year­old children across Victoria, just as we said we would.

Eighty-five to 90 per cent of a child’s brain development occurs by age five. Experts tell us that children who participate in early childhood education have higher cognitive and non-cognitive development than children who do not. There is an entire body of work, including from Nobel laureate economist Professor James Heckman, about the strong correlation between investment in the early years and economic benefit to that individual and to the economy as a whole.

Over 560 children are enrolled in up to 15 hours of funded three-year-old kindergarten programs across our first six local government areas in rural and regional Victoria: Buloke, Hindmarsh, Northern Grampians, Strathbogie, Yarriambiack and South Gippsland. Parents are getting on board. In South Gippsland, for example, 86 per cent of three-year-olds are attending a three-year-old program. This is a massive increase on the 30 per cent that attended the same unfunded programs last year and well above the four-year average for the state.

Next year we are rolling out three-year-old kinder in another 15 local government areas, again in rural and regional Victoria, something that we are proud of. By 2022 for the rest of the state all three-year-old children will be able to participate in at least 5 hours of kinder, scaling up to the full 15-hour program by 2029. We will need 6000 additional teachers and educators. We will need to build or upgrade around 1000 new kindergartens. We are getting on with one of the most profound education reforms in our state’s history, a reform only possible under the Andrews Labor government.