Thursday, 23 March 2023

Kindergarten attendance

Matthew BACH (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (16:04): (139) My adjournment matter tonight is for the Minister for Early Childhood and Pre-Prep. I was hanging out in Berwick last week with Brad Battin, and he took me to one of his favourite haunts, and that is the Berwick neighbourhood house kindergarten and early learning centre. Look, there is bipartisan – multipartisan – support for our amazing neighbourhood houses, and the staff there were just fabulous. They had an idea, and Mr Battin and I were so struck by their idea that I wanted to come here and put it to the minister for early childhood.

What the fabulous staff there said to me is that they have a system to make sure that if one of the children in their program is late – is not present, say, 20 minutes or half an hour after the start of the day – they make sure that they call through to parents. They informed me of something that I was not aware of, and that is that there were a couple of really troubling examples recently of parents just forgetting – now, this sounds silly, doesn’t it, but just forgetting – that they have headed off in the morning with one of their kids in the back seat. But quite frankly, given that at the moment I have got an 11-month-old and a four-year-old, I do understand that if you are deeply sleep deprived, then it would be possible to drop one child off somewhere – at school or elsewhere – and then completely forget about the other one.

In my career in secondary education, especially in wellbeing roles, we always placed the highest importance on attendance data. It tells you so much information about, especially, the mental health and wellbeing of the kids in your care. The government, to its credit, carried on processes and procedures put in place under the Baillieu and Napthine governments to ensure that, in primary and secondary schools, parents were called if the child did not turn up to school, but we do not have the same processes in our kindergartens. So the action that I seek from the minister is to review, please, the processes currently used in state schools whereby parents are called if a child does not come – with a view to emulate, if that is feasible. I cannot see why we should move ahead with policies like this in our primary schools and secondary schools but not in our kindergartens and other early learning settings.