Tuesday, 26 August 2025

Early childhood education and care

Trung LUU (Western Metropolitan) (00:46): (1872) My adjournment is for the Minister for Children and concerns the shortage of kindergartens and kindergarten placements for my residents in Williamstown and surrounding areas. The action I seek is for the minister to immediately request the department to work with my concerned constituent Mr Paul McArd from Williamstown, who has contacted my office and seeks support for his son Oliver to obtain access to kindergarten services in his local neighbourhood. I am aware my constituent has also written to the minister on this matter, and I would have hoped that by now the minister would have provided Paul and his family with timely support. I was shocked to learn that Paul has attempted to enrol Oliver in their closest kindergarten, Robina Scott Kindergarten in Williamstown, which is about 1.4 k’s from their home, only to be informed that his application for his son was not approved due to limited numbers of spaces. This is the family’s first option. The family showed flexibility and tried to enrol Oliver in nearby services, including the Range kindergarten, also in Williamstown, and the Home Road Kindergarten in Newport, only to find that they had no availabilities for their son. This is not good enough.

This issue is felt by many of my local constituents in the west, where it is clear there is nowhere near enough local kindergarten spaces for a number of families. I hear this too often – namely, from those living in the south-east of Wyndham council. Therefore I ask the minister to seek for her department to urgently review the current number of spaces available for families in kindergartens across Western Metropolitan Region as of August, where vacancy rates are highest in the LGA and, therefore, where the family can enrol their son Oliver so he would not be required to commute for an unreasonable amount of time and distance. I also ask the minister to support a guarantee that all children can have as their first choice the closest kindergarten possible and to set a target to achieve this goal, including transparency measures to ensure that this happens via annual reporting. This is critical if it is to ensure its three- and four-year-old kindergarten reforms are realised.