Thursday, 4 June 2026

 Rikkie-Lee TYRRELL (Northern Victoria) (12:27): (1346) My question today is for the Minister for Children. Minister, the 11 children enrolled at the Beulah Outreach Preschool located within the Beulah Primary School are currently forced to divide their time between Beulah and Hopetoun – Mondays at Beulah and the rest of the week at Hopetoun. Hopetoun is a 25-minute drive from the Beulah Primary School. One parent reportedly travels over 12,000 kilometres a year. Was the minister aware of the unfair burden placed on families in Beulah by the inadequate preschool situation?

 Lizzie BLANDTHORN (Western Metropolitan – Minister for Children, Minister for Disability) (12:28): I thank Ms Tyrrell for her question and for her interest in ensuring that we are able to deliver our free three- and four-year-old kinder programs – programs which are saving families $5000 or more across their preschool journey right across the state. Our infrastructure plans that we have with our local governments – and we work in partnership with our local governments and indeed with parts of the Catholic and independent sector and our providers to ensure that our preschool opportunities, our free three- and free four-year-old kinder, are available right across the state. We work with them on the plans in order to ensure that there are the places. Those places are designed to meet those demands. It is also why we invest heavily in infrastructure, again, right across our state, from our 50 Early Learning Victoria centres, 18 of which are now open, through to our Building Blocks improvement grants, which allow us to upgrade some of the smaller, often regional, sessional preschools and kinders, so that we can provide that offering and indeed the increased hours of four-year-old kindergarten as well. As we move to every four-year-old child in the year before school having up to 30 hours of preschool, we need to really map out and plan out that infrastructure. That is work that is ongoing, but if there are particular issues or concerns regarding your constituents, we are happy to work with you on those.

 Rikkie-Lee TYRRELL (Northern Victoria) (12:29): I thank the minister for her answer. The preschool is currently run out of the old library and art room of the primary school, which is one of the reasons for the limitations to the preschool program in Beulah. The Beulah community has worked incredibly hard to come up with a plan to completely rejuvenate their school and preschool precinct. Will the minister meet with the Beulah community and see their proposed plan and their commitment to expanding the preschool services?

 Lizzie BLANDTHORN (Western Metropolitan – Minister for Children, Minister for Disability) (12:30): I again thank Ms Tyrrell for her question, and we are always happy to receive representations from everyone who is interested in the delivery of our free three- and four-year-old kindergarten right across the state. There were 147,000 children last year, for example, and we expect another 147,000 this year. So of course, as my schedule permits, I am more than happy to meet with your constituents about that. But what I would say is that we do work directly with our local communities, with our local governments, to develop kinder infrastructure plans to ensure that we are meeting the need for every three-year-old and every four-year-old to get those years of free kinder prior to them embarking on their school journey.