Page 2325 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 1 November 1989
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A member: What if there were four?
DR KINLOCH: I do have a comment later about figures, Mr Speaker, and I do note the figures given by Mr Humphries. We now come to what are the conditions which are appropriate for the closing of a preschool. The first is if the actual school building is so decrepit or even dangerous that it would not be safe for children to go there. That is not the case in any of those schools. The second is if there are inadequately trained teachers and aids - that is, if the number of preschool teachers is not sufficient to staff the schools. That is not the case here. The third is if parents, themselves, decide against preschool education. I met one such young couple at a conference at Parliament House on Monday. Both father and mother, with three young children, argued that they wished to keep their children at home, but I found that a very unusual case. That is not the usual case at all. It is certainly not the case here. Again, to refer back to that rally in the courtyard, there were many parents there who were very anxious indeed to have their children in preschools.
The fourth thing is that, if we had the kind of government in the ACT which wished to go back on almost a hundred years of preschool and kindergarten education, then one could understand this need to close preschools. But that is not the case here. No-one in this Assembly - not anyone from any of our six groups - would wish to turn the clock back to 1896 when the Kindergarten Union of New South Wales was formed, or even to 1938, the year of the founding of the Australian Pre-School Association, when everything was voluntary and fee paying.
We have come a long way since then. Indeed we now wish to build on and go beyond the 1972 Child Care Act which provided Federal funding for capital expenses and subsidies for teachers' salaries. Indeed in this Territory we really have done very well in this area of preschool education, and we all, of course, rejoice at the ending of preschool fees. So we surely want to ensure preschool involvement at the local level in the immediate neighbourhood - I stress, in the immediate neighbourhood - of all children in the ACT.
In relation to the fifth condition, we come then to the question of numbers. What is the magic number at which we say that a school is not viable? Is it 25, the maximum allowed size, possibly, or 17, that mystical number that is so important in this Assembly, or 10 or 5 or what? At what point do we say to mothers with toddlers that they have to find themselves transport to leave their suburb and deposit their children several kilometres away and then have to repeat that journey later in the day? One of the people from the preschool group to whom I spoke suggested that under one circumstance some parents, whichever parent did it, would have to take the child three and a half kilometres to school and back on that day.
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