Page 3755 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 22 November 2006
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(4) declares that the ACT Government has made the proposals in relation to preschools with little understanding of their unique governance situation; and
(5) calls on the ACT Government to suspend all proposed closures and/or amalgamations of preschools until relevant governance and structural issues have been explored and the legality of the proposed actions has been clarified.
Mr Speaker, this motion goes to the heart of family life in Canberra suburbs. It is an exceedingly important matter because of the importance of preschool in the early childhood years and in the process of early childhood education. The minister, to his credit, has spoken at length about the importance of early childhood education and says that the proposal Towards 2020 has an emphasis on early childhood education. This is an area which has perhaps been under explored and under examined for many years; it is time that Australia, and the ACT in particular, came into the 21st century when it comes to early childhood education.
In many ways, when you look at how Australia performs in educational comparisons across the world, we do fairly well. But we do not do as well as some of the countries that have a considerable emphasis on early childhood education. Here and in other places people have mentioned figures on the amount of investment that you do in the early childhood years and how that can create savings further down the track. This is especially the case for children who are in some way socially disadvantaged. For those children, early intervention will mean that they have a reasonable start in life and can capitalise on their school education and use their education as a means of overcoming the disadvantage that they might find themselves in. That is especially the case for those who are faced with economic disadvantage, poor housing and the like.
When we look at the progress of the Scandinavian countries in particular, especially Finland, we see that significant contributions are made to early childhood education, which is not compulsory, but which provides access to early intervention for children in need and which has a guided structure that feeds into the later schooling system. There is much to be learned from this. There is much in Towards 2020 that contains the germ of some good ideas about early childhood education. But, as with almost everything in Towards 2020, such passages are so vague and so overshadowed by suggested disadvantageous changes that it is hard for us to see whether the minister is capable of making progress on early childhood education through the structure that he has proposed.
As with everything about Towards 2020, if the minister had come out and said that, as a community, we should find a new and better way of delivering early childhood education for the benefit of the whole community, we could have had a discussion about that and the ways in which it might happen. We have under way some trials of the way in which we integrate preschools and primary schools. These trials have been going on for two years or so, but there has not been very much change or real innovation in those areas. Yet what we see as a result of Towards 2020 is that by 2008 almost every preschool in the ACT will in some way be compulsorily subsumed into the neighbouring primary school. There will hardly be a freestanding preschool left in the territory.
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