Page 1166 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 28 March 2017
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I conclude by once again simply reflecting on the very challenging but at the same time rewarding job that the staff have. Based on my own experience, I have a great deal of respect for their energy and their dedication when it comes to looking after the youngest people in our city.
MR STEEL (Murrumbidgee) (4.10): I thank Ms Cody for raising this matter of public importance in the ACT. I want to focus particularly today on the benefit that universal access to early childhood education provides to young children here in the ACT through our preschools in the year before full-time schooling.
It is important to note that children are doing some of their most important learning during the first three years of their life. In fact, language development during this period is the foundation for all other cognitive development. There are many great providers of early childhood education and care in the ACT for children from birth to five years of age through play schools, long-day care, family day care and in-home care funded through commonwealth-funded childcare assistance. But I will focus today on preschools.
I want to turn our minds back to 2007 when the then federal Labor opposition made a commitment at the 2007 election to provide universal access to preschools as part of a new national early childhood development strategy. This was then delivered in government through the first national partnership agreement on early childhood education in 2009. The federal government introduced funding to the states and territories for preschool with the goal of all children receiving 15 hours of high quality early childhood education in the year before school.
They did this because early childhood education is proven to be crucial for a child’s success at school and in later life. Access to 15 hours of preschool is the UNICEF-recommended benchmark for children’s development. The reason for 15 hours preschool provision is based on significant overseas research showing the benefits of children’s participation in these programs.
I have spoken many times in this place about the UK’s effective provision of preschool education and effective provision of preschool and school education studies. These are highly influential pieces of research that look at both early childhood education and school education.
I want to get down to the detail of the studies based on comments by the lead author, Professor Edward Melhuish of Oxford University. What he said about this study is that they actually tracked thousands of children from when they attended preschool right through to when they completed their end of school exams up until the age of 18.
They looked at the difference between the duration that children attended preschool education—five hours, 10 hours, 15 hours all the way up to 30 hours. What they found was that all children benefit from 15 hours of preschool and disadvantaged children benefit from even more than that, up to 30 hours. So the duration that children attend preschool matters greatly.
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