Education and Child Development Department

The Hon. S.W. KEY (Ashford) (14:52): My question is directed to the Minister for Education and Child Development. Minister, can you advise the house on how the Department for Education and Child Development is supporting ongoing professional development of staff?

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Minister for Education and Child Development, Minister for Higher Education and Skills) (14:52): Thank you, sir, and I thank the member for her question. Members may be aware that the Department for Education and Child Development has an accredited registered training organisation that supports DECD employees to further their professional knowledge and experience by completing vocational education and training.

Next week, we will celebrate the achievements of approximately 550 DECD staff members who have completed a vocational qualification with the DECD RTO. This is a remarkable achievement and one worth celebrating. Vocational education is hugely important to ensuring our workforce is skilled and aims for continual improvement.

Often we hear about it in the context of helping young people to enter the workforce with job-ready skills, but it is also a critical part of making sure that our existing workforce has ongoing opportunities to better understand and develop crucial skills within their roles. Vocational education helps workers keep up to date with advances, innovation and current research relevant to their profession, to learn skills to enable them to work smarter rather than harder and, most crucially, to work together to build a focused and responsive South Australian education and child protection system.

Staff involved represent a huge range of roles within the department: SSOs, principals and preschool directors, residential care workers and Aboriginal education workers. The demographics represented by the graduates are similarly wideranging, including students who are in their 20s right through to those over 50, as well as students who have not studied since high school and those for whom English is a second language.

The graduates have completed an extensive variety of qualifications, including certificates in child and youth and family intervention, accounting and education support and diplomas in early childhood education and care. Also, among those being recognised at next week's ceremony will be the first graduates of the Graduate Diploma of Strategic Leadership, which is a qualification aligned with the Australian Professional Standard for Principals.

Leaders have a critical and broad role in schools and preschools, from working with staff, students and parents to managing finances and infrastructure. Their role is critical to students' success. Research tells us that leadership is second only to teacher quality as the most important factor affecting student outcomes. Our leaders require a broad set of skills, and supporting them to hone or develop these skills is a priority for DECD.

The advanced leadership qualification, the first of its kind in Australia, supports DECD leaders and aspiring leaders to strengthen their skills and their ability to manage the significant day-to-day demands of leading their school communities. The course content was developed in collaboration with the University of South Australia, DECD site leaders, education directors and corporate representatives. Areas covered include management of site resources; leading improvement, innovation and change; and engaging the school community, just to name a few.

This first group of 27 graduates are new leaders, and they were supported to undertake the course free of charge. Recognising they were balancing study with the demands of being a new leader, they were also allocated release time from their schools. Not only are they better equipped for the demands of leadership, they are also the first DECD leaders to hold the qualification of choice for site leader appointments.

To help build the capacity of our future principals and directors, aspiring leader programs will commence with a trial cohort in 2016. I applaud each of the RTO graduates for making the effort to boost their skills and qualifications. They are bringing back to their workplaces new skills and ideas that will benefit our schools, preschools, Families SA services and, most importantly, our children and young people.