Early Learning Strategy

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER (Morialta—Minister for Education) (15:26): It is a great pleasure to be a minister in a government that is building what matters, that is creating jobs and, importantly, that is delivering better services for the people of South Australia.

Just today, I was with the Premier at the Hackney Kindergarten launching the Early Learning Strategy, which was funded in this year's budget. It is a $50 million project which will support children and young people in South Australia to thrive and learn, to succeed in their education and succeed in life. It is an outstanding document and, indeed, I am very pleased to be part of a government that is investing in the future of South Australia.

We are focused on the wellbeing of our young people and we are focused on their futures. That is why we are engaged in supporting a budget that is going to also create jobs and ensure there are future-focused investments that are going to create jobs for these young people so that we pick up any developmental issues in their first 1,000 days or their first five years as part of our strategy to ensure that all young people are thriving and learning as part of our Early Learning Strategy.

We support them through their preschooling and their schooling with world-class educational opportunities so that they can be their best and so that they can be supported to fulfill their potential. We are reforming vocational education training, pathways to traineeships and apprenticeships, further education and higher education so that in South Australia, as a result of these investments that are made by people like the Minister for Innovation and Skills, we are seeing double-digit increases in the relevant KPIs on how we are going on commencements.

While the rest of Australia is either going backwards or progressing at a marginal pace, we are seeing dramatic increases in young people taking up traineeships and apprenticeships, fast outstripping every other jurisdiction in the nation at a time when it could not be more important; and the government is investing in jobs of the future. Whether they be in defence, space, cyber, high-tech, agtech or in hospitality and tourism, an investment like the arena will create jobs through the opportunities for conventions and concerts and sporting events when it is completed towards the second half of the next decade. Some of these young people will have great jobs there too.

But we want to support them in their schooling. In the discussions about the dramatic improvements that the Marshall Liberal government is supporting in early learning, it also reminds me of some of the work that has already been done. I want to commend some of the people who do not just work in those early years before children get to school but in the early years of school. Since the Marshall Liberal government's election, there has been a radical overhaul of the way that many of our schools are delivering early years literacy programs.

When we first came to government, we became the first state in the nation to require all our government schools to offer a year 1 phonics screening check to every student. It is also a screening check that we have made available to independent schools and Catholic schools and many of them have taken up the opportunity to do so. One of the challenges that that screening check identified in 2018 was that only 42 per cent of our students in year 1 in South Australian government schools were able to correctly identify 28 of the 40 words in the check, which was the expected standard to which we expected achievement.

Indeed, the British screening check, the English screening check on which our check was based, requires 32 out of 40 as the expected standard, but it takes place at a different time in the child's development. We had support from Flinders University—Anne Bayetto, from memory, and Jennifer Buckingham, who did a review of it as well, and they identified that 28 was the appropriate standard.

Only 42 per cent could achieve it though. In our second year, as a result of the evidence-led practices that were encouraged throughout our schools—the guidebooks on literacy that were supported through the education department's expert what was then learning improvement division and our Literacy Guarantee unit, and the coaches who were working with schools—that was able to be lifted to 53 per cent and then last year to 62 per cent, a further dramatic increase despite the ravages and disruption of the pandemic on so many elements of society.

I am very much looking forward to seeing how our students and our children and young people go in that phonics screener in August this year. I am confident that there will be further improvements because what I have seen in our schools is an absolute embrace of evidence-based teaching practices by our early childhood teachers and principals who have seen the dramatic improvement that it has led to in children's literacy and then behaviour in following years.

The confidence with which our children are now reading when they are discovering the opportunity to do more complex texts later on is all part of a piece of world-class education being delivered by the Marshall Liberal government that is investing in education, that is investing in the future of our state and that is delivering better services for the people of South Australia.