Education Standards Board

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER (Morialta—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (14:50): My question is to the Minister for Education, Training and Skills. Will the government provide extra funding to the Education Standards Board to increase their volume of assessments and ratings? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER: Board minutes of the Education Standards Board released under FOI indicate that the minister has recently been advised by the board that they require additional funding of $2.2 million to facilitate what they say is a necessary increase in the volume of assessments and ratings to ensure our childcare centres are providing safe environments for our very young children.

The Hon. B.I. BOYER (Wright—Minister for Education, Training and Skills) (14:51): I thank the member for Morialta, again, for this important question. I know as a former minister for education he understands only too well the issues that we face in terms of the role that the Education Standards Board plays in being the regulator under the national regulations in terms of the quality, safety and standards that need to be met by our child care, preschool, out-of-school-hours care, vacation care and other learning and care institutions and that there has been a longstanding issue around the capacity of the ESB (the Education Standards Board) to carry out their job and keep pace with the number of checks of those sites that it is supposed to do each year.

Of course there was, as some members may have seen—yesterday, I think it was—a very interesting article in the Adelaide Advertiser by Lauren Novak which went into some important detail around some of the challenges that we are facing, particularly in terms of staffing, with out-of-school-hours care.

It will not come as a surprise to anyone in this place that skills shortages are a national problem. We are not immune to it here. We are certainly not immune to it in my portfolios, and nor are we immune to it in terms of out-of-school-hours care. I was pretty frank, I thought, in my comments, and I said that I thought that OSH had been treated like the poor cousin for far too long. It has not been prioritised.

I say this as someone who relies very heavily on OSH as a parent of three daughters in the public education system. We use it all the time. I am constantly in admiration for the staff who work there. They are more often than not younger, they are paid less and they get our kids when they are at their most tired and ratty, at the end of the day, and are expected to care for them.

Of course, we have a jobs and labour market here now where there are basically a record number of job vacancies, and it is increasingly a very hard value proposition to put to a person around why they should choose teaching, why they should choose child care, why they should choose out-of-school-hours care as opposed to another job which might be available and probably requires less stress and concern for the young people they are caring for and probably pays more as well.

I give that background because that is one of the issues driving some of the incidents we do see at some of our sites, particularly in OSH, to which the article on the weekend referred. But I want to lay to rest here—and I appreciate the opportunity that the member for Morialta's question has given me—to say that there is no government in South Australia which has done more to prioritise the issues around out-of-school-hours care than this one. We might only be 16 months into our term here, but there is no South Australian government that has done more to prioritise the issues that the early years sectors face than the Malinauskas Labor government.

It was out of opposition that we announced, along with the Deputy Premier and the Premier —and it was the Deputy Premier who actually drafted the first terms of reference—and we sat down and all agreed that we absolutely need to have a term of reference in there which deals with issues around accessibility, affordability and quality of OSH. I can tell you that in terms of your specific question, member for Morialta, I may defer to the Treasurer for specifics, but I understand that there is provision in the budget.

That, of course, is the Treasurer's purview, and I am confident that some funding will towards the ESB should be a part of that provision. We have received the royal commission's interim recommendation, which I think amounts to about $2.2 million that is needed, and we are absolutely clear on this side of the house how important that is. I very much look forward to hearing a bit more about what might be coming out in the budget later in the week.