Universal Three-Year-Old Preschool

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER (Morialta—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (14:15): My question is to the Minister for Education. Will the government allow working parents with children in long day care to access public preschools from 2026? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER: Recommendation 15 of the royal commission, which the government, I believe, has publicly accepted, recommends a model where parents whose children are in long day care programs, as most children of working parents currently are, will be required to have their children to three-year-old preschool offering provided within their childcare centre where possible. It is unclear whether there will be room for their children to access a public preschool for the second year of their preschool program as well.

The Hon. B.I. BOYER (Wright—Minister for Education, Training and Skills) (14:15): I thank the member for Morialta for his question. I am pleased to have an opportunity to speak about Julia Gillard's royal commission report, which the Premier and I released together with the royal commissioner on Sunday. It has a lot of very important recommendations contained within it, 43 to be precise, of which we have immediately accepted 13. That is not to say that we are not very positively predisposed to accepting the other 30 recommendations, but it is just that there is some complicated work to do.

This is the biggest reform for early childhood education in South Australia, probably since the introduction of four-year-old preschool, I think, and we need to make sure that we get it right. The recommendation to which the member for Morialta refers is the recommendation that the royal commissioner makes in her report about a mixed model of delivery. A mixed model of delivery will see some three-year-old preschools delivered in long day care and some delivered by the government system.

One of the other recommendations points to us starting with those 1,000 most disadvantaged South Australian children, which I think people in this place will agree is a logical place for us to start, given that is where we can make the biggest gains in terms of addressing those issues that lead to having young people counted, in the development census, as developmentally vulnerable. The national average for developmental vulnerability in Australia is about 22 per cent; in South Australia, it's 23.8 per cent.

Of course, what that means is that young people at the age of five are not meeting the mark as they should be in a range of indicators, including their growth development, social, emotional, their learning, their executive function. These are things that, if we don't get right in the early years, the outcomes for those young people later in life are worse almost in every single indicator, including employment and housing, in mental health and a range of different things.

The Premier and I on many occasions have had the opportunity to interrogate some of the recommendations here and have asked about the reasoning behind the mixed model of delivery because it is something different. The royal commissioner has made it clear in no uncertain terms that the reason she has recommended that mixed model of delivery is because it is our best and, really, only way of being able to roll it out as quickly as possible but also to get coverage as high as 90 per cent of three year olds in South Australia taking up the opportunity of three-year-old preschool. We have accepted that recommendation.

We have also accepted the recommendation—which is number one and the most important, and I think, really, the recommendation that we should go back to whenever we are wondering why we are doing three-year-old preschool—to reduce the number of developmentally vulnerable South Australian kids from that 23.8 per cent, which is higher than the national average of 22 per cent, down to 15 per cent in 20 years' time, which of course will radically and positively change the life outcomes of those young people.

When faced with the recommendation to have the mixed model, and once we asked those questions around why it was that the royal commission recommended a mixed model instead of a model with a higher coverage within the government system, the royal commissioner gave us the answer that that's how you can achieve the workforce, that's how you can achieve up to 97 per cent coverage of three year olds, and that is how you can have it rolled out by 2032. I think the government did the right thing in accepting that recommendation, which is exactly what we've done.

The SPEAKER: Supplementary question from the member for Morialta.