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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2025-11-25 Daily Xml
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Naracoorte Out-of-School-Hours Care

Mr McBRIDE (MacKillop) (14:38): My question is to the Minister for Education. Will the government step in to ensure that Naracoorte families can get access to out-of-school-hours care before the start of the Christmas holidays? With your leave, Mr Speaker, and the leave of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mr McBRIDE: As you are aware, Naracoorte is without an OSHC service. This is particularly concerning as we head into the summer school holiday period and families are desperate to have some certainty for the care of their children.

The Hon. B.I. BOYER (Wright—Minister for Education, Training and Skills, Minister for Police) (14:39): I thank the member for MacKillop, not just for his question but for his long ongoing advocacy to try to find a solution for his community in terms of finding an out-of-school-hours care service to take over from the one that unfortunately ceased operations. I have some very good news for the member for MacKillop today, and other people in this house. We have found a provider. They are called Our Patch, and they run a number of services in government primary schools. We have been engaging with them for a number of weeks now, hoping that we can come to an agreement where they step in to provide not only that really valuable out-of-school-hours care service but also, as the member for MacKillop said, vacation care, which is equally important to many families. I know that, being in a family who uses that as well.

I want, before I answer the member's more specific question about whether or not we can have this new service up and running for Christmas, to thank the people in the out-of-school-hours care team from the Department for Education, who have been doing this work. That is a team that we put in place as one of our responses to the Hon. Julia Gillard's royal commission into the rollout of our three-year-old preschools—a recommendation that we actually created a team in the Department for Education, responsible for working and finding innovative solutions to problems like this, which we know we have not just in Naracoorte but in other places in the state, and they have managed to do that.

We are working diligently, I can tell the member for MacKillop, to try to have something in place for the Christmas holiday period. I will update him personally on that, but I am sure he would agree this is good news that we have been able to find something for the Naracoorte community. I think it shows our commitment and our dedication in trying to find solutions for regional areas where these gaps are. It gives me a lot of hope, too, I have to say, that in those other parts of our state—and there are many—where there is a shortage of things like out-of-school-hours care, vacation care and child care, we can, by working together, actually find really clever solutions that will work for the local residents.

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