Page 3777 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 22 November 2006
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Towards 2020 proposes a vision that is forward looking and seeks to bring the community with it. The first part of Mrs Dunne’s motion is quite acceptable to the government, but the second part seems to be a vision suited to the Second World War. Education has changed significantly since then and the needs of children and families have changed. Now is not the time to seek to turn back the clock.
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (3.34): I thank Mrs Dunne for continuing to pursue the issues relating to the proposed 2020 school closures. I know that the community appreciates it very much as well.
Mrs Dunne’s motion points out some of the complexities of the situation of individual preschools, and I agree that preschools have been overlooked in the 2020 strategy. But we have to take care not to oversimplify any debate in this place because we really need to consider the complexities of issues before we leap in and cast a judgment or propose a sweeping course of action.
This government’s decision to reshape Canberra’s preschool sector in such a short time frame without any meaningful consultation and in the absence of a collaborative approach with the Canberra preschool community as a whole is simply stupid. It is stupid because, in choosing to push through the changes so quickly, this government has created enormous unnecessary problems for the many parents and others involved in the provision of preschool education in the ACT. The Canberra Pre-School Society has called for more time so that parents can reorganise their complex childcare and preschool arrangements and wind up the operations of their preschools, where necessary.
Preschools in our society are a partnership. While they are now largely government funded, they are only manageable and affordable because of the contribution of the preschool societies, which are technically, legally and, in practice, partners with the ACT Government. Perhaps Andrew Barr and Jon Stanhope are not aware of how complex it all is. If they had listened to preschool parents or demonstrated some empathy towards them, they could have found out.
It is important to acknowledge that the society does accept the link of preschools into primary schools as a part of a plan for a more integrated approach to early childhood education. The Greens are on the record as opposing the way this plan has been put into place, and shortly I will come back to how the government has presented the case for this course of action. The preschool society has bent over backwards to be cooperative.
On the time frame, it is important to emphasise again that this government could have had the preschool sector as partners in this project if it had bothered to work with them. However, at no stage that I am aware of have the minister for education or the Chief Minister bothered to explain in this place or to the ACT community why the plan to shut so many of these preschools and to bring the others more firmly into the orbit of the local primary school could not have been managed over 18 months, rather than six.
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