Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth. How will the government's plan to establish an early years quality fund improve the quality of child care and support childcare workers and educators?

Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Moreton for his question. There are some 14,260 children who live in Moreton. In fact, the member has a four-year-old son called Leo who attends child care. There are 135 childcare services. Our decision to lift the childcare rebate from 30 per cent to 50 per cent resulted in an additional $7.5 million ending up in the hands of Moreton families in 2011-12.

The fact is that the early years are absolutely crucial to a child's development, so it is very important that we have a professional early childhood workforce in place to improve the quality of early childhood services. That is why, as the Prime Minister has already referred to today, we were pleased to announce a commitment of $300 million over two years to improve the quality of child care through improved wages for early childhood educators through the early years quality fund.

We really want to make sure that early childhood educators are well supported to do the best they can to care for and educate our children. The fund will provide services with the support to enable $3-an-hour increases for eligible certificate III qualified educators and proportional increases for diploma and bachelor degree qualified staff. It is a significant increase for early childhood educators.

To be eligible under the grants the services will have to demonstrate a commitment to the National Quality Framework—an initiative which has been led by this government—which is intended to make sure that wherever families drop their kids off for early childhood care and education they know that the services are the best that they need to be.

In addition, we will fund a pay equity unit to be established within the Fair Work Commission, and that will provide assistance with data and research collection and specialist pay equity information. This announcement is in addition to the government's existing investments of around $190 million in a range of measures to train and retrain a highly qualified early childhood workforce. That has included the removal of TAFE fees for diploma qualifications, a reduction in the debt of early childhood teachers, and introduction of formal recognition of prior learning assistance. We understand how important it is and we have continued to work with the states and territories on the Early Years Workforce Strategy.

On top of that we also have the commitment to universal access for all kids in the year before they go into school, and we are seeing some extremely good results, with a number of states having their universal access figures really starting to deliver the goods. It is encouraging to see these improvements. I want to acknowledge the important work that was undertaken by United Voice—I think some of them are here today—and others. At the end of the day this government understands how important it is to support early childhood care and education and the workers who do an absolutely wonderful job delivering that service.