Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is great to have the opportunity to talk about this incredibly important issue of early education. It is always entertaining to listen to privileged people trying to give each other lectures on what it is like to be poor, isn't it? It's fascinating! But I'm always happy to cop it if it leads to better child and early education. We have a friendship group for early education that is very active in this building—the member for Ballarat is my co-convener—and we have these discussions very regularly.

There is no doubt that Australia has an almost unique model of service provision, with our predominantly private early education provision. Then, of course, overlaying that, we have preschool and C&K services. Getting them to work when run by two levels of government is challenging but not impossible. We know that, for four-year-olds, we already have fairly low levels of engagement in preschool, and that needs to be improved. I recognise the former Labor government for the quality standards that they put in place, which, though challenging, have been met by the sector with an overwhelmingly positive response, and we are now seeing real changes with the nature of the curricula materials. We know that you have to start early. We have some of the best products in the world, like 3P Learning's Matheletics and Reading Eggs, providing educational opportunities for children at home to be doing the very basics in literacy and numeracy so that they get the start they need.

But let's talk about where the speedbumps are—because it is not just that one side of politics has all the problems and the other side of politics does all the hectoring; it's actually both sides of politics trying to sort out this area. The first one is privacy and data concerns, where schools can't work with early educators to identify kids at risk and start putting those services in place before these kids turn up in prep and don't know which end of the pencil to hold. We need schools to be able to visit early education centres in their areas and be able to say, 'Can I come and meet some of these children and let's work out a way of mapping it forward?' There's a massive number of services available internationally—coming out of the US predominantly—to benchmark where children are sitting, where their domains are that are weakest, and what we need to do to get them school ready. No-one is going to disagree on that; that's important.

But what is more interesting is that Australia is a unique case because of the nature of our child-care mix in this country. Predominantly, when we look at the evidence of three-year-olds having universal access to preschool, in the context of four-year-olds already not taking it up, the question is: how far are we pushing the economics moving down to three-year-olds attending preschool? The data mostly comes from Europe. It is thanks to diligent work by the OECD. When they looked at PISA results for students in primary school, they found that they were able to map back and see definitive benefits in European economies if they went to preschool—and that is quite legitimate. They had a certain number of years of preschool prior to starting school. The problem is that that data doesn't reflect itself in Australia, and there are a number of reasons that that could be the case.

We are talking about a 30 PISA point benefit to children attending preschool. It almost seems like you can't argue against it. But there is one problem: most economies don't have an extremely high acuity measure of socioeconomic status for children who are attending preschool. Australia does; we are lucky to have the ICSEA score, which uses the household's level of income, their highest level of education, indigeneity, remote and non-English speaking background to map out exactly what communities these children come from who do and don't attend preschool. There's no point getting into a detailed debate on that data, but, when you control for socioeconomics, the preschool benefit all but vanishes. There are plenty of wealthy, successful families accessing preschool and self-evidently doing better. When you come to Australia, the whole benefit of four-year-old preschool, as mapped by OECD, is a humble seven points. When they adjusted it for socioeconomics, it fell to just one point benefit. This is in the realm of no impact whatsoever doing an additional year's preschool. And the reason? Because the people who attend early education are already doing well enough at home, to the point that it actually doesn't matter if they're there or not.

The group we must focus on is the lowest quintile that doesn't attend child care in this country. In parts of Scandinavia everyone, holus-bolus, goes into early education and they're all there. But in Australia, we have the unemployed household, we have the group where no-one works, no-one intergenerationally ever has worked, and these people aren't taking up child care for their own reasons. And they won't take up preschool unless we can find a way around that.

Australia's problem is the non-working household. We are one of four countries—we're level with New Zealand, the UK and Ireland—to have the highest proportions of those in the world, and those four countries are going to get the least benefit of having universal preschool, because the kids who need to be there simply do not turn up. Now it's not a reason not to do it, but it's a reason to get four-year-olds in there first; it's a reason to acknowledge that they need to be identifying those communities and those families most at risk and finding a way to get them there. The coalition did that with 12 hours free child care—I'm glad they have—and that's the way forward: working with that lowest quintile.

See this speech in context