Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

The ELSA program is built on and expanding on the success of another program, ELLA—Early Learning Languages Australia—which helps to engage preschoolers in languages other than English. We have now seen some 1,800 preschools across Australia choose to engage in the ELLA program, helping more than 60,000 young Australian children to access different languages. Assessment by Deloitte Access Economics and Swinburne University of Technology shows that ELLA is delivering outstanding results already. Around two-thirds of parents and guardians have observed their child using parts of the target language in their home environment. They are taking their learnings of different languages from preschool home with them. This is lifting the expectation and ambition of parents to be able to access and engage their children to continue to learn other languages in future, and 87 per cent of educators expect children to continue with their interest in languages as a result of this exposure. (Time expired)