Thursday, 18 April 2024

Literacy education

Renee HEATH (Eastern Victoria) (17:27): (833) President, firstly, I would like to thank you for hosting such an amazing event and thank all the amazing parliamentary staff. Thank you particularly to Anne and a few others.

My adjournment is for the Minister for Education. Children deserve a quality education, and in Victoria they are not getting one. One in three children cannot read proficiently, and in rural and regional areas that number rises to one in two. Parents of students have reached out to me saying that their kids have reported that classrooms are stressful, chaotic and distracting. A principal told me that in regional areas they cannot recruit teachers, and this is backed up by the data that in Gippsland per teaching position they get 0.7 applications, so it is true. Once they have them they have trouble retaining them. Another parent said to me that because her daughter did not have a strong foundation in reading, she is now stressed because she is behind, and she is worried that she will not be able to catch up.

Being able to read is vitally important, because if you cannot read, you cannot then read to learn. If children have a strong foundation, they can do anything, and I believe that we should be leading the nation with a good education system to give kids the best possible start in life. My adjournment is for the Minister for Education, and the action is that the minister supports our educators to teach phonics in our schools. This would require a broad-ranging review to embed phonics in English and literacy programs and upskilling our teachers to ensure that they have the capacity to support young people so that they are ready for the workplace and the real world.