Address to the Homestart Co-ordinators Conference

 

Wednesday 28^th July 2010, Goulburn

Acknowledgements:

I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet, and pay my respects to their elders past and present.

I would also like to acknowledge the Mayor, Carol James, and Director, Homestart National, Marilyn Barnes.

Thank you very much for inviting me here today. It’s a lovely change to have an event of this kind in my backyard, and so, along with the Mayor, I’d like to welcome you to our beautiful part of the country. I hope you’ll enjoy your time in our historic city.

And you are here, of course, to learn and share ideas about how you can do your work of supporting Australia’s children even better.

So let’s begin with a snapshot of Australia’s young children:

• ­       There are currently around 1.4 million children aged under five in Australia.


• ­       An increasing numbers of these children live in one-parent families.


• ­       About half of them are in childcare, with 570 000 children aged between 0-5 in government approved childcare services.


• ­       And they have diverse cultural heritage: around 68,000 young children are Indigenous and many children have parents or grandparents that were born overseas.

Homestart’s mission to support these parents and young children at an early stage in life is a vitally important one.

The evidence has been mounting over the past decades and is now incontrovertible that the early years of childhood are of vital significance to a child’s development.

To quote the National Early Childhood Development Strategy,

All parents and early childhood experts know that the development that takes place in the first few years of life, including before birth, is critically important and is strongly influenced by a child’s experience within the family and community in which he or she grows. After this time patterns of thinking and behaving become more fixed and are difficult to change later in life.

This influence of a child’s social setting on their development was made starkly apparent to me at this year’s Social Inclusion Conference in the presentation by the Director of the UK’s Centre for Excellence and Outcomes in Children’s and Young Peoples Services, Christine Davies.

Part of Ms Davies’ presentation included a graph showing development levels from birth of children from lower and higher socio-economic backgrounds. The graph showed their starting point, that is, how they had rated on basic skills assessments at birth and then how they progressed in the following months.

The results were extremely disturbing. Children who had rated highly on the skills assessment at birth and came from low socio-economic backgrounds, over time, scored lower than those children who had rated low on skills assessment at birth but came from higher socio-economic backgrounds.

That is, by the end of the observed period, the low scoring advantaged babies were at the top of the chart, whilst the high scoring disadvantaged babies were now at the bottom.

In short, they had changed places. Children who would have considered “high achievers” at birth were now below the norm.

What is most disturbing is thinking about the missed potential of these children who started out with such a bright future. This is not only a personal tragedy for the children involved, but it is also a great loss for our community as a whole, which is poorer from the lack of the contribution they might otherwise have made.

This is why children in low socio-economic environments is one of the key focuses of the Australian Government’s Social Inclusion Agenda, which we outlined in the Social Inclusion Statement that Julia Gillard launched at the conference this year, entitled A Stronger, Fairer Australia.

This statement identifies three major challenges for the government to address in this area of children at risk:

1. ­       To act in the early years of a child’s life to maximise the positive influences on early childhood development and encourage all of those around a child to make their contribution.


2. ­       To encourage parenting and family relationships that strengthen the resilience of children as they grow up; and


3. ­       To improve education, health and support services for families and communities where disadvantage is concentrated and where risks are greatest.

 

In the past three years, we’ve put in place an ambitious plan of action to take on these challenges.

Working with the states and territories, we developed the first ever National Early Childhood Development Strategy. The objective of the strategy is to outline how we can work in partnership with the states and territories to build an early childhood system in Australia that is one of the best in the world.

As part of this strategy, we committed $4.4 billion over the next five years towards new initiatives to directly improve the life opportunities of children.

This has included $970 million to ensure that by 2013 every child has access to 15 hours a week of quality play-based early childhood education for 40 weeks in the year before full-time schooling.

The strategy also includes a work-plan to develop a single set of national quality standards for early childhood education that will incorporate an Early Years Learning Framework.

We’ve also been looking at how the Australian Government can better provide services to families and their children. And so we’ve created a new Family Support Program that brings together a number of existing family, children and parenting services, and enables services to better focus on the needs of families and children, especially those at risk.

But perhaps most excitingly of all, we’ve passed legislation to establish Australia’s first ever Paid Parental Leave scheme that will commence on January 1 next year. This will enable more parents to make the decision to stay at home with their new born during the first most crucial months – and is sure to translate into a little more work for you!

As you would know more than most, supporting Australia’s parents and young children is a big job, and the government can’t do it alone. We need community organisations such as Homestart, and your precious volunteers, to ensure we reach more families and children who are in need of a little extra help, moral support or advice.

The work that you do across NSW and now in Victoria too is simply invaluable. The birth of a first child or having several under the age of five can sometimes be a lonely and challenging experience. As a mother of four I remember this only too well!

Your volunteers must sometimes seem like angels to the people they visit – non-judgemental, non-official friendly people who are simply there to help out of the goodness of their own hearts. These are the kinds of roles that only volunteers can fulfil.

Knowing, as a young mother, that the person who is visiting you is there only because they want to help, and not because they need to ensure compliance in some way or another, builds the kind of trust that enables advice to be given and openly received.

This is the real gift of your volunteers – being a “real” person, so to speak, whose personal experience enables not sympathy, but empathy, and the practical knowhow to offer solutions to the many challenges of early childhood.

As co-ordinators of the program in each of your regions, I have no doubt that you highly value your volunteers. I notice that you offer your volunteers a comprehensive training program and ongoing training and fellowship through your volunteers’ conference.

So I’d like to use this opportunity of speaking to you today to bring to your attention a wonderful opportunity next year to honour and celebrate your volunteers.

Next year is the 10^th anniversary of the United Nations International Year of the Volunteer, originally celebrated in 2001. The Australian Government is planning a program of events to celebrate the year, including the launch of the first ever National Volunteering Strategy, and you’ll be hearing more about the other events we have planned on International Volunteers Day this year.

However, it’s important that the community as a whole come together to mark this important occasion and celebrate the enormous contribution our volunteers make to our nation. In the great diversity of ways they make that contribution, from environmental protection to family visits, they – as I like to say – shape our nation.

So I’d like to encourage you, as the coordinators of volunteer-based organisations, to think about what you might do next year to celebrate the contribution of your volunteers. It might be through a special volunteer morning tea during National Volunteers Week in May, or through organising a commemorative book or other token of appreciation to give to your volunteers.

You can discuss how to celebrate 2011 with other volunteers and volunteer managers on the social networking site www.volunteering2021.ning.com. And you could even start the discussion among yourselves here over morning tea today.

I look forward to hearing your ideas. I’m a regular visitor to the volunteering2021 website, so would love to be a part of your conversation.

I wish you all the best as you embark on the rest of your conference today and tomorrow. You’ve certainly got a diverse program. And I hope you will leave refreshed and full of new ideas to take back to your regional Homestart and share with your volunteers.