Joint Doorstop Interview with the Prime Minister and Senator Seselja

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

Joint Doorstop Interview with the Prime Minister and Senator Seselja, Mother Teresa Early Learning Centre, Canberra

8 February 2016

ZED SESELJA:

Good morning, welcome here to Harrison to the Mother Teresa Early Learning Centre. It’s great to have the Prime Minister here, it’s great to have Christopher Pyne here and it’s great to have had the opportunity this morning to see young children having the opportunity to learn, the opportunity to learn new things in science and in counting. We know that these are the building blocks for a good education. It is really important the Government invests in these.

We are very proud here in Canberra to have some wonderful schools and Mother Teresa is one of those.

So, it’s great to have the Prime Minister here and with that I will hand over to him.

PRIME MINISTER:

Thank you very much, Zed. Yes, it is wonderful to be here in Harrison and isn't it inspiring to see all the future mathematicians and scientists there? It is remarkable. This is the work of the Government's Innovation Agenda happening right here in this school.

As you know, we are committing an additional $4 million to The Smith Family's Let's Count program and Lisa O’Brien will talk about that in a moment. And also we’re committing another $4 million towards the Little Scientists program and Sibylle Seidler from the FROEBEL Foundation will be talking about that in a moment too.

Now what we’ve recognised if we are to be a successful nation of innovation, we have to have a stronger commitment to science and technology, it has to start right across the board. This is a change for every age, but above all, it needs to ensure that our youngest Australians, the preschoolers, are becoming more numerate, more scientifically literate, and what better way to do that than here in schools with programs like this, that excite them.

So, this is a very important national priority. Programs like this are the building blocks, as Zed said, for our future prosperity. To create an innovation nation, a culture of science and technology right across the board.

Now, between them over the next three and four years these programs will reach another 350,000 young Australians like the three year olds and the four year olds you’ve seen learning to count and snakes and ladders and dominos, building, learning to count with little towers of wooden blocks, blowing bubbles, learning how water is filtered. All of those things are exciting their imagination and ensuring that they in their turn, will go on to create the prosperity and the success that we need to ensure that we remain a first world, generous social welfare net, high wage economy. In fact, the nation we are today. To enjoy all of those things in the future, programs like this need to be successful.

I’d like to now invite Lisa O’Brien from the Smith’s Family to talk about Let’s Count and then Sibylle Seidler to talk about Little Scientist.

LISA O’BRIEN:

Thank you very much, Prime Minister. And thank you to Minister Pyne for your generous support of this Smith Family program. The Smith Family recognise that there were too many children in disadvantaged communities who were starting school without early numeracy. And so we’ve developed this program Let’s Count,which works with [inaudible] educators, with parents so that they have the skills to teach early numeracy at home, so measurement, counting and doing that through games and just bringing maths into the every day.

This is a highly targeted program supporting disadvantage children and it’s a highly effective program. We’ve evaluated it over three years and we really know that we are making a difference to these kids that we are supporting. So, with this kind of support we know that we’re setting up these young people from all communities to be very engaged in the future of the country so really apart of both an innovative and a thriving nation.

So, thank you very much, Prime Minister.

PRIME MINISTER:

Thank you, Lisa.

LISA O’BRIEN:

And I thought you might like a pack for your grandson, so you can bring a little bit of maths into his every day.

PRIME MINISTER:

We’ll do that! Jack will definitely be counting with the help of this.

Thank you.

Now, Sibylle?

SIBYLLE SEIDLER:

Thank you every one for coming. I’m Sibylle Seidler from the Little Scientist Foundation. We are all about STEM education in the early years, and it’s really our pleasure to receive this funding, it will open up a lot of opportunities for us, it will open up opportunities to upskill educators because that’s where we come from. For us, it’s all about upskilling educators and making them very confident to go into the preschool so we focus on three to six year olds, go into their classrooms and to their preschools, and really work with the children and keep on nurturing their natural curiosity.

That’s what it’s all about and that’s really what counts. That’s what we have to harness and that’s what we have to keep on taking through into primary and secondary, because that’s something that will – you know, that natural curiosity, that fun in experimenting, exploring like looking at the natural world and asking why. So Little Scientist is all about also inquiry based learning so let the kids ask the questions and the educators are there to kind of guide them through and take their questions and say why do you think that is. So, that’s really something that we want to foster. We thank the Government for their generous support and just look forward to the next three years because it will make such a huge difference in the next generation of Australians.

Thank you.

PRIME MINISTER:

Now, Sibylle, at the risk of doing the job of all of these great journalists here, just tell us a little bit about the FROEBEL Foundation and how the Little Scientists program is such a big part of preschool education in Germany. Now, Germany is a good example of a first world, highly developed nation, of course which has a very strong commitment to technology and science and innovation, and has really been able to remain at the frontier of innovation. And part of that is this culture of commitment to science. Just talk a little bit about what your program has done in Germany, and how you have brought it here.

SIBYLLE SEIDLER:

Yes so Little Scientists Foundation originates in Germany, it is coming into its 10th year this year and they realised, you know, they had to do something about science education to not fall back and to nurture innovation. So they came about this program. And we have been lucky enough to have FROEBEL, one of the largest early childhood providers in Germany - to know that this concept really works, and it has been 10 years in Germany. It really works, and they were generous enough to seed fund us into Australia. It is quite altruistic, it is like they said more children should benefit from the program and so they have