Early Childhood Literacy Forum

Statistics from the Australian Early Development Census Community Profile 2018: Latrobe Victoria show that a large number of children in Latrobe City are not equipped with adequate literacy and communication skills when they start primary school. This often includes physical literacy, that is, coordination and motor skills. Because of these problems’ children are experiencing delays in multiple aspects of their education throughout their school years.

Due to the large number of early childhood literacy and numeracy providers in Latrobe, the Assembly hosted an early childhood literacy forum to encourage providers to work collaboratively to identify any gaps in service provision in Latrobe City.

The Early Learning Literacy Forum provided participants the opportunity to network and create greater connectedness and promoted the opportunity for self-led innovation in the early childhood literacy field.

The forum was well attended with close to 50 people from major stakeholders in the early childhood literacy field taking part.
The key topics that were discussed at the Early Leaning Literacy Forum include:

• A need for a system to track students if they moved from different day-care centres/kindergartens/schools;
• Importance of parent education, to be able to build confidence, knowledge and skills;
• Better incorporation of technology into education from a younger age (e.g. day-care centres and kindergarten);
• Education for parents and children around nutrition, health eating and budgeting with “real” money;
• A network database for literacy providers so that providers can know who else is doing similar work in the area; and
• Need for emotional literacy education.

Attendees of the Early Learning Literacy forum expressed a desire to continue the momentum via town based meetings between providers. These occurred during June 2019 with investigations underway on how we can action the concepts raised at the four meetings. Further updates will be added in future editions of this document.