Key Initiatives
For the first year of this three-year corporate plan, four initiatives will support the achievement of our corporate priorities. These initiatives provide direction for annual planning and strategy development, resource and project planning, and management reporting.
Initiative 1: Blueprint
The Blueprint for Education and Early Childhood Development (2008) sets out the Government’s five-year reform agenda for early childhood services and schools to drive improvement and integration, and help us to deliver the best possible outcomes for all our children and young people.
The Blueprint reform agenda reflects the outcomes of consultation with families, practitioners, education and early childhood stakeholders and the wider Victorian community.
Initiating a systematic approach to the progressive implementation of the Blueprint policy agenda will be a key focus in the first year of this corporate plan.
Initiative 2: Integration
In support of the Blueprint agenda, the Department will work to establish the systems and processes needed to provide the necessary foundations for
an effective organisation and support the successful integration of early childhood development and education.
In the first year of this corporate plan, as well as making strides in the new integrated policy agenda, we will integrate systems and processes in head office, and develop a new operational model for the successful integration of regional staff in early childhood development and school education into one office in each region.
Throughout their lives children face a number of transition points, notably the transition from pre-school to school and the move from primary to secondary school. These transitions present enormous challenges for individual children, for schools and for the system.
These transition points are too often the cause of student disengagement. The Department will work to smooth these transition points and provide a seamless learning and development system for students.
Post-school transitions into further study or work are also a major area of focus for the Department and must continue to be so. The Victorian Government has set an ambitious goal that 90 per cent of young Victorians will complete Year 12 or its equivalent by 2010.
Strong progress has already been made towards this goal, but it will require further work. In particular, we need to improve school based pathways,
further reform the vocational education and training sector, and make a concerted effort to maintain young people’s engagement with education, and lift skills attainment levels.
All of these areas of integration will require us to coordinate our activities with other government departments and agencies and to partner with families, employers and the broader community.
It also means that we will have to continue to foster relationships with local government and other early childhood stakeholders.
Initiative 3: Commonwealth – state relations
Our reform agenda for early childhood and school education is being developed in the context of a new national agenda for children and young people.
An important focus in the first year of this corporate plan will be to take a proactive role in this agenda and help to create a climate for jurisdictions to engage in a collaborative federalist approach to major issues of human capital reform.
There are unprecedented opportunities through COAG and the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA) to create a shared national vision and a collaborative national approach to improving outcomes for Australia’s children. Appendix 2 outlines COAG outcomes and progress measures in detail.
Leading the development of the nationally agreed Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians, which provides a new framework for national aspirations for school education, is a recent achievement for DEECD.
Victoria will continue to work strategically to influence COAG and other nationally agreed policies across early childhood development and education and to ensure that new Commonwealth policies and funding arrangements are based on appropriate principles, agreed outcomes and help deliver on Victoria’s policy and directions.
Initiative 4: Organisational development – human capital, information capital and cultural capital
The Department is committed to being a continuously improving high-performing corporate organisation that is capable of supporting the school and early childhood sectors, through highly devolved management systems, to deliver the best possible outcomes for children and young people.
This initiative will set out an organisational development framework that is simple to understand and that draws together the internal environmental characteristics, organisational culture and leadership capabilities needed to help us become a department of world-class performance.
Key to a high-performing organisation is the people, the information systems and the corporate culture. These can be described as human capital, information capital and cultural capital.
The Department will follow a coordinated, integrated approach to developing the organisation by focusing on human, information and organisation capability in order to meet the strategic agenda outlined in this corporate plan.
In developing a new organisational development strategy along these lines, an important focus will be to simultaneously promote stronger integration across the Department in accordance with key initiative 2 and corporate priority 3.