About the Department

Secretary

Professor Peter Dawkins

The Secretary is directly responsible for management of the Department. He is also responsible for ensuring that the Minister for Education and the Minister for Children and Early Childhood Development are supported by the department in the management and administration of their portfolios. Image of Professor Peter Dawkins, Secretary of the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development

Professor Peter Dawkins joined the Department in 2006.

Prior to that he was Deputy Secretary of the Victorian Treasury, a position he held from April 2005, where he worked on Victoria’s national reform initiative for the Council of Australian Governments (COAG), especially in the area of human capital reform (education, health and work incentives). His more recent activities in this area has been as a member of the COAG Productivity Agenda Working Group.

Peter joined the Victorian Public Service from the University of Melbourne, where he was the Ronald Henderson Professor and Director of the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research from 1996-2005. He also served for a period as Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Commerce while at Melbourne University. He is the author and editor of several books and numerous scholarly articles on a range of economic and social issues. Since the late 1970s he had been a University teacher and researcher in a number of British and Australian universities.

While in academia Peter was a prominent public policy analyst and advisor and served on a number of federal and state government committees. For the Commonwealth, this included the reference group that produced the McClure Report on Welfare Reform; the Prime Minister's Science Engineering and Innovation Council; and the Australian Statistics Advisory Council. For the State Government this included an expert reference group on Commonwealth-State Relations – chaired by Professor Glyn Davis; and the Victorian Workforce Participation Taskforce – chaired by John Button.

Peter is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and a Fellow of the Institute of Public Administration (Victoria).

See: Batting for the team (PDF - 3.9Mb) (Page 31 of Education Times, Issue 11, July 17, 2008)