The Senior Secondary Reform presents our state with an important opportunity to improve educational outcomes for students. Furthermore, it provides us with the chance to strengthen our communities by encouraging and normalising active community participation in the formative years of development and learning.

Working Together to Build Victoria’s Early Childhood Education Workforce

This submission to the Strategy highlights the need for a greater understanding of the role volunteers play in the sector, the value of their current involvement, and the potential contribution that volunteering can make to meeting the Strategy’s aims of attracting and retaining a quality Early Childhood education workforce.

Volunteering is critical to sport and recreation, and its partner sectors. Sport and recreation organisations and services would not be viable without the contribution of volunteers. Victorians volunteer for sports and recreation more than for any other activity, making it the largest volunteer base across all sectors.

The Current State Disability Plan for 2017-2020 titled “Absolutely Everyone”, apart from one point, does not specifically reference volunteering. This is despite the significant and critical role that volunteering plays in the disability sector, in the workforce that supports disability services and indeed in the lives of people with disability across all sectors of the community.

This Position Paper seeks to bring into focus the elements of the Final Report of the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System which relates to volunteering, so that the Victorian Government can incorporate the following ideas in its response to the Commission.

We have written to the Hon Luke Donnellan (Minister for Child Protection, Disability, Ageing and Carers) and Anthony Carbines (Parliamentary Secretary for Carers and Volunteers) with our proposal for the Victorian Government to invest in a sophisticated place-based partnership model to reinvigorate and sustain this important infrastructure into the future.

We have been working with Volunteering Australia and other S/T peak bodies and volunteer resource centres to plan the re-design of the VMA.

We believe there is an opportunity through the development of the Victorian LGBTIQ+ Strategy to take a further systemic and strategic approach to improve LGBTIQ+ inclusion in our communities, by building greater capacity for inclusive volunteering in our sector.

We call on the Government to exempt volunteers in the disability sector from the costs of screening checks as is currently, and will continue to be, the case with volunteers who work with children.

We welcome the opportunity to submit to the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee (PAEC) on the Victorian Government’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic.