How Better Beginnings Began and Continues to Grow
You need to learn to read.
It helps you with every other subject and, if you don’t read, you struggle with everything else in life.
Professor Fiona Stanley OAM, Director, Telethon Institute for Child Health Research and former Australian of the Year, recently stated in the documentary Risking Our Kids that, “in Australia, one in four 5 year old children are not ready for school”. Early years research shows that learning to read is one of the most important factors in school success and that an early exposure to books and stories substantially contributes to success in early literacy.
The Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey, released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2006, shows that approximately 7 million or 46% of Australians aged 15 to 74 years have poor or very poor prose literacy (e.g. able to read a newspaper) and document literacy (e.g. able to use bus timetables) skills that do not enable them to meet the complex demands of everyday life and work.
There are strong links between literacy, school performance, self-esteem and life chances with poor literacy skills being linked with lower education, earnings, health and social outcomes as well as high rates of unemployment, welfare dependence and teenage parenting.
Despite this body of research, there had not been a comprehensive early literacy program in Western Australia until 2005 when the State Library of Western Australia developed the Better Beginnings family literacy program that targets children aged zero to three years. The program recognises extensive early years research and best practice and focuses on working in partnership with families and communities to support children’s early literacy and learning and provide successful school readiness strategies.
Since 2005, the Rio Tinto WA Future Fund (RTWAFF), the State Government and Western Australian local governments have partnered to provide funding and in-kind support to develop and deliver Better Beginnings in Western Australia. Better Beginnings is a proven successful family literacy initiative that has delivered over 70,000 reading packs and free books, through public libraries and community health centres, to families with babies across the state. With the ultimate goal to raise literacy levels throughout WA, the program has had a significant positive impact on parental early reading practices, attitudes and beliefs.
Better Beginnings and its partnership model has been widely recognised as a model of best practice as has the government/business partnership that has funded the program. The program has shown itself to be a comprehensive, practical and effective family literacy model that builds relationships between families and literacy resources in the community to open the door to a lifetime of literacy and learning for young Western Australians.