[00:06.4]
The reason it's important
to think about gender in programs like the one I'm involved in, is that childcare in our society
tends to fall on women. And so if women need to work because,
you know, they've got expenses or mortgages or other things
they need to pay for, they need to work, and if they can't access care for their kids
between the time that school finishes and the time work finishes,
they are locked out of the workforce.
[00:28.7]
And also some of the skills
that these women have are locked out of the workforce as well and that's bad for society as a whole. I'm Edward Okulicz, I'm the Program Manager Outside School Hours Care in Schools and Regional Services,
Department of Education.
[00:45.1]
So my role and my team help schools
with policy and decision making regarding the provision of
Outside School Hours Care. So if they want to know how they can
get a service or they've got an issue with the one they've got,
or just any kind of question about policy or implementation of Outside School Hours
Care, my team is available to help them.
[01:08.1]
The program I run is called the High Intensity Outside School Hours Care Initiative, and we run Outside
School Hours Care in Victorian government specialist schools
for children with disability.
[01:22.3]
We did a gender impact assessment
because we were applying for funding to expand and extend an initiative
we were already running. It had been running
as a pilot for a while, and we saw that it was going really well
and delivering a lot of great benefits and so we were invited to do a budget bid to request funding from Treasury
so we could keep the program going and part of that process is you have to
complete a gender impact assessment.
[01:45.9]
The process I took for this was,
I had a story that I wanted to tell, and I wanted to use the gender impact
assessment as a way of convincing decision makers
that my program was worth funding and so by putting a magnifying glass
on the people that we would be helping and identifying them, so someone reading it could go,
“this is who I'm helping” that's really where I started from and it helps focus your mind
like a bit of a laser when you're actually writing it, because
you always know who you're writing for.
[02:16.3]
The outcome of our budget bid was that we were successful
in getting funding to continue and expand our program,
and I think the gender impact assessment was really helpful for that because it talked about the people
that had a disadvantage and how our program would directly work
to address that disadvantage. So that's women who are trying to access the workforce
but have a child with a disability, the people that will work in the services
and the children themselves.
[02:40.8]
Another thing
we did as a result of the gender impact assessment was, once
we'd identified that women made up the majority of our workforce,
we also became aware that they were not necessarily the majority of leadership
or management within our sector so we built into our contracts
a requirement to support women with progression
and upskilling so they could become the leaders and managers
and bosses of tomorrow within their field.
[03:04.6]
The rollout to more schools has been
a big success, schools are happy, families are really taking to the services. I come out to the schools
pretty regularly. I really enjoy coming out to the schools
because I actually see the people I've been writing about
in the gender impact assessment, when I come back to schools
and look at the programs in action and next time I'm asked to do
one of these gender impact assessments for a budget bid, these are the people
I'll be thinking about when I'm writing.
[03:26.5]
What I would say to anyone
who's about to do one is, you might be doing it
because it's compulsory, but don't view it as something
that's just compulsory. It does have a benefit
and it does help sharpen your thinking. It does help challenge
some of your assumptions, and it does help to place that idea in your mind
about who your program is helping and I think that's something that always
needs to be at the forefront of your mind.
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