Early childhood is a crucial time.
We need to work to ensure that teachers are supported in exploring and developing new ideas and sharing good practice we can take the best of all programs and develop some Tasmanian Exemplars not always borrowing from other places. Literacy and numeracy learning and teaching have a high priority throughout all the years of schooling. The Department of Education has a particular emphasis on trialling and implementing programs which support explicit literacy and numeracy teaching. There is an emphasis on intensive literacy and numeracy teaching and learning for all students in the first three years of full-time schooling. This emphasis is based on clear research evidence which suggests that these are the crucial years for developing competence in literacy and numeracy.