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Children's Week 2024 takes place from 18-27 October, to celebrate the rights and wellbeing of children.

The campaign, run by Meerilinga, serves as a reminder of our collective responsibility to protect and advocate for the rights of children, ensuring they experience a childhood safe from harm and abuse. This year’s theme is ‘Children have the right to a clean and safe environment’.

DLGSC engages extensively with children and young people through the services we provide, the organisations we fund, and as part of our commitment to fostering a cohesive, prosperous, vibrant and healthy WA community.

Here’s a just a few of the ways we celebrate and support children and young people.

Last year more than 333,000 children and young people in WA participated in organised sports. Our highly successful KidSport program is a long-term, statewide initiative to reduce the financial barrier to participation in community sport for low-income families by providing funding to eligible children aged 5 to 18 years.

Since its launch in 2011, KidSport has provided more than 124,000 children with more than 336,000 vouchers, distributing more than $51.6 million to help children across WA participate in community sports and swimming lessons.

We also work closely with industry partner SportWest to fund and implement its TrueSport program, which delivers a range of educational tools and resources to the sport industry on child safeguarding, mental health and wellbeing and sideline behaviour practices.

In 2023-24 our 5 recreation camps hosted 671 school bookings. More than 95% of the activities delivered are for children and young people, which resulted in more than 137,000 participations, equivalent to 206,100 physical activity hours of instructor-led programs.

DLGSC plays a vital role in promoting arts and culture for young people. Since launching the Creative Learning Partnerships program in 2022, 223 schools from 8 regions participated, benefiting 32,000 students and 270 artists with more than $4.6 million in funding.

In 2023-24, the Partnership Acceptance Learning Sharing (PALS) program supported 288 schools with $796,000 to promote reconciliation and celebrate Aboriginal cultures.

Additionally, we partnered with Healthway to launch the Creativity and Wellbeing for Young People pilot program, providing $600,000 to 8 organisations working with children and young people.

DLGSC supports a variety of cultural institutions, including the Art Gallery WA, WA Museum and State Library of Western Australia, all of which are dedicated to nurturing the growth and development of children and young people across WA.

The Art Gallery WA (AGWA) is dedicated to creating inclusive spaces where children and young people are welcomed. Through engaging programs and workshops designed specifically for children and young people, AGWA encourages creativity and exploration through interactive art experiences.

The WA Museum is continuously evolving its offering to meet the interests of children and young people. In 2023-24 the WA Museum welcomed close to 1000 schools and 50,000 students across its 7 public locations and engaged with nearly 9000 teachers.

Plans for the upcoming year include new exhibits, enticing temporary exhibitions and a wide variety of workshops, school holiday programs and events all designed to engage, educate and entertain young visitors.

The State Library of Western Australia (SLWA) offers education workshops and children's programs both in person and online, and supports families across the state through 233 public libraries and the Better Beginnings program. Better Beginnings promotes early literacy by providing book packs to every baby, toddler, and kindergarten student in WA.

In 2023-24, the Office of Multicultural Interests supported 53 community language schools, teaching 34 different languages to 7366 students through the Community Languages program.

DLGSC’s Aboriginal History WA (AHWA) unit continues to educate children and young people about Western Australia's cultural heritage, producing historical publications and learning resources for schools.

This year, AHWA welcomed a new collaboration with the Follow the Dream program which saw the unit and SLWA provide Aboriginal history information sessions to Year 8 to 10 students. The session introduced students to key resources produced by AHWA and demonstrated how to access family history records and SLWA’s Storylines online archive.

To ensure children and young people are safe, respected and empowered when they engage with us, our Child Safeguarding Implementation Unit has been leading DLGSC’s delivery of a number of important child safeguarding reforms.

These include contributing to the WA Government’s Statement of Commitment to Child Safety and Wellbeing, establishing a child-friendly complaints process, and delivering targeted safeguarding training for staff working in our 5 recreation camps. 

We are also embedding child-safe policies into our recruitment and operational processes, implementing the National Principles for Child Safe Organisations through our Child Safe Actions Workplan, and have developed a self-assessment tool for local governments to help understand and respond to child-safe reforms.

We believe child safety is everyone's responsibility.