Our vision is ‘A great future for every Queenslander'.
Our purpose is to give all children a great start, engage young people in learning, create safe and inclusive workplaces, build Queensland's communities, and foster a more sustainable racing industry.
Our strategic direction
Our
Strategic plan 2021–2025 was published on 1 July 2021. It outlines how we will achieve our vision for a great future for every Queenslander through six strategic objectives:
- a great start for all children
- every student succeeding
- building Queensland communities
- safe and capable people delivering our vision
- fair and safe workplaces and communities
- a sustainable racing industry in Queensland.
Each objective has a set of strategies to help meet our objectives and performance measures to monitor our progress.
Our service areas and objectives
Our strategic objectives are delivered through our service areas, which support us to provide a broad range of responsive services to support government and departmental commitments and priorities.
|
A great start for all children
Building Queensland communities |
Early Childhood Education and Care Queensland children engaged in quality early years programs that support learning and development, and strengthen successful transitions to school. |
Every student succeeding
Building Queensland communities |
School Education Queensland students engaged in learning, achieving and successfully transitioning to further education, training and work. |
|
Fair and safe workplaces and communities |
Industrial Relations To improve the wellbeing of all Queenslanders by making Queensland safer and supporting fair and productive workplaces. |
|
A sustainable racing industry in Queensland |
Racing Administering the
Racing Act 2002 (Qld) and managing programs that support a viable, prosperous racing industry in Queensland. |
Each service area includes performance information about how we deliver services efficiently and effectively to achieve desired service delivery outcomes. The performance information for each service area is included at the end of their relevant section in this report.
Our challenges
In delivering on our strategic objectives we identified the following challenges:
-
Safety and wellbeing: Addressing complex issues impacting the wellbeing and safety of children, students, communities and our workforce.
-
Overcoming disadvantage: Reducing the impact of disadvantage through targeted interventions and culturally appropriate support.
-
Fit-for-future investment: Investing for future generations and responding to the needs of our dispersed and diverse communities.
-
Contemporary practice: Leveraging technology and adapting our approach to advance teaching, learning and new ways of working.
-
Building resilience: Strengthening our prevention and preparedness approach and building resilience for disruptive events and climate impacts.
Our opportunities
We also identified opportunities to deliver on our strategic objectives:
-
Prepare young people for the future: Building lifelong learning and the skills to prepare young people for the future of work.
-
Evidence-informed decisions: Informing our approach using research, data and evidence to integrate new thinking into everyday practice.
-
Place-based responses: Improving outcomes through the collaborative efforts of community, stakeholders, industry and government.
-
Workforce culture and leadership: Developing leadership at every level and a skilled workforce to deliver quality outcomes for Queenslanders.
-
Embrace diversity: Harnessing the experience, skills and perspectives of diverse cultures, languages, abilities and identities.
Queensland Government's objectives for the community
The government's direction is informed by its broad objectives for the community. As one of the state’s largest agencies, we play a key role in contributing to the following objectives:
- Safeguarding our health and jobs by supporting wellbeing and safety in the early years and schools, communities and workplaces
- Backing our frontline services and our diverse workforce by engaging healthy, safe and capable people across Queensland communities
- Building Queensland by creating jobs and driving fit-for-future investment in social infrastructure and technologies
- Investing in skills by educating young Queenslanders for the future of work to prosper in the economy
- Protecting the environment for future generations by investing in energy-efficient and cleaner, greener technologies in schools and workplaces
- Growing our regions by driving economic prosperity and sustainable investment in services across our diverse and dispersed communities.
The objectives are built around the
Unite and Recover—Queensland’s Economic Recovery Plan with a focus on protecting our health, creating jobs, and working together.
Queensland public service values
Our employees' behaviour and decision-making are guided by the Queensland Public Service values:
- Customers first
- Be courageous
- Ideas into action
- Empower people
- Unleash potential
- Work safe, learn safe, be safe
Our Mandatory All Staff Training program includes a component that emphasises the importance of adhering to, and promoting, the Queensland Public Service values.
Public Sector Ethics
We believe that today's decisions shape our reputation tomorrow. Throughout 2021–22, we have continued our integrity focus and strengthened understanding of the values within the Queensland Government Code of Conduct, our departmental Standard of Practice and the
Public Sector Ethics Act 1994 (Qld) (PSEA).
The department complies with the PSEA and the
Public Service Act 2008 (Qld) through the following measures:
- All new employees undertake mandatory all staff training within one week of joining the department, which includes an ethics and integrity component. Following mandatory onboarding training, all employees must complete public sector ethics training every 12 months while employed with the department.
- In 2021-22, we released the 'What's your Integrity IQ?' quiz, to educate staff on conflict of interest risks.
- In December 2021, the new Conflict of interest policy and procedure, and Notification of other employment procedure were published to outline departmental obligations and expectations on staff for disclosing and appropriately managing conflicts of interest.
In 2021–22, we placed significant emphasis on asking employees to consider what integrity means to them and how it translates in their workplace behaviour, including speaking up and reporting suspected wrongdoing. As part of this, our new
Integrity Long-Term Plan was released, which supports our existing Integrity Framework.
The plan seeks to ensure a workplace culture that prioritises building public trust and confidence in our services, and ensuring resources are invested effectively to deliver better outcomes for Queenslanders.
Under the Plan, we are:
- identifying key focus areas for preventing fraud and corruption and a timeline for action
- addressing risks identified through our Enterprise Risk Management Framework, audit activity and relevant Crime and Corruption Commission report findings.
Our people
As at 30 June 2022, there were:
- 94,636 employees or 75,267.1 full-time equivalents (FTE)
- approximately 94% of the workforce based in schools.
The table below shows the FTE as at 30 June in the respective years.
Staffing
| Early Childhood Education and Care | 319 | 319 | 319 |
| School Education | 74,127 | 73,963 | 74,499 |
| Racing | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| Office of Industrial Relations | 885 | 885 | 885 |
| Total FTE
1,2,3 | 75,334 | 75,170 | 75,706 |
Notes:
- The difference between the 2020–21 Adjusted Budget and 2020–21 Estimated Actual is due to lower student enrolments in the 2021 school year than forecast, seasonal factors such as school vacation periods and local staffing needs in schools.
- The increase in the 2021–22 Budget FTEs relates to additional school-based staff associated with forecast enrolment growth and election commitments.
- FTEs include staff funded from all sources including state and commonwealth funding, as well as school purchases.