NSW early childcare education minister Leslie Williams said the focus of state government funding was for children in the year before they started school and that an additional $150 million was being invested through its preschool funding model.

Mrs Williams said the extension of a national partnership agreement with the federal government for another two years provided “some security about our funding”.

“We’ve just signed off on a new partnership agreement and obviously support more funding coming into the space and we recognise that as I said, parents have a whole, a range of needs they have in terms of childcare and preschool education,” she said.

“We want to do what we can to accommodate those needs.”

Mrs Williams’s appointment to the role of early childhood education minister after the March election separated it from the education minister’s portfolio.

“This is the first time in NSW that we’ve had a minister specifically for early childhood education,” Mrs Williams said.

“So my focus has really been going out and listening to the different centres, bearing in mind they all offer different types of services - long day care, preschool, family day care for example and there are a whole range of funding models there.“

Dubbo MP and deputy premier Troy Grant hosted Mrs Williams during her visit to the city, where she visited two childcare centres.

The minister, who is also the Member for Port Macquarie, said metropolitan and regional parents’ needs were not unalike.

“Obviously just as there are parents in regional communities that require a long day care service, because both parents may work for example, and that certainly applies in metropolitan areas as well,” she said. 

One of the facilities the minister visited at Dubbo was Red Gum Child Care Centre, which opened earlier this month. 

Mrs Williams said the centre was “great to see”.