Excerpts
The Australian early childcare sector is experiencing a relentless surge in media attention. It has exposed significant concerns about children’s safety and the quality of early childhood education (ECE) across Australia. Coverage includes multiple and widespread abuse incidents, inappropriate discipline, unsafe sleep practices, serious mistreatment, and seemingly ineffectual regulation.
Evidence from the Early Learning Work Matters project points to systemic issues sitting beneath the diverse array of significant concerns across the Australian ECE sector. In ECE, where educator-child interactions are known to be the most significant contributor to individual child outcomes and service quality, educators’ experiences of work and children’s experiences of ECE are inextricably interwoven.
Current concerns around the diminishing quality of educator training programs, increasing casualisation of workforce, along with high turnover rates, attrition, and burnout – are all related to the current concerns around child safety. And yet quality education and care is about so much more than ‘just’ child safety – child safety should be a given.
Early Learning Work Matters
Our latest publication from the Early Learning Work Matters project focuses on educator workload. We surveyed 570 Australian ECE educators. They reported widespread concerns including heavy workloads, particularly non-contact work, regular unpaid hours, and limited and inconsistent access to entitled breaks. Critically, over 70% of educators reported feeling concerned that children are not receiving enough of their time. They also reported that educator workloads in their service are so heavy that they are reducing quality for children. Overall, educators report the nature of their workload and working conditions are reducing their capacity to engage in quality interactions, and to provide a quality program overall.
In the current climate, conditions for both educators and children at large are suboptimal. Genuine and meaningful reform requires thoughtful consideration of the system dynamics that have evolved allowing the current concerning conditions and associated risks to develop.
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Not just the experiences of a few
At times like this, it is important to note that these are not just the experiences of a few, these are not isolated concerns. These are representative of system issues underpinning the sector at large.
A systems-informed analysis does not simply criticise individual providers but interrogates how regulatory settings, funding mechanisms, workforce conditions, and market structures interact to produce current patterns of care. It asks: what and who does the system currently reward, and what or who is neglected? Further, what are the system goals and how are other system elements aligned with them? Crucially for ECE, a systems-informed analysis should ask: what kind of system design do we need to ensure that the best interests of young children—rather than commercial returns—are the driving force of early education provision?
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