Early childhood expert Elspeth McInnes, a senior lecturer at the University of South Australia, said it was crucial to have better-paid, more qualified staff.
“Best practice in childcare involves a policy of continuity of care, an environment where the child consistently has a familiar carer available to them,” Dr McInnes said.
“Childcare pay row tests the care factor”, Elissa Doherty (Herald Sun, paywalled)
Big Steps Day on Saturday November 17 was a hit, bringing out a great deal of support from the community for undervalued early childhood educators. The events were well covered, and I’ve collected up some of the major coverage here.
SMH: Caring for children is no picnic, say workers
Canberra Times: Childcare workers rally for more pay
Fraser Coast Chronicle: Childcare workers take action to gain higher wages
Herald Sun: Child care workers march for better pay
The director of Master Kid Childcare Centre in Matraville, Emily Donnan, has been in the industry for 16 years and said she had spent 12 of those working two or three jobs at once.
She said many of her staff were living at home because they could not afford to rent. ”They will never be able to even think of having a holiday, getting a mortgage or even owning their own car,” she said.
Caring for children is no picnic, say workers, Melissa Davey (SMH)
This past week marked the fourth anniversary of the appointment of voluntary administrators Ferrier Hodgson to childcare company ABC Learning, after its stunning public collapse in 2008.
With structural changes aiming to improve the quality of early childhood education and care (the National Quality Framework) beginning to roll out this year and a campaign to improve the wages of early childhood educators making news, it’s a timely anniversary.
ABC Learning was at one time the largest publicly traded childcare operator in the world, at its peak worth $4.1 billion.
It was regularly held up as a shining example of the “free-market” approach to providing early education and care. Its more than 1200 centres (including centres in New Zealand) were used as evidence of the success of John Howard’s changes to the sector — removing the subsidy from service operators and channeling it directly to families.
It was, as we now know, all an incredible sham. The business was in financial turmoil and its founder Eddy Groves is still under economic and legal scrutiny.
In 2008 Labor Government was returned to power, and in 2010 would describe the collapse of ABC Learning as “the greatest ever shock the Australian child care market has experienced”. A Department of Education report, “The State of Childcare in Australia”, identified that “unfettered growth in the provision of corporate child care created an unacceptable risk of serious disruption in the market”.
Crikey’s Bernard Keane wrote in 2008 that the collapse of ABC Learning was not just a business failure, but a serious government policy failure. Keane recommended that “Julia Gillard (then minister for education) should be undertaking a fundamental reconsideration of child care support in Australia,” perhaps including a takeover of ABC’s centres. The Labor Government was continuing the lack of long-term strategic thinking about the goals and growth of the sector, despite investing billions of dollars through subsidies.
Lindsay Tanner, then finance minister, quickly dismissed any notion of a government takeover of ABC. This didn’t come as a shock; if the government became involved in the provision of early education and care to that extent they would have had to take responsibility for the systemic and structural problems that are facing the sector, as well as ABC’s debt.
Not a lot has changed in the four years since ABC’s collapse. Although a large private operator hasn’t emerged to take the place of ABC, around 6000 centres are managed by private, for-profit companies, 71 per cent of the centres in Australia.
The 30 per cent direct rebate to families was increased in 2008 to 50 per cent, and government funding to the sector (mostly indirect, through family subsidies) will reach a projected $22.3 billion over the next four years. Accordingly, the number of children now accessing some form of early education and care has jumped to around 1.3 million.
Yet, despite this significant amount of money, the issues facing the sector have only deepened and become more acute. Workforce retention and turnover is reaching endemic levels and presents a looming disaster as qualification requirements become stricter.
Fees are steadily rising to meet new quality requirements and waiting lists have ballooned, particularly for infants.
But the biggest issue still to face the sector and the community is the one that should have been faced four years ago — the incompatibility of private companies, operating in the sector to make a profit, and quality care.
A recent and timely report from Canada, which has a similar early education subsidy model to Australia, has revealed the inherent contradiction of private operators managing centres while being effectively subsidised by government funding.
Not only does it encourage the kind of financial risk that led to the rise and fall of ABCLearning, the report found, but private operators are effectively paid to push for higher profit margins — which means more children in less space, fewer qualifications and lower wages. All of which can have drastic impacts of the quality of children’s learning and safety.
The same pattern can be seen in Australia. With representation from the Australian Childcare Alliance, which claims to “represent the future of Australian childcare,” the private operators are able to employ a lobbyist to the government to directly advocate for less regulation and caution against raising working conditions for educators.
It should be self-evident that the provision of education and care for Australian children is the responsibility of the community and the government, not private operators. This is not only economically obvious — if the private approach was the best approach government subsidies would be unnecessary — but also ethically obvious.
As was presented to the Government in a submission by Price Waterhouse Coopers in 2011, the only sustainable and equitable model that benefits young children and their families is a government funded and managed model that allows for universal access for all children, regardless of their socio-economic situation.
Community organisations, which currently only provide 26 per cent of early education and care, must work together to present a united front on this issue. Private operators have been effective at coming together and presenting a single voice on issues, which is why the media turn to them for quotes and analysis of early education issues.
The government is currently working with the sector to the implement the National Quality Framework package, which will improve the quality of early education and care services, including lower staff-to-child ratios and higher qualification requirements for early childhood educators.
While the private operators warn of cost increases and burdensome regulation, most experts in the sector actually argue that the changes, although welcome, go only a very small way to creating greater learning outcomes for young children. A lot more needs to be done.
The Gillard Government must face up to the issue that is starting it right in the face. The $22.3 billion it is currently using to subsidise private operators would be far better invested in completely overhauling the sector.
Community organisations are the only operators currently able to fully and ethically represent children and families, but a reluctance to engage in advocacy has been a major failure.
That said, Goodstart Early Learning publicly supported early childhood educators’ union United Voice’s “Big Steps” campaign for government-funded professional wage subsidies for early childhood educators. Ironically, Goodstart Early Learning is the not-for-profit consortium that now manages the majority of centres that ABC Learning mismanaged and left out to dry. There’s a lesson there.
This article was originally published on the New Matilda website.
This Saturday, November 17, teachers, educators, families and children are coming together in a show of support for Canberra’s early childhood education and care workforce.
Big Steps Day is taking place around Australia in support of the campaign for professional wages in the early childhood sector. As well as being a fun family day out with food and entertainment, it has another important purpose.
This year saw the beginning of the National Quality Agenda – a Government framework to improve quality outcomes for children in childcare centres through lower ratios and higher qualification requirements.
However, the starting wage for an early childhood educator is just over $18 an hour.
This, on top of lengthy and ever-changing shifts to meet opening hours and difficulties meeting staffing requirements, has led to an incredible 180 educators leaving the sector every week.
The lack of recognition of the work educators do now no longer affects just the educators themselves. Staff turnover and recruitment challenges for organisations are having a direct and lasting impact on Canberra’s children and families.
Research has shown that the first five years of a child’s life set the scene for the rest of their development – the fastest amount of brain growth and “wiring for learning” occurs before they even set foot in a school.
Early childhood educators are no longer just babysitters. They play a key role in supporting children’s learning, through observations, planned experiences and play.
With a national conversation continuing around the shape of Australia’s education system into the future, and a vision from the Prime Minister that we are in the Top 5 in the world when it comes to education, it is impossible to ignore the early years.
But with a system that is driving educators away and a lack of community recognition for the hard work that goes into every day working with young children, we will not be able to achieve the goal of having equitable access to education for all of our children.
As well as encouraging a lifelong love of learning and providing children opportunities to become aware and engaged citizens, early childhood education and care is fundamental to a great deal of Canberra families.
It’s clear from Canberran waiting list times, particularly infant spaces, that the current system is not meeting the needs of our community. Simply opening new centres (as promised by the ACT Government) will not solve this issue if the mass exodus of educators continues. The ACT faces the very real risk of a spate of centre closures in the next few years.
So I urge all Canberrans to head into Garema Place on Saturday at 11am and support the hard-working and under-appreciated early childhood educators who hold so much of the promise of future generations in their hands.
This article was originally published on the City News website.
[Goodstart Early Learning] Chief executive Julia Davison said the shift to quality early learning meant staff needed higher wages. “For us to be able to continue to deliver quality early learning and achieve positive outcomes for children, we need to be able to attract and retain qualified and experienced early learning professionals,” Ms Davison said.
“Childcare giant backs pay claim, if government pays” (The Australian, paywalled)
Great article up today from Karen Hardy in the Opinion pages of the Canberra Times.
As a parent, one of my biggest bugbears was the turnover of staff, 180 a week, as alluded to by the Big Steps website. Your child would just have become attached to a particular carer, you would have developed a relationship with them yourself, and then they’d leave. I totally understood why, but, in those years when I was in the heart of it, could barely sympathise.
Read more: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/opinion/big-childcare-choices-need-to-be-made-20120803-23khd.html
Once again, we find early childhood education and care (ECEC) back on the front pages.
Fees have risen. Families are outraged. Private services demand reforms are scaled down, or thrown away altogether.
As someone who has worked in the early childhood sector (we don’t call it childcare anymore) for over 10 years, all this news isn’t exactly news.
ECEC in Australia has always sat somewhat uncomfortably in society. Its primary purpose was to increase workforce productivity by allowing new mothers to return to work, and indeed until recent history ECEC sat under an industry or productivity portfolio in government.
For a long time, it was viewed and often managed as essentially day-long babysitting. The workforce were “carers”, and although outcomes for learning and development were observed, these were mostly of the checklist and school-readiness variety.
The sector, with varying degrees of government funding, continued in much this fashion for some time. The Howard government created major structural changes for the sector by directing funds to families, rather than centres.
The Childcare Rebate and Childcare Benefit, aimed at increasing productivity (and also possibly winning a vote or two in a close election), caused numbers of children accessing an ECEC service to sharply jump.
This significant increase in the number of Australia’s young children accessing a centre also coincided with growing bodies of research highlighting that the greatest growth, change and learning in a child’s brain occurs in the first five years of their life – before they start institutional education.
The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children also highlighted that negative impacts across a variety of indications such as social, emotional and physical could have exponentially detrimental impacts later on in life.
Conversely, focusing on positive learning strategies and building social and emotional skills in the first five years had a hugely positive impact down the track.
This confluence created higher expectations for ECEC services to provide a greater focus on education and learning. This culminated in the announcement of the National Quality Agenda for Early Childhood Education and Care, a reform agenda to raise quality standards and bring together a national approach to disparate state and territory regulations.
The National Quality Agenda is now in place, and requires higher standards of qualifications and lower educator-child ratios for children. It has been met with both support and criticism from a sector divided between community not-for-profit services, and private operators represented by the Australian Childcare Alliance.
No-one can argue that higher quality programs and lower ratios are a bad idea for Australia’s children. But, as with most things in life, it all comes down to the money.
Despite the Child Care Rebate and Benefit, families are reportedly feeling the effect of asharp increase in fees over the last year. The Gillard Government is investigating the issue while promoting the large increase in spending on the sector compared to the Howard government.
So, the wheel turns, and despite all the reforms we’re still stuck in the same arguments about fees and waiting lists. Quality outcomes for children are usually put second to the workforce issues in any media report, and ECEC services are once again left to manage relationships with families and children.
I’m supportive of the Government’s reforms to the sector. As a person who loves and believes in my work, I think we should be challenged to provide the best quality education and care to children we can. But the issue that is fundamentally ignored in these debates is the workforce issue – not the national workforce, but the ECEC workforce.
One of the fundamental and mind-boggling dichotomies of the ECEC sector is that it was primarily set up to give women choice and enable them to continue their careers while having a family – a choice that men never had to make.
And yet, according to the Productivity Commission Report into the Early Childhood Workforce, the sector is 97 per cent female and beset by incredibly poor wages, poor conditions and a lack of professional recognition.
The incredible situation is that as a society we created opportunities for women to overcome institutionalised sexism and maintain a career with a family, but to do it we created a workforce “underclass” of women to continue it. It was, and arguably still is, seen as “women’s work”.
Ask any early childhood educator – the job is tough. It isn’t babysitting, and it isn’t sitting around playing with blocks. It’s lots of paperwork, it’s lots of reading in your spare time, and it’s emotionally and physically demanding. $18/hour is not much of an incentive to join the sector.
United Voice, the ECEC union, have stated that 180 educators are leaving the sector every week. Plainly, the status quo can’t continue. Both as an educator and as a father with a daughter accessing a wonderful ECEC service, it is no longer acceptable.
As roundtable talks loom in the distance, it’s time to reframe the debate. It shouldn’t just be about productivity and fees. We need to give the ECEC workforce the same opportunities that they give to the rest of Australia. We need to focus on the best quality outcomes for children.
I strongly urge the Prime Minister to support the Big Steps in early childhood education and care campaign and address the issue of wages and conditions for early childhood educators in any further reforms to the sector.
This article was originally published on the ABC’S The Drum opinion website.
Liam McNicholas 