Tag: early education

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Government announces new trials for extended ECEC hours

The Gillard government will today announce new national trials that will include family day care options in the home for parents who do not work standard 9-5 office hours as well as the extended childcare centre hours.

The national experiment will cost $5 million and seek to answer not only whether extended hours are viable for centres but also track whether they reduce the stress levels of families.

Samantha Maiden, Sunday Mail (16/3/2013)

In an election year, “trials” of this kind were an inevitability. It is no doubt a tricky issue – casualisation of the workforce and issues for shift-workers have always been around. While I am in principle supportive of measures to deal with those issues, I am wary of any measures to extend hours for early childhood education and care centres.

As I have written before, turning ECEC into a 24/7 convenience destroys any chance of the sector being viewed as fundamentally an education sector, and as right to children. Instead, it will remain a workforce participation measure and a right for families.

This is fundamentally inequitable for children, and raises substantial questions around how seriously Australia takes the wellbeing and educational rights of children.

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Greens to push for new inquiry into ECEC

Ms Hanson-Young said the government could no longer ignore child care, which is shaping up to become a key election issue.

”The Labor government can’t continue to pretend that nothing needs to be done,” she said. ”The sector needs proper funding reform if it is to lift quality standards and meet the needs of families.”

A national survey of 230 child-care centres conducted by the Greens in January found that fees were increasing while availability was declining in a number of areas.

Rachel Browne, SMH (12/3/2013)

An inquiry into the funding of ECEC could potentially be very positive for the sector and for children. The current funding model is heavily weighted in favour of profiteering private operators and makes raising quality standards very difficult.

But history tells us that the inquiry would likely focus on waiting lists, fees and workforce participation rather than the best interests of children.

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What does education mean in the age of Google?

[Children’s author James] Marsden said that while some schools are “absolute groundbreakers” in the way they foster innovation and open-mindedness, others are sticking to a 1950s didactic education model.

“Children graduate without the social, emotional and intellectual skills to be as successful as they might be,” he said. “They are in more danger of failing in a lot more areas of their lives.”

Cosima Marriner, SMH (10/3/2013)

The education system is arguably little different from the schools of the early 1900s. With information available at the click of a smartphone search bar, how are we preparing children to be confident, capable and active citizens in this information society? An particularly important question for early childhood educators.

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Overcoming prejudice as a male educator in ECEC

Being the only man on this female dominated course and the butt of the teachers’ jokes was hard in the beginning. “I cried every evening for the first few weeks. I had a good friend there who helped get me through it but I spent a lot of time crying into my pillow at home,” [John Warren] admits.

This did happen many years ago and he says “things have improved since I started out but men still encounter prejudice” and men are still very much a minority in childcare as only two per cent of the early years workforce is male and this statistic has remained steady in the past decade, despite national and local recruitment campaigns aimed at men.

Sue Learner, daynurseries.co.uk (7/3/2013)

I am lucky to have had a mostly positive experience (with a few exceptions) as a male early childhood educator in Australia. But the numbers are still low in Australia, and I have heard a lot of my male colleagues still suffering similar prejudice and suspicion.

This will continue to be a major challenge for the sector until a coordinated and holistic approach to recruiting male educators is implemented.

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Retail more financially rewarding than educating children

[Tanya Holmes], a traineeship diploma educator at South Penrith’s Bollygum Childcare Centre, will complete her diploma of children’s services this year.

Ms Holmes said she was forced to take a second job, in retail, to make ends meet.

And she was considering leaving the industry because it was too tough to provide for her family.

Alexis Carey, TheTelegraph.com.au (7/3/2013)

Great to see more of the individual stories of struggling educators out there, particularly on International Women’s Day.

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Attention on the lack of men in ECEC, but what are the causes?

[Early childhood educator] Mr Wagland, 48, happily spends most of his days interacting with children outside, passing on his love of the environment, focussed “on ground level”.

“You don’t notice that your workplace is full of women because you are actually working with children all day,” he said.

Martina Simos, Adelaide Now (4/3/2013)

To be blunt, this article is an incredibly lightweight look at a complex issue. Childcare SA President Sam Mahony (who recently threatened to use ECEC children and families in a political campaign against Minister Kate Ellis) claims that men are wary of entering a female-dominated industry, which may be true, but he does not (in this article at least) raise the issues of professional wages, professional respect and potential suspicion of men who choose to work with young children.

Mr Wagland’s comments also unfortunately reinforce existing stereotypes on men who work with children. Happily spending his days outside with the children is great, but tends to reflect a preconception that male educators and teachers focus on physical development and games with children. This ignores the male educators and teachers who work with children in other areas across the range of holistic early childhood learning. This then creates further challenges for men who do not fit the existing stereotype to join the sector.

As for the comment “You don’t notice that your workplace is full of women”, this is sadly entirely missing the rather obvious point that ECEC workplaces are full of women. This is tied into cultural norms that place women in the role of caregiver, and then into low-paying and lowly-respected roles as essentially “babysitters”.

I would suggest to Mr Wagland that he perhaps takes a another look around his centre and advocate for community recognition of his work and the work of his colleagues he appears not to have noticed.

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New Zealand campaign to improve early education launched

Cuts to funding are eroding the quality of ECE services and the union wants the Government to commit more money to ECE in the next budget, NZEI national president Judith Nowotarski says.

“It is a great cause for concern that earlier gains such as a goal of having 100 percent qualified teachers in ECE centres have been dropped and centre sizes have been allowed to balloon out to 150 children,” she said.

“Quality ECE is crucial for all children but is particularly important for those children who come from low socio-economic backgrounds.”

3 News (3/3/2013)

A great shame to see early education services for New Zealand children and families being reduced. New Zealand has a progressive and respected approach to early learning with children – particularly Te Whāriki, NZ’s early learning and development framework.

The conservative government of the United Kingdom has also flagged rolling back reforms to their ECEC sector. What would these moves signify if we end up with a Liberal Tony Abbott-led government in September?

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Is a lack of high-quality ECEC holding back women’s rights?

The U.S. lags far behind other industrialized nations in establishing a functional child care system. That’s why President Obama’s recent proposal to provide universal access to preschool is encouraging. While it doesn’t completely address the needs of the 11 million children younger than 5 utilizing child care each week, it’s a step in the right direction for women and families.

Not only does preschool improve the educational trajectory of young children, but universal access to preschool would eliminate one barrier to women’s equality in the workforce — at least, beyond a child’s first three years of life. The work-life policies that [New York Times columnist] Coontz seeks must be accompanied by increased public investment in child care and early education, particularly for the most marginalized women.

Anika Rahman, Huffington Post (2/3/2013)

The childcare sector was set up primarily to provide opportunities for women to enter the workforce, due to entrenched cultural biases towards women taking on the child-rearing role. While it is certainly true that a well-funded and high quality ECEC sector could improve women’s rights in the workplace, it can be problematic to purely view ECEC as a workforce issue. This means that the focus is on workers, and not children.

If we wanted to view ECEC as purely about workforce participation, we could simply cut qualification requirements and regulations and have it as an extremely cheap babysitting service. This would enable more families to afford it and enable great workforce participation.

But would that be in the best interests of children? Surely a superior proposition is to have high-quality early learning for children at no cost to any family – thereby ensuring equity for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. This is the philosophy behind universal-access advocacy, and would be working in the best interests of children, while also giving families (particularly women) choices around their careers.

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United States early childhood educators facing similar pay struggles to Australia

Heather Amos, who works at A New Dimension Child Enrichment Center, said she is actually making less money in the child care field now than she was seven years ago. “It’s not just a physically demanding job but emotionally as well,” she said. “Obviously no one goes into this field to get rich, but I feel given the amount we are investing in the lives of these children, we should earn more.” Still, she has mixed feelings about unions. “A lot of it comes down to who is running the unions, but I feel childcare workers are underpaid for the amount of work we do.”

Sheila Regan, Twin Cities Daily Planet (1/3/2013)

The United States has a much more complicated system of early childhood education and care which varies wildly from state to state. Government funding levels are also a huge issue, with President Obama prioritising an overhaul of preschool funding in his most recent State of the Union address.

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Megan Mitchell appointed as Australia’s first National Commissioner for Children’s Rights

On Monday, Prime Minister Julia Gillard said that Ms Mitchell would ”ensure that the voices of young people are heard by government”.

Addressing the PM and children at a Canberra primary school, Ms Mitchell said the role was ”something the community has been calling for for some time”.

Ms Mitchell said that until now there had been no one person that could ”focus solely on the needs of children and their rights and their interests and the laws and policies and services that effect them”.

Judith Ireland, SMH (25/2/13)

The appointment of Australia’s first National Children’s Commissioner is a great step towards having a truly national and holistic focus on children’s rights.