It was a huge honour to be invited to speak at Community Child Care Co-operative’s 35th Birthday event, alongside such incredible early childhood “rockstars” as Alma Fleet, Eva Cox, Lisa Bryant, Anthony Semann and more. For those on Twitter, check out the hashtag #CCCCis35 to check out some of the incredible moments from the day.
The post below is my prepared presentation at the event – there were some minor changes on the day which reflected what I had heard and been inspired by in the previous presentations.
I would also like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we gather today, the Cadigal People of the Eora Nation. I would also like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land I call home and work from, the Ngunnawal People.
I’d like to wish Community Child Care Co-operative a very Happy 35th Birthday! It is a great honour to be invited by them to speak with you today. As CCCC has been such a positive and powerful force for advocacy in NSW and around Australia, to be invited to speak on that topic is somewhat nerve-wracking!
It is also a huge privilege to be speaking alongside such incredible educators, activists and leaders in the sector. I’ve worked with some of you professionally in the past, some of you I’ve followed through your writing, and some of you I’ve had long arguments with on Twitter.
It was particularly exciting to meet the wonderful Lisa Bryant (@lisajbryant) in person today, who has been a regular social media sparring partner! The early childhood community on social media is growing each day, which can only be a fantastic development.
The ability of social networking and online forums, such as Early Childhood Australia’s NQS Forum, are invaluable to the ongoing discussions, disagreements and arguments that will be shaping the future of our sector.
The late Christopher Hitchens once said that “Time spent arguing is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.”
So I’d like to take this opportunity to thank those in this room that I have spent valuable time “discussing” the finer points of early childhood policy with.
My talk today is focused on policy and politics – hopefully it will be a little more interesting than that sounds!
I set up my blog to explore the nexus between children, policy and politics – obviously particularly focused on the early childhood education and care sector.
As a sector, I don’t think we’ve successfully explored or acted in that space. With my usual arrogance and desire to hear my own voice, I figured I’d have a go.
This is not to denigrate the exceptional work of advocates and activists in this room, or advocacy organisations like CCCCNSW, who do incredible work.
But we need to acknowledge that our advocacy has not been as successful, or as strategic, as we need it to be.
Galling though it may be, we also need to acknowledge that the private operators do advocacy better.
They’re kicking our backsides. The Australian Childcare Alliance has a full-time lobbyist at Parliament House.
They’ve cultivated a close relationship with the new Assistant Minister for Education, Sussan Ley. A close-enough relationship that there is a more-than-passing resemblance to each other’s press releases.
The political agenda on children’s early education in this country is shaped by that advocacy.
So I have worked to focus my advocacy on policy, and politics.
My drive for advocacy has grown as my career has grown. My first love is working directly with children, but my career has slowly moved me away from day-to-day work with them. First as a Centre Director, and now as the ACT Territory Manager for Goodstart Early Learning.
The face-to-face work with children is crucial, it’s everything – and I salute those of you here today who are still in those roles.
From the first time I took on a Director’s role, I felt a powerful responsibility to advocate for the work of those in my team who were doing that tricky and complex work every day as Team Leaders, or assistant educators.
For me, this started with the Big Steps campaign. Although Directors are certainly not paid enough for the work they do, I felt that the privilege of the higher pay-rate, the ability to manage my own time, the greater ability with which I could access professional development and networking opportunities, conferred on me an ethical responsibility to advocate.
This has been particularly clear to me in my current role as an Area Manager – particularly in the new world of the National Quality Framework.
The Framework ask a lot of Centre Directors – they are legally responsible for their centres, with all the pressures and challenges that entails.
Those of us in roles such as mine, without legislative responsibilities and with no direct day-to-day, ongoing work with children, are in what my Manager and professional mentor gleefully describes as “made-up jobs”.
I am not in the ECEC National Law. The Government has not deemed my job to be essential to the successful education and care of Australia’s children.
I’m going to assume there are people in similar positions in the room today – don’t worry, I won’t make you put your hands up!
What I would ask you to do is to reflect critically on your roles – my challenge to you is if you are not advocating tirelessly for those who are carrying out the day-to-day teaching and education with children, you are not doing your job.
I am fortunate to work with an incredible team of Centre Directors in the ACT, and I’d like to just acknowledge their professionalism and work in their communities of children, families and educators.
I reflect every day on the privileges that my “made-up” job entails me, and if I cannot justify my work to that group of incredible women at the end of the day – then it’s not worth me being there.
For me, this means that above and beyond my day-to-day work, of which advocacy is certainly a part, it also means advocating above and beyond my 38 hours a week.
Anything less I could not ethically justify.
My particular focus with advocacy is politics. Political advocacy has always been one of the most common, and most effective, forms of advocacy as it is targeted at those who actually make the decisions.
My interest in politics stemmed largely from growing up as a teenager in the Howard years. I don’t want to get into a big discussion around Right vs. Left, but those 11 years left a deep impression on me and many in my generation.
The issue that particularly engaged me was refugee policy.
It seemed incredible to me, as a naive sixteen-year old, that we could actually make laws and decisions that treated people so cruelly.
That women and men working comfortably in offices in one of the most prosperous nations on Earth could sign documents and make telephone calls that would directly imperil the lives of people fleeing persecution that I could not even imagine.
Now, being from Canberra for the last 15 years, it’s very easy to reduce politics to bureaucracy – to people passing paper around with little-to-no impact on the real lives of people.
Our politics and policies on refugees and asylum seekers helped me realise that politics and policy have a direct impact on every one of our lives, whether we know it or not.
Just as those decisions can directly impact people fleeing persecution from outside Australia, decisions made in Canberra have a direct and deep impact on the work we do, and the communities we do it in.
They are the frameworks we put around our society.
The connection with early childhood policy took a bit longer to come to me, but since then it has informed my work as a professional in this sector.
It particularly “clicked” for me when I came to a single, clear realisation about our work.
Children’s education and care policy in this country is not about children.
It is about workforce participation.
The childcare sector in Australia is entirely set up, resourced and funded to ensure that families are at work and contributing to the economy. This fact informs every part of our sector, every challenge and every frustration.
Australia’s entire policy focus on early childhood education, on both sides of politics, Labor and Liberal, and even in far-left parties like the Green, has nothing to do with children.
This almost made sense in the 1970s, when getting women into the workforce wasn’t just a social and moral challenge, but a practical one.
Women with children were expected to remain at home.
The strides that have been made in gender equality since then are due in no small part to the creation of a formal, regulated and affordable childcare sector.
Greater numbers of women in the workplace have forced organisations to slowly (in some cases, extremely slowly) adapt to the 21st Century.
The childcare sector played a large role in that, and is overwhelmingly positive. But more than 40 years later, the paradigm needs to shift.
It’s no longer enough for us to accept that the early childhood education and care sector is just there to “babysit” children so their parents can contribute to the economy.
The latest figures from DEEWR tell us that for the first time in Australia’s history, over a million children are now in some form of ECEC. This is a staggering amount, and represents a major challenge for Australian society.
At the beginning of my talk I mentioned our friend Judith Sloan. It’s important to analyse her perspective on ECEC beyond her ridiculous comments about “dimwits”.
Her article points to the underlying tension of our work. The notion of universal access early childhood education for all children is a direct attack on conservative “family values”.
The conservative argument is essentially that the best place for a child, any child, is in a stable home with Mum and Dad (certainly not two Dads, or two Mums, but we’ll save that for another time).
I never attended childcare when I was a young child. I still did well in school, have a University degree (admittedly not from a Uni that would meet with Judith’s approval) and have a great job in a sector I love.
My parents had no degrees in early childhood education, but helped set my brother and I up to work hard in our studies (primary, secondary and tertiary) and in our work.
My story would provide “evidence” for conservatives that access to early childhood programs is unnecessary and a waste of taxpayer money.
However, I was extremely fortunate to have two well-educated, stable and loving parents with no mental health issues or other vulnerabilities.
I was given every chance to be successful, even before I was in school.
But we are part of a society where not every child has those same opportunities. Some children will grow up in challenging and disruptive environments, where their parents are suffering immense challenges of their own.
Advocating for universal access to ECE is about ensuring that any child, no matter the circumstances of their home life, can be given the same head start I was given.
So I believe that we are getting near a crossroads – I would actually like us to be at that crossroads now, but unfortunately I think we’re a way off even from that.
Brain research consistently tells us that the first five years are absolutely crucial. Long-term studies like the Australian Early Development Index and the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children also point to those formative years as the building blocks for later life.
With a million children now accessing some form of childcare in those foundational five years, it is no longer good enough for our sector to just be about workforce participation.
We have the incredible opportunity to be improving children’s lives right here and now, and in so doing drastically lower their risk of experiencing vulnerability throughout the rest of their lives.
Children who struggle early will continue to struggle, and will find it harder to engage in formal learning and study, increasing the challenges they will face in employment and housing.
These foundational years all take place before children set foot in a school – and yet our entire education focus for children, from a policy and political perspective, only really begins in Year 1 of school.
So is Australia ready to leave behind the paradigm of workforce participation, and adopt a truly child-centred approach to ECEC?
Yes, the majority of states and territories have some form of funded preschool, but it’s telling that over the last 2-3 years of public debate around David Gonski’s school reforms, preschool and long day care was conspicuously absent.
I’ll be blunt – that our sector was not represented in those policy discussions points to a significant failure on our part, and the need to significantly raise our levels of advocacy.
This was our chance to raise our voices – the challenges we as a society will be helping children to face throughout their childhood years can, and MUST, be addressed in early childhood.
And yet, nothing.
I look at the recent election, and the only time early childhood education and care was mentioned was in terms of fees, waiting lists, planning permits and workforce participation.
Again, this represents a significant failure of our advocacy.
I’m sorry to be the person at the birthday party who brings the tone down, and I understand I won’t be getting many invites to other parties after today!
But if we are to take our advocacy leadership seriously, we need to acknowledge our challenge.
There are advocates in this room who have done incredible work, who have spoken and written and banged their fists on tables around the country. CCCC has done incredible work.
But despite all of that, we have not shifted majority opinion. We have not changed enough minds.
The debate in Australia, beyond these walls today, is not about universal access. It’s not about children’s rights. It’s not about the potential for ECEC to lift children out of structural disadvantage.
It’s about fees. It’s about freezing the CCR. It’s about “flexible opening hours”.
As leaders in our sector, and as advocates for children, we have to do better. It is unacceptable to do anything less.
We know the importance of what we do. We know the challenges, we know the structural inequities that stand in our way. It’s no use convincing the people in this room.
Our advocacy has to go beyond that.
We also know that if we are serious about improving outcomes for children; if we are serious about upholding children’s rights and their voice in our society; then we have to be the ones who are raising our voices.
If people aren’t listening, it’s our job to make them listen. Are we using every opportunity to raise the profile of our work, demonstrate our professionalism and inform people of our potential?
Are we creating opportunities to do those things?
So that is our challenge. I am not doing enough. None of us are.
Until we are having debates in cafes and offices around the best way to fund true universal access to early childhood education for children, we aren’t doing enough.
Until a journalist in a national, televised debate asks a candidate running for Prime Minister what their plans are to use ECEC to improve outcomes for children at a foundational level, we have not done enough.
Until the right of children to fully and freely participate in quality early learning programs is a national priority, and embracing that is a cornerstone of our education, family and health policies, we have not done enough.
So, enjoy the day and particularly enjoy the cocktail party tonight. Because tomorrow, we’ve got some work to do.
I’ve talked a lot about what we’re not getting right, despite the hard work of people in this room today. What are my thoughts on the next steps?
Above all, be fearless. Have arguments. Speak your truth.
Through my limited reach as a writer and participant on social media, I have forcefully and doggedly argued views that have infuriated and aggravated friends and colleagues.
A big one was the Early Years Quality Fund.
A fund that would only reach 40% of the sector, would only last two years and would be awarded on essentially a “first-come, first-served” basis?
This was a deeply flawed funding model, and in my view offensive to me, and those I work with.
I publicly stated that I could not ethically support this Fund, and criticised United Voice for agreeing to it.
In the lead-up to the election, I also publicly voiced my criticism of the Labor Government for their implementation of the National Quality Framework.
This was at a time when the sector was being encouraged to almost band together and cheerlead for Labor.
My firm belief is that the Labor Government categorically failed to implement the NQF in a way that would ensure its survival and growth.
It was a once-in-a-generation chance to change the conversation on Childcare. Labor didn’t do it well enough.
Overlaying the requirements of the National Quality Framework without a plan to address the structural inequities of the system, including the sexist discrimination of low wages, was always going to be problematic.
Are they to be commended for at least attempting? Yes, but I cannot and will not allow partisanship to silence criticism where it is due.
The case for early childhood education reform is a generally “progressive” issue. But this does not mean that advocates for early childhood should just support and “cheerlead” for Labor.
As has been shown all too clearly with refugee policy, Labor is in many ways only a progressive party by comparison with the Coalition.
To put it clearly, blindly supporting Labor without criticism as the only progressive party in town means that if you are, you are now supporting sending pregnant women legally seeking asylum to a tent in Papua New Guinea.
It amazed me the amount of my progressive friends and colleagues who had joined the campaign for Labor, who were suddenly quiet about the issue of asylum seekers after the PNG “solution”.
They had been extremely happy to loudly berate and criticise the Liberal Party, quite rightly, for their policies.
Labor supporters who had criticised the undermining of Julia Gillard by Kevin Rudd and his supporters, suddenly donning Kevin 13 shirts after a quick change-up in the Labor leadership team quite soon before an election.
If the price of joining up with a political party is silence, it is too high.
Advocates should be fearless and furious with criticism. Advocacy should be targeted at politicians, without being tied to a single party.
Advocacy should be about our sector, not political victories for others.
I don’t like to give advice, but I would urge my colleagues in advocacy to remember that.
The issues surrounding our sector – feminism, contested rights between children and parents, the role of education in the social good – demand that we be strategic and smart with our advocacy.
Tying ourselves to a political party or a political ideology is a bad idea.
Another bad idea is to paraphrase Mark Twain, but as he very nearly said: “Loyalty to progressing the early childhood education sector: ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.”
Advocacy is not just writing, not just attending rallies or forums. The Early Years Learning Framework encourages educators and teachers to look at every moment with a child, or group of children, as an opportunity to learn.
In exactly the same way, every moment in our day-to-day work is an opportunity to advocate for our professionalism, and the professionalism of the sector as a whole.
Every time you greet a family at the door, we could be advocating. Every time we have a pedagogical discussion with an educator, we could be advocating.
But I firmly believe we also have an obligation, and imperative, to advocate at that wider level – at the level of policy.
The Italian pedagogue and President of Reggio Children Carla Rinaldi encourages advocates to be a “megaphone for children’s voices”.
Aim it at Parliament House.
What made you angry? What frustrated you? When was your voice silenced? What made you want to yell at the TV screen, or your computer?
Write about it. Get it out there. Contact your local MP.
But do not fall victim of the “us versus them”, or “Left vs. Right”, or “Labor vs. Liberal”. As soon as we subsume our advocacy to that of a political ideology, we are no longer advocating. We’re advertising.
It can seem like a huge and uphill battle when you look at where the national discussion now.
Imagine having an election fought on the principles of children’s human rights and the magnifying and uplifting power of early childhood education.
It seems like at the moment as a people we are more focused on having cheap, available childcare.
But, fellow advocates, just remember, as Jon Stewart said, “You have to remember one thing about the will of the people: it wasn’t that long ago that we were swept away by the Macarena.”
Thank you very much.
Thanks again to Community Child Care Co-operative for inviting me to speak. You can check out their website at http://ccccnsw.org.au/.
Liam McNicholas 