Autumn 2007

Early childhood education & care

A new way forward

Pam Cahir discusses a new vision for early childhood services, and suggests ways in which services can reorganise to keep pace with modern demands.

Early Childhood Australia’s vision

Early Childhood Australia’s dream—since the early 1970s—has been for a range of properly funded, high-quality early childhood services that would meet the needs of all children and families.

Set alongside this—from the mid-1980s onwards—was the Australian Government’s purpose in regard to child care: to support mothers who return to the workforce through providing child care services.

There was, and continues to be, some tension between these two goals.

The current system

The current children’s services system was not established as a result of any real agreement about need from the perspective of children and society, but evolved over time to meet a changing set of perceived needs.

What this has meant is that we now have a patchwork of services established for different purposes, at different times, and funded—in varying ways—by different levels of government. Therefore we have many small, locally based services operating independently and carrying all their own costs and overheads.

Adapting through a systems approach

This is not about whether we are doing a good job now. We are doing the most we can do in an environment which makes the best impossible. It is about, first, what we can do to make it more possible to do a high-quality job; and, second, what we can do to ensure our services are here for the long haul.

Our goals and our vision for children and families remain the same. What has changed is that many services struggle to make ends meet and certainly most don’t reflect the fundamentals that evidence says are necessary to deliver good outcomes for children.

Many people responsible for small services, particularly those that are struggling, feel professionally isolated and stuck. Many directors of community-based services feel that more and more of their time is spent in managing, in meeting government requirements, etc., and less and less is spent focused on children—the reason they entered this field in the first place.

If we think constructively about this, we need to recognise the weaknesses that exist and the context in which we provide our services. We need to understand the shifts in the environment in which we work and be responsive to them. We need to focus not simply on maintaining the status quo, but on exploring options for achieving our vision for children and the services they use.

There is the potential for improving the general quality of child care through a ‘systems approach’ to children’s services. By ‘system’ I mean a group of services formally linked, with all or part of their operations managed centrally.

What does a high-quality system look like?

The key features of a high-quality early childhood service system are: qualified staff, low staff–child ratios and small groups, staff stability, professional support and development for staff, and good conditions for staff.

Early childhood qualifications and strong leadership matter

Staff with responsibility for children should have early childhood qualifications. Generalists and managers have their place in any service but the leadership has to be clear about what matters for children.

Staff–child ratios and group size matter

Lower staff–child ratios and smaller group sizes enable the sensitive, thoughtful and responsive interactions which children need.

taff stability, professional support and development matter

Staff continuity allows the quality interactions and relationships which are so significant in children’s learning and development. Professional development must include those professional conversations that allow us to re-think and improve our practice with children.

Wages, conditions and career prospects matter

These are key factors in people’s decision to continue to work in our services. We need to be robust and determined in our resolve to get pay parity with teachers in schools and to evolve a career structure for early childhood professionals. Only if we do these things will qualified and committed people stay in this sector.

How can a systems approach help?

We are all natural systems thinkers—system thinking permeates our day-to-day activities. When we carry things on a tray and make one trip rather than many, we are using a system. We do it all the time.

We are no strangers to service systems in this country. We have school systems—both public and subsidised private systems. We have also a large system of corporate provision of child care. I believe that there can be clear benefits to being a part of a system. However, we need to be aware of those and think about whether the positives outweigh the negatives. Meeting children’s needs must be the central purpose of any system of children’s services.

Two fundamental questions need to be considered in any children’s services system: what things need to be done centrally to provide guarantees for all services (e.g., policies, best practice guidelines, professional support); and what things need to be done locally so that the programs are responsive to children and families?

There are many benefits to a systems approach for children’s services, such as centralised administration and the consolidation of staff. Centralised administration would generate significant economies of scale in terms of staff, finance systems, data entry, reduced prices and other infrastructure costs. The consolidation of staff into one system offers the potential for a career structure, the possibility of system-supported staff development and communication, and reduced professional isolation.

A system, most importantly, offers the potential to invest savings into quality frameworks like smaller group-sizes, lower staff–child ratios and staff with early childhood teaching degrees. Ultimately, an early childhood services system has a fundamental purpose, which is the delivery of high-quality programs and outcomes for all of the young children and families who participate in them.

Where do we go from here?

Change is scary—it will take planning and real commitment, but it is my belief that this kind of thinking provides our best chance of moving forward; our best chance to say we have done the best we can with current funding. The case for increased funding from Government would be harder to resist in this context.

We cannot stay where we are

We have to take charge and make the changes that are necessary to build a high-quality, sustainable system.

We cannot wait for others to generate the vision and provide the leadership. We must do it ourselves and do it now. Children cannot wait and they deserve no less than the high-quality services described as part of Early Childhood Australia’s vision.

Website link

The full speech from the Country Children’s Services Association of NSW 2006 conference, ‘A systems approach to the delivery of children’s services in this country—does it have anything to offer?’, is available from the News section of the Early Childhood Australia website: www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au

Pam Cahir is CEO of Early Childhood Australia.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au