Setting the record straight on misguided claims about ECEC and the value of qualified educators

The piece ‘Maybe childcare staff need fewer degrees?’ by Aaron Patrick in the AFR 12 July 2023 is both ill-informed and misleading. If you haven’t seen it, here is the abridged version – the commercial childcare industry is charging inflated prices hurting families because of rules that ‘force centres to hire more, better-educated staff’ and ‘ratio rules make caring for babies and infants twice as expensive as looking after three-to-five-year-olds’.

Everyone with any experience in early childhood education and care knows that the work is challenging and demanding. To do it well you need professional skills, gained through qualifications. Educators and teachers work as a team, to provide learning environments and programs that are age-appropriate and offer rich learning experiences. The notion that an unskilled workforce would be better placed to deliver early childhood services in which children are safe and cared for is ‘adequate’ is just wrong. Reducing qualifications or increasing child-to-educator ratios would only serve to make the work untenable and exacerbate workforce issues such as turnover and stress levels.

The difference between paying an unskilled educator and a skilled educator represents a modest but vital investment in the quality of services provided and the reasonableness of educator workloads. Only someone who has never provided a rich and interactive learning environment for four infants at the same time would consider that this could be done by someone with no professional skills.

In the first five years of life, children’s brains are wired to learn quickly. Early learning helps to amplify their natural skills and abilities. Professional early childhood educators support and extend play to maximise learning through exploration, inquiry and problem-solving and fostering children’s connection to their world. Educators also help families understand and support their child’s development. The evidence is very clear—children who experience high-quality early education are twice as likely to be developmentally on track when they start school as those who don’t.

Patrick’s argument, under the guise of advocating for women’s workforce participation, conflates ‘choice’ and ‘options’ for high-quality early learning. The ACCC interim report shows that families make decisions based first on what they can afford, followed closely by what they can manage in relation to distance – leaving parents to choose between often limited options. A National Quality Framework ensures that children’s learning, development and wellbeing are safeguarded and attended to in all environments available—that is important to families as well as educators. 

The Australian National Quality Framework for Early Childhood Education and Care is well-regarded internationally because it is grounded in solid research and it strikes an appropriate balance between regulation to ensure minimum standards are met while also supporting and promoting quality improvement.  It has absolute support across the early childhood education sector and early childhood experts in our universities, education departments and decision-making roles.

The solution to reducing out-of-pocket costs for families is to re-calibrate government investment to the cost of delivery and cap parent contributions at a reasonable level. Reducing quality would not deliver substantial cost savings but would put children at risk, reduce the confidence families have in their services and further disenfranchise the early childhood profession. Hopefully, the day will come when newspapers stop using early childhood education as ‘clickbait’ by publishing uninformed opinions and focus on genuine solutions to addressing affordability and access in a sector that should be seen as critical social infrastructure delivered by education professionals.

ECA Administrator

4 thoughts on “Setting the record straight on misguided claims about ECEC and the value of qualified educators”

    Donna Chisholm says:

    Would it be possible to have the correct date in the opening sentence?

    ECA Administrator says:

    Thank you for your response. The error has been rectified.

    Lee Jones says:

    A very professional and informed response Sam- well said!

    Kerri Smith says:

    By listing Educators and teachers as two separate positions within a service, it has reinforced the notion that they are different. Going on to write about skilled and unskilled educators – implying teachers by absence of comment are skilled – also reinforces this narrative and reduces the meaning/definition of educator.
    The original article once again focussing on women returning to the workforce continues to reinforce the stereotypes that childcare is for women and not for families.
    We have come a long way…we still have so much further to go.
    The cost of care should not always be attributed to wages and inflation, as almost every article addressing the issue does, but also to the huge increases in insurance premiums and interest rate impacts on facilities.Food provision has also astronomically increased, yet very few look into these costs.
    We battle on for professional recognition.

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