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Early Childhood Australia's National President, Margaret Young, was invited to speak at the launch of LHMU's Big Steps in Childcare campaign on 20 June 2008.
Margaret Young's speaking notes are below.
Acknowledgement of country
Early Childhood Australia joins in the acknowledgment of the people of the Eora nation, the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet, and pays respect to their Elders and all Aboriginal people who live and work on this land today. On occasions like this it is important to remember that for thousands of years Aboriginal families lived and worked on this land, and the children grew, played and learned here. For me, this reflection always strengthens our steps to full reconciliation.
Welcoming the Big Steps in Childcare campaign
Early Childhood Australia warmly congratulates the LHMU for focusing its efforts on workforce development in the early childhood services sector through the Big Steps in Childcare campaign. As is well known, early childhood services around Australia struggle with a range of workforce issues – to the detriment of our young children – and this initiative proposes an important and positive step towards addressing this situation. The experience of contributing to the union's work on this has been very positive and fruitful and we thank them, and the other partners.
ECA commends the union for its recognition that childcare centres should be centres of early learning, delivering intentional high quality early education and good outcomes for young children – and for showing that practical steps can be taken to achieve this. This in itself will help Australia overcome the damaging 'care/education' division that has so influenced our early childhood funding programs, the development and delivery of our services and the education of early childhood practitioners.
We also recognise the importance of a range of other factors in achieving high-quality services for young children, including the important issues of staff–child ratios and funding, and we look forward to working further with the union in the future as the campaign moves into these areas.
In focusing today on workforce issues, ECA applauds the LHMU's promotion of a strategy to build on the existing experience of many staff and raise the overall level of skills and qualifications in the sector. This is a first step in a very important journey – that of finding ways to encourage and support a largely unqualified workforce to become a workforce where everyone has a useful qualification and where there are sufficient highly qualified specialist early childhood teachers for the important tasks of ongoing pedagogical and program leadership in all services.
We also applaud the goal of pay parity between people who care for and educate young children in early childhood services and those who do the same work with children in schools. We recognise that there is a way to go in achieving this, and hurdles to overcome, however we are committed to the view that tasks that are equivalent in work value should have equivalent rewards.
This launch highlights for us the fundamental connection between the union's focus on workforce development initiatives and Early Childhood Australia's own focus on good outcomes for young children – and we also celebrate the Australian government's recognition of the importance of these good outcomes for young children to its long-term goals for our country.
International evidence shows that for young children in early childhood services stability of staff, high levels of staff qualification, good remuneration and sound career structures together are among the strong predictors of good outcomes for children. The steps towards improvements in qualification levels, remuneration and career structure in the union's proposal have the potential to be a great boost to staff stability in the sector – with related benefits for our young children.
However, there will be big challenges in implementing the strategies proposed in the Big Steps in Childcare campaign, and overcoming these without giving ground on building the quality of staff and services, will require real participation and co-operation from a number of groups.
One example of concern to Early Childhood Australia is the quality of early childhood teaching qualifications. Achieving the outcomes which the government wants – and which we want – will require preparing teachers to a calibre and capacity equal to the task. This requires the provision of university degrees around the country which will be consistently robust enough to equip people to do this important work, and the achievement of this is a challenge for universities, government funders and advocacy groups like ECA.
No challenges, however, are so daunting that with vision, determination and good will they cannot be met – so again, congratulations to the LHMU for setting out on the journey with Big Steps in Childcare. Our very young children and their futures are too important for us not to take steps like these.
Further reading
Visit the LHMU's Big Steps in Childcare website.
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