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Early childhood settings in Australia have seen a rapid rise in the use of digital documentation tools. As services work towards reducing their environmental footprint, these digital tools can be viewed as a holistic alternative platform for parent communication, documentation of learning and general information sharing with important stakeholders. 

Educator Meg Anastasi shares her views on the pros and cons of digital platforms for documentation and how we can reassert control by putting guidelines in place.  

Our recent Early Childhood Education and Care Workforce Survey Pulse Check confirms what we have been hearing anecdotally through member calls and emails, that our workforce is in crisis, and that there are a number of factors exacerbating this. 

To further inform our advocacy, a number of our members have provided detailed information about their individual workforce challenges in order to further shine a light on what needs to be done, and how that changes depending on factors such as service type and location.  

Here we provide a brief summary of three of those case studies. Further details will be provided in an upcoming edition of Broadside. 

We are incredibly excited about what recent announcements could mean for the future of our sector and for Australia’s children. However, if we don't start addressing the workforce challenges our sector is facing immediately, we run the risk of failing to meet the policy objectives of the historic early childhood education and care reforms.

“In order to secure the success of these new reforms, it’s vital that retention and recruitment strategies are implemented,” says Michele Carnegie, CELA CEO. “There are many and varied reasons that our workforce is in crisis, and while remuneration is one factor, there needs to be a broad range of strategies applied to start fixing the underlying causes now.” 

Read on to find out what our recent workforce survey revealed about the key issues being faced by our members and the urgent solutions we are advocating.