Amplify! Blog

CELA CEO Michele Carnegie was one of twelve early childhood representatives invited to meet with Dr Anne Aly, Minister for Early Childhood, at the Ministerial Roundtable on Early Childhood Education and Care Workforce Issues held in Sydney on 8th August. The roundtable will feed into the Jobs and Skills Summit, which will take place in September this year.  

In this article, we share the recommendations that Ms Carnegie continues to put forward to the government and what we will do to keep these issues in focus as the Jobs and Skills Summit approaches.  

Research tells us that gratitude promotes well-being and life satisfaction, but is the practice of gratitude appropriate for very young children?  

To find out more, we speak to gratitude advocates and CELA members Kathy Phipps (Director of Narooma Preschool) and Ying Bean (Director of The Ridge Preschool and Childcare Centre). 

Every year on 4 August, Australia celebrates National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children's Day (Children's Day). This is a national day dedicated to celebrating First Nations children and recognising the importance that culture, family and community play in the life of every Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander child. 

Deborah Hoger, a proud Dunghutti woman and early years Indigenous educational resources specialist, shares what this year's theme means, and why every service should celebrate this day.  

In June, the New South Wales Government announced landmark funding of $5.8 billion over ten years to deliver one year of play-based early learning in the year before school.  

We recently interviewed Minister Sarah Mitchell about the initiative. She explained that she had visited Ontario, Canada, a few years ago to learn how similar reforms were implemented. "There are a lot of similarities between that part of the world and NSW, in terms of geographical spread and Indigenous population," Minister Mitchell told us, noting that Ontario offered a good comparison. 

We explore what universal pre-kindergarten looks like in Ontario, including the challenges and successes for children and the workforce.  

Japanese reality TV show Hajimete no Otsukai (My First Errand), rebranded as Old Enough! on Netflix, depicts toddlers being sent on their first complex errand.

We explore what the show says about society’s approach to giving children responsibility, and how its themes fit within a local cultural context. 

Conversations are key to relationships, and as children develop their language and listening skills, the communication habits of the adults around them can start to have a big influence.

To learn how to best respect the little ears that surround us on a daily basis, we spoke to Alison Donkin, Educational Leader and Early Childhood Teacher at Gymea Community Preschool in NSW.

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.