"CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY"
Good morning.
It’s good to be here, and I’d like to thank the NSW/ACT Branch of the Independent Education Union for inviting me to speak to you today.
The theme for this conference, ‘Changing the world from the ground up’, resonates powerfully with me, and indeed with the Rudd Government, as we embark on comprehensive reforms in education at all levels.
I’ve long been a passionate advocate for teachers and teaching - and my own experience tells me that the best teaching is the kind that inspires, challenges and encourages.
I’m reminded of an early childhood memory. A star-packed night sky, sitting beside my grandfather on the back steps of the old Scarborough home that was my refuge as a young child.
I remember my grandfather pointing out the Milky Way, and together we wondered what was behind all those twinkling stars. Other planets, our ancestors, or something altogether terrifying. Infinity? A four year old has trouble with that one.
Long after I left the care of my grandparents, I studied Shakespeare’s Hamlet and pondered his question – "And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?"
The nature of being and our concept of the universe involve some of the great questions.
A few weeks ago, the professional star-gazers at the Anglo Australian Observatory in the middle of my electorate brought me up to date.
More than 200 planets revolve around the stars and the galaxies that make up the Universe originated approximately 13.7 billion years ago.
We know about this because a long time ago a bloke called Galileo Galilei looked directly at the sun through a telescope. No-one gave him an Olympic medal. On the contrary the Church made his life a misery, but in 2009, astronomers the world over will celebrate the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first astronomical observation.
At the Marsfield Observatory, Galileo’s 21st century children are from France, Canada, the UK, Poland and Russia. They are 20. They are 50. Highly gifted researchers, they are all drawn to the Marsfield site because of its reputation for innovation in optical astronomy.
These are people who reach for the stars every day – literally and metaphorically. They all tell much the same story, that once they looked through their first telescope they were hooked.
"After you’ve seen the rings of Saturn, that’s it. You know you’ll spend your life looking at stars."
Yes - but where did that sense of wonder come from I ask?
My bet is there was something else going on when these researchers were very young.
Indeed, this is what all the international data into early childhood development tells us. That children learn more in the first five years of their lives than at any other comparable period.
Get it right in the early years and many more of our young people will be able to reach for the stars.
The challenge right now for commonwealth and state policy makers is to ensure that the magic of Marsfield translates into every early learning centre and preschool in the country.
Before I go any further, I’d like to acknowledge the terrific work the IEU is doing in representing its teachers, particularly in seeking to improve their rates of pay and skills recognition.
In fact, I met with your organisation in June this year. The teacher in me set a bit of a research task and I was delighted when Chris Watt came back to me with the answers a few weeks later! So thank you for that.
And you might be wondering what we’ve been doing since the election last November?
Well if you’ve been following our progress over the past eight months or so, I think you’d agree that we’ve entered a new era in early childhood development in this country.
For the first time, we have a federal government that has made our children’s earliest years a priority, and we’ve demonstrated that commitment by investing significantly to improve the status quo.
Smart governments around the country are doing the same and increasing their investment in the early years.
Just this week, Queensland Premier Anna Bligh announced a major reform package for the early years, acknowledging that her state could be doing better when it comes to kindergarten education.
I thought Premier Bligh summed it up well when she said: "Education is the key that unlocks a child’s potential".
Queensland’s initiative will create an extra 240 kindergarten services by 2014, and double the capacity of the community kindergarten sector in that state. It will improve access and availability of kindergarten services to an estimated 24,000 children who are currently missing out.
Importantly, the Queensland government is also establishing a new Office for Early Childhood Education and Care, reporting directly to the Education Minister.
Of course, I can’t mention the last initiative without noting that this is exactly what the Commonwealth did earlier this year, establishing the Office of Early Childhood Education and Child Care within the Education portfolio.
The Rudd Government is driven by the ideal that whether a child lives in Gympie or Ballarat or Fremantle, it has a right to calm, secure and stimulating care – the type that will ensure he or she makes a happy transition to school.
That being the case, the centrepiece of the Government’s reforms is universal access to early learning.
The Government has committed to ensuring that all children, in the year before they start formal schooling, have access to 15 hours a week of quality early childhood education programs delivered by a university-trained teacher.
Achieving this major national reform will require significant changes and a considerable degree of co-operation between the Commonwealth and the states, but I’m pleased to report that the states are on board, and many are well on the way to achieving the 15 hours.
In fact, just two days ago the ACT Government and the Commonwealth reached agreement on Universal Access for children in the ACT over the next two years. In that state, government preschool students will have access to 15 hours of preschool by 2010.
This is co-operative federalism at work, and the winners will be children and families.
Aside from our universal access commitment, there are two major areas of reform that I want to speak to you about in particular this morning.
The first is improving the quality of education and care. The second is professionalising the workforce - and you can’t have one without the other.
We are in the process of developing a national quality framework, which will establish rigorous new national standards, a quality rating system and an enhanced regulatory mechanism.
Whether it's the work of James Heckman, Fraser Mustard, the OECD, or our own Frank Oberklaid or Fiona Stanley, the message is clear: quality early childhood experiences ease the transition to formal schooling, and have a direct effect on longer term education, employment and health outcomes.
Over the last month or so, the Office of Early Childhood Education and Child Care has conducted a series of consultations across the country seeking public comment on the new framework.
I was fortunate to open four of those consultation sessions, and my feeling is that there’s a real sense of momentum building in the sector.
This momentum arises from the fact that we're putting the focus where it should be - on children.
What people are telling us in these forums is that they support our reforms.
However, quality goes beyond regulation and accreditation. It is overwhelmingly about the qualifications, commitment and professionalism of those who care for and teach young children.
Children need the attention of an early childhood professional, who, in the words of Professor Ron Lally, " is neither babysitter nor trainer - but a loving facilitator of emotional, cognitive, language and social competence".
So as part of developing these national standards, we will of course look at the qualifications of the early childhood workforce. And I can tell you, that our ambition for this sector is to train a generation of highly skilled early childhood educators.
Research tells us that teachers with a four-year early learning degree have more positive, sensitive and responsive interactions with children.
It's not because of the qualification per se, rather, it’s the teacher’s ability to create a better learning environment that makes the difference.
Not only do better educated teachers offer richer language and cognitive experiences; they are less authoritarian, less punitive and less detached, giving children a better chance to realise their full potential.
And can I say that when it comes to qualifications—and I often say this to all my state colleagues—I applaud New South Wales for being the only jurisdiction with a requirement for centres with more than 29 places to have a university trained teacher.
If you look at the statistics, only 7 per cent of the long day care workforce holds a bachelor’s degree or higher, and 39 per cent have no formal child care qualifications.
This situation has to change if we’re to ensure that Australian children are to get the best possible start in life.
As you probably know, an increasing number of children are accessing early childhood services each year, a trend likely to escalate with the Government’s universal access agenda.
In 2006 there were around 1.1 million children in approved care. And more women are having babies and returning to work—currently about 60 per cent return to work by the time their children are 18 months old.
As you can imagine, these numbers have significant implications for the early years workforce.
And, quite simply, we know that we will not achieve our goals in this area unless we dramatically increase the professional standing, qualifications and supply of those who work with young children.
The data on the early childhood workforce is patchy, but we do know there are about 19,000 early childhood teachers and around 90,000 workers in child care services across the country.
We also know there are significant challenges to be addressed in developing a high-quality early childhood workforce. Some of these issues are longstanding and will require a concerted effort from all governments.
Teachers in long day care receive lower wages, limited professional standing and poorer working conditions than their counterparts in the preschool and school sectors.
Teachers with the same qualifications, the same responsibilities and doing the same job can earn substantially different incomes depending on the setting.
Here in NSW, a long day care teacher with a four-year degree earns around $44,000 per year, compared to over $50,000 for a teacher with the same qualification in a government preschool.
Further, research has shown that the move from vocational education and training to early childhood education university programs can be difficult for many students.
However, this is an important education pathway for many early childhood workers.
And when it comes to child care workers, I suspect we all agree on the issues.
- Job turnover is high. Over one in five child care workers leave the occupation every year.
- Pay is low and conditions are poor. Child care workers have the second lowest income—$17.30 per hour—of all 86 non-managerial occupations. This is lower than textile workers, checkout operators and cleaners.
- Enrolments in diploma courses—the minimum typically required to be considered qualified—have fallen since 2002;and,
- The child care workforce suffers from high casualisation.
Research also shows that the mismatch between workers’ status and wages compared with the high levels of responsibility and workload demands continues to be a critical factor in the lack of suitably qualified child care workers.
I’m aware that low pay and poor career paths are widely seen as contributing to serious levels of turnover in the child care sector and these issues must be addressed in the longer term.
In fact, the 2006 National Children’s Services Workforce Study estimates that, without intervention, these dynamics will ultimately lead to an estimated shortfall of at least 7,000 workers in the sector by 2013.
Clearly, attracting new child care workers and teachers to the sector and keeping them there will benefit our children and their development.
The Australian Government has committed to building the highly skilled and capable workforce necessary to implement its early childhood reform agenda.
And we are doing this by offering a range of incentives to improve the qualifications and supply of early childhood teachers and workers, particularly in remote and disadvantaged areas.
The 2008-09 Budget allocated funding to:
- support around 8000 child care workers gain a qualification by removing TAFE fees for child care diplomas and advanced diplomas from next year;
- create additional university places for early childhood teachers, starting with 500 places in 2009 and rising to 1500 places by 2011
- reduce up to half of the HECS-HELP debts of early childhood teachers who work in regional and remote areas, Indigenous communities and areas of high disadvantage.
In addition, the Government is spearheading the development of a National Early Years Workforce Strategy, which will focus on workforce issues facing the early childhood education and child care sector.
We have established a Workforce Working Party, comprising representatives of all governments, to develop this strategy by the end of the year.
This party will report to the Productivity Agenda Working Group, chaired by the Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard.
The strategy will provide a long-term blueprint to improve recruitment and retention of the early childhood workforce, develop pathways that reward and support the best workers, and help raise the level of workers’ qualifications.
Last but not least, we need to improve the status of the early years workforce. The community needs to understand and acknowledge that the job these people do in nurturing, caring for and teaching our most precious citizens is an important one.
And I believe the best way to enhance the status of the workforce is to professionalise it. Early learning must be seen in the same way and treated with the same respect as every other sphere of education.
This vision will be achieved through the effective engagement of all stakeholders to support the training, supply, retention, development and deployment of the early childhood education and care workforce across government, community and for-profit private sectors.
I commend you on your efforts in working with our children to provide them with the best opportunities for a good start in life, and I look forward to your support in helping us to champion the notion ‘That teaching is a fine thing to do.’
I hope you too will take up the cause and send the same message that I do to potential graduates – think about teaching, and in particular, think about teaching infants.
A profession that has the potential and the power to nurture young minds and set children up for life is a noble one.
I am sure I will get no argument from this audience when I say that it is time to honour teachers and to return to the vocation of teaching the prestige it clearly deserves.
It may just be the sustained unhurried conversations you’ve been having with that three year old is what she will remember when, in years to come, she picks up the 2025 Eureka Prize in optical astronomy and joins Galileo’s descendents at Marsfield.
Thank you.