Page 1164 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 28 March 2017
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national partnership. This has been in existence for many years. We know that some families in the ACT have children who are enduring negative early life circumstances. For reasons of stigma as well as poor social connectedness and financial hardship, they are marginalised.
Marginalised families and their children do not participate in many of the activities that those families with high levels of social connectedness enjoy. It is likely that this extends to a reduced participation in early childhood education and care services. What we see there is, I guess, an exacerbation of some of those underlying issues. Those children who come from perhaps a more advantaged family, who have perhaps some natural advantages, go fine, because they head off to the services. But those who do not have those opportunities potentially get left further behind. That is certainly where universal access is particularly important.
The Australian early development census of all children in Australia in their first year of full-time school highlighted concerns for ACT children in certain domains of vulnerability that may be linked to poor educational environments prior to school. It is an empirical fact that children who start behind their peers in kindergarten can take some years to catch up academically. For some, those delays can unfortunately have negative impacts that last for many years.
Again, this finding from the early development census underlines the importance of access and what a difference access to early childhood education and care can make. That is also why it is so important that we value and respect the hard work and professionalism of the mostly female workforce. The government recognises, as the current minister well knows, that quality costs.
These workers whom parents and carers entrust their children to are far more than “just childcare workers,” as you might have heard them described. They are educators and they are carers. They play a vital role in identifying developmental delays in time to support early interventions that can prevent future problems for children. They support vital physical and mental milestones being met and can support parents and carers to be more involved in their children’s learning.
It is hard to imagine that they play all these roles in one day, but that is actually what goes on in the early childhood centres. As a former minister for education myself—I know that Minister Berry just made some observations—having visited a range of the centres across the city, I know how passionate the staff are, how proud they are of what they deliver for students and how they are constantly thinking about ways to do it better. They are constantly innovating as well as just coping with, frankly, the noise, the chaos and the fun that can be taking place inside a centre.
At the same time, we see these workers sometimes maligned in the media, or perhaps by some churlish commentators, who denigrate their work. That is an area that I think needs some increased focus. We saw on International Women’s Day recently the departure of staff early to recognise the gender pay gap. Being a female-dominated workforce, this particularly plays out in the early childhood education and care space. I think that was a very powerful statement they made by going home at around
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