EPISODE 15 TRANSCRIPT TALKING TEACHING WITH MAXINE MCKEW, MIRIAM BROWN, TRISH EADIE AND DEB BRENNAN
0:00 Maxine McKew I’m Maxine McKew is Talking Teaching
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0:16 Miriam Brown In your group challenge...
0:27 Child I like chocolate ice-cream
0:29 Miriam Brown I love vanilla
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0:36 Maxine McKew Hi there again, and today’s focus is on early childhood education. Now one of the big achievements of the past decade has been the 20% increase the nation has seen in the number of young children who attend a pre-school programme. The participation rate is now up to 95% which means that many more children are better placed to start school as happy, confident learners. This is after a decade of change right across the system to the point where the Australian National Quality Framework for early childhood education is now accepted as a foundational document. I’ll make a declaration here as I’m hardly a disinterested observer. I played a role as the Federal Parliamentary Secretary with responsibility for this area and pushed for system wide change. But it was a collective win for a very disparate sector. Together with a group of dedicated academics and policy makers, they all managed a big transformation, and that was to engineer the policy settings and structures that recognise that children are hard-wired to learn and that aiding the astonishing development that starts from birth should be the primary focus for the years before school. Still, there’s a lot of unfinished business. The push now is for universal access for three year olds, and already the state of Victoria has committed to this. We’re going to hear shortly from two academics who’ve been central players and thinkers in this area – the
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University of Melbourne’s Associate Professor Trish Eadie whose research has focused on developmental pathways and Deb Brennan, Professor of Social Policy Research at the University of New South Wales. But first here’s a taste of the kind of teacher interaction that happens on a daily basis at one of the Gowrie Centres, this one at Claire Court just outside of the Melbourne CBD. Miriam Brown is a graduate of the Master’s programme offered by the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. She teaches at Gowrie so let’s listen to what she has to say about the relationship between educators and young children.
2:42 Miriam Brown I guess our intention at the beginning of the day is just to start with its settling in, reconnecting, it’s Monday morning, we’ve all been doing all sorts of different things. So we’re running routines like a morning circle time, a regular show and tell morning on a Monday with different challenges for the children. So they come in quite excited to share what they’ve brought with them. Today the challenge was really simple, it was find something between home and kinder that you can share with your friends today
3:17 Miriam Brown And this one was spiky and this one was...?
3:22 Child Soft
3:22 Miriam Brown Soft and they both smell? They both smell good. And where did you find them Georgia?
3:30 Child At kinder
3:32 Miriam Brown Ah they are kinder show and tell discoveries yeah?
3:37 Child And I’m going to take it home
3:40 Maxine McKew I noticed you had guidelines there that you were encouraging them not to talk over each other to wait
3:45 Miriam Brown Conversational pragmatics is there. Everybody’s very excited to start their session with ringing a bell, they then get a little bit of
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conversation time with me and we’ll open it up to some questions, and we need to differentiate there. Some children come in fully prepared to share a long story about what they’ve brought with them, and others need a little bit more drawing out, and sometimes that’s showing rather than actually verbalising what they’re doing.
4:17 Miriam Brown Tell us about ... I can see a photo but I can see something else you’ve got there. What have you got there?
4:26 Child A slap band
4:28 Miriam Brown What did you call it?
4:30 Child A slap band
4:30 Miriam Brown A slap band? How does it work? Oh it just slaps onto your wrist
4:38 Miriam Brown So it’s about sharing stories, it’s about listening. We have listening songs that remind us of how we do that with each other. Identity is a complex thing but I guess it’s as simple as the pictures of our families that we have up on our walls, the stories that we share with each other about who we are and where we’re from, and that’s definitely part of a relational model I guess I’m working on as a teacher.
5:05 Miriam Brown Who’s in the photo?
5:08 Child This is my sister and me
5:09 Miriam Brown What’s your sister’s name?
5:10 Child Alice
5:12 Miriam Brown Alice?
5:12 Child Alice in Wonderland
5:15 Miriam Brown Alice in Wonderland. There’s Alice and Eva and who else is in that picture? Is that dad?
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5:26 Child It’s an elephant
5:28 Miriam Brown Who is it?
5:27 Child Elephant
5:27 Miriam Brown It’s an elephant and what are you doing with the elephant?
5:33 Child Washing it
5:37 Miriam Brown The learning is always where the excitement is for children. When you see that opening up, that curiosity starting to emerge you know that they feel secure in their place. It’s just a deep sense of satisfaction that you get from the knowing that those children feel connected with themselves as a learner.
5:58 Maxine McKew Now you draw on the early years learning framework, how helpful or applicable is that to what you do?
6:05 Miriam Brown Oh it’s everything it’s absolutely wonderful. We engage with particularly the practice principles. The outcomes flow very naturally when you’ve got those practice principles embedded in what you’re doing. I guess it’s always there in terms of being advocates for the children’s learning in a play-based emergent programme, it’s a wonderful way to sort of tease out that very complex sort of process that’s going on in that kind of a learning environment. Oh good coat! It’s like the air we breathe, you know children play, but understanding what’s going on when children play and the potential that there is in children’s play for learning, that’s the framework for you. So it’s understanding the child’s use of technology or drawing one concept from one area of your programme, connecting it with something from home and creating something completely new. It’s a very creative process yeah.
7:11 Maxine McKew And with the children you’re working with now who will be starting school next year, do most of them hit their developmental goals?
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7:18 Miriam Brown Oh absolutely yes and some.
7:22 Maxine McKew And tell us what that means.
7:23 Miriam Brown Well I guess we’re advantaged in many ways here at this location. Our families are very proactive when we raise a concern for example about I don’t know speech or occupational therapy that might be of advantage to that child, they’re very eager to get onto it. But when we take a strengths-based approach, we find that you know we don’t look at the children as deficits to be filled up, we look at their strengths and see where that can lead their development. So for example you know a few years ago we had a child with a physical delay, and we were able to work with his many, many strengths as a creative force, as a companion, as an observer of his world, and in fact he arrived at school with many more advantages than some of his peers. The relationship he was able to build is really quite exceptional yeah.
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8:31 Maxine McKew Well let’s take up some of those themes now with both Trish Eadie and Deb Brennan and welcome to both of you. I’d like to begin our discussion by looking at the important recommendations in the review of the national early learning landscape that you conducted Deb, and this is a report to senior officials in all states and territories and with input from others, from you as well Trish. If we look first at the overall picture, now it seems to me you’re saying in the past ten years Australia has put in place some important pieces of policy architecture, but we’re now at a point where we need to do some more heavy lifting, hence the title Lifting our Game. So Deb Brennan to you first. You make the strong argument that if we get the investment and the policy settings right, there is as you put it a double dividend. Just explain what you mean by that.
9:20 Deb Brennan Australia has so much to be proud of in terms of what’s happened over the last decade, and we’ve put some really good policy architecture in place, things like the National Quality
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Framework and the National Quality Standard and the Early Years Framework and so on. But we still have too much of a division between early education and child care. So the argument that Susie Pascoe and I put in Lifting our Game about this idea of a double dividend was that if the Commonwealth were to tweak its policy settings and some of the policy procedures, particularly in relation to the National Quality Standard, we could be getting a much greater educational bang for the buck in terms of childcare expenditure, rather than the fairly narrow focus that we currently have on parental workforce participation. So while we think that supporting parental workforce participation is incredibly significant and important, we think that with a few changes the Commonwealth could reap the double dividend of ensuring that every child in a Commonwealth funded service is also getting a really high quality standard early education experience.
10:41 Maxine McKew So Deb how do you judge the Commonwealth sentiment on this?
10:46 Deb Brennan So there are a couple of things that I think are quite telling about the Commonwealth perspective. The first Maxine I would say is actually about language. If you look at for example the naming of the new Commonwealth subsidy for the children’s services that it funds, there were many pleas during the Productivity Commission and the aftermath of the Productivity Commission Enquiry into Early Childhood Learning and Care that the Commonwealth subsidy be named an early learning subsidy to reflect the fact that children are learning from the moment of birth and they don’t start to learn when they walk in the school gate. So it was very disappointing to see the Commonwealth name that new subsidy in July 2018 The Child Care Subsidy, and we see that language pretty well exclusively used by Commonwealth Ministers with responsibilities for that area of position. So regrettably, although Australia now has a really innovative and exciting policy architecture around early childhood services, an architecture for example that applies the same quality standards whether a service is say a kindergarten, a pre-school or a long day care service, we still have very different streams of funding feeding into those service types,
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and those streams of funding, in addition to having a quite separate eligibility requirement for the families and the children, also I think gives different messages to the community about their purpose.
12:30 Maxine McKew Trish, could I get you to comment on this, and I do note that when we’re talking about universal access to preschool that the report does highlight the fact that participation is up now to 95%, which is a 20% boost in the last ten years so that’s a big plus. But I think you have concerns to pick up on Deb’s point about guaranteed funding from the Commonwealth for universal access.
12:50 Trish Eadie And I think the Australian system is fully of dichotomies. So I often talk to groups of people and I pose the question that if we funded schools on a year to year basis, would we as a community be as silent as we are when it comes to year to year funding for early childhood education?
13:16 Maxine McKew It’s a good point. Why do we accept this in the nought to five area when all the evidence says you invest in these years and you reap the reward?
13:24 Trish Eadie So I think it is about that education and care piece really harnessing families and early childhood educators to really see the value and the benefits in the education piece as well as the care piece, and I think educators and the educational sector in early childhood from birth to five years gets that very well. I think there’s some work we have to do in explaining that well to parents and communities, and certainly the system at the moment is not set to value the education as much as the childcare and I think Deb’s comments about the subsidy are really pertinent there because in fact it’s referred to as a childcare subsidy, and your access to it is via an activity test of parents. And so what we’re finding at the moment is that if parents can’t meet that activity test, and there may be a number of reasons for that, then their children don’t get access to the subsidy or the family doesn’t, and so the child’s not participating in services, and unfortunately that access and activity test is having the biggest impact on the more disadvantaged families
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where children will have the most benefit from participating in the services.
14:57 Maxine McKew I note too Deb the other ambitious recommendation in the review is to actually extend universal access to three year olds. Now as we know this was a Labor initiative, but not yet picked up by the Coalition, so where do you see this heading? And I should point out of course Victoria has committed to this, so Deb how you reading this on the national landscape?
15:19 Deb Brennan So this is a really interesting issue and I feel that the momentum to extend universal access to three old children is extremely strong in the sector. In fact I was actually quite surprised going around the states and territories in the process of preparing this being our gauge to discern the strength of support for three year old preschool. The goal is not to put children into a separate service type with the preschool label necessarily, it’s to ensure that children for two years before the commencement of compulsory schooling receive the benefit of a high quality early education. So that could be potentially in a long day care centre if it’s of sufficient quality, just as much as it could be in a kindergarten or preschool.
16:14 Maxine McKew So what are the benefits?
16:15 Deb Brennan Well the benefits show up in all kinds of ways, but most particularly if we think about starting points of formal education when children arrive at the school gate at the commencement of compulsory formal education, there is really a strong body of evidence now that those children who have had access to one and preferably two years of early education arrive much more prepared to learn, much happier about the educational environment, they’re much less likely to have a remedial focus because if they’d been in a good quality service, the problems that they might have which could be developmental issues around sight or hearing, or could be emotional or social problems, hopefully will have been picked up much earlier and either addressed or at least children will have been identified as needing perhaps a little bit of special and additional support, and
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that information could be passed onto the kindergarten teacher. So we actually see much less need for remedial education, much less requirement to repeat grades or be held back in school, and although it’s not my highest priority, we also do see benefits in NAPLAN testing as well.
17:43 Maxine McKew Trish, can I bring you in there. I’m sure you’d agree with many of those points, but I notice that Deb said right at the beginning of that answer there that she feels momentum is quite strong for two years of quality interaction with children before they start formal schooling. What do you see as the challenges in the sector then delivering on that?
18:01 Trish Eadie Yes, so the benefits are very clear as Deb’s described, but the challenges are also quite significant. So one of the biggest challenges is about ensuring quality in the services. There are real challenges and Victoria is starting to understand these at the moment in terms of the workforce. So there are already through our National Quality Framework and the National Standards there’s an imperative to move from one qualified teacher in every early childhood service to two qualified teachers by 2020, which is actually only next year. But then when you start thinking about needing qualified teachers in universal three year old programmes, there is an issue around the actual number of teachers that we have who are qualified to be delivering problems, and there are real issues with the workforce with retention of staff in services, which those issues are very multilayered. I think the other issue for me too is to acknowledge that whilst some of our national census data, the Australian Early Development Census data, which is collected every three years, suggests that children are entering school less vulnerable overall in Australia. What we see are very particular groups where the gap is widening. And we also know from research that quality is often more challenging to get high quality early childhood education programmes in those communities too.
19:50 Maxine McKew Deb, can I get you to comment on that because I’m pretty sure I saw in the report as well that you made the point that children growing up in poorer parts of Australia tend to be
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in centres where the quality of teaching is not what we would wish it to be, and I’d like you to comment on this overall question of the number of teachers perhaps that we have in the system now. It’s hard to get reliable data on this isn’t it?
20:12 Deb Brennan It is indeed hard to get reliable data. But Trish is absolutely correct in all the issues she’s raised because one of the first issues would be how many teachers with appropriate early childhood education training and preparation are being produced over a given period? But then there’s the question of how many of those young graduates are going to choose to work in early childhood settings as distinct from a primary school setting because with the particular qualifications they emerge with, many teachers will actually have that option. And once they begin their employment, and in many settings will find that they’re being paid perhaps thirty thousand dollars a year less than their counterpart in a school setting, there is unfortunately but very understandably, a shift away from early childhood education to primary settings. So I think there’s an interrelated set of issues. There’s the number of graduates, there’s the nature of the preparation, there’s questions around the quality of the preparation and how much of a teaching degree is actually focused on the early years. And I think there’s a really interesting question there about how well the evidence about the critical importance of the early years, the rapid nature of brain development before the commencement of formal schooling, how well is that evidence reflected in teacher preparation, and how well are our teachers equipped to work in those early year settings, and then how well do we nurture our teachers because it’s one thing being prepared to work in early education and being willing to work in it. It is a setting that can have challenges, particularly if a graduate chooses to work in a community or a part of Australia that has more challenges than another.
22:19 Trish Eadie But I think more than ever, we now understand what the teaching strategies are that are evidence-based, and that if delivered with fidelity and sustained over time make differences to children’s trajectories. It’s very clear that there are social emotional supports and instructional supports that teachers from
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infant and toddler rooms through to four year old preschool rooms can be using that really harness and build on children’s concept development there, their understanding of the world around them, their problem solving skills. So we now have that evidence, it’s how we manage to embed it both in all of those different pre-service contexts and then how we can manage to also at the same time upskill through professional learning and professional development programmes the workforce we have. And that takes us back to the workforce issues because Deb, you might know more recent data, but some of the figures I’ve heard is that a quarter of the workforce in the early childhood sector turns over annually. Now that has enormous ramifications for continuity of care and quality of educational programmes. But also in the funds that you commit to professional learning... if you know that...
23:47 Maxine McKew It’s a high level of attrition isn’t it?
23:49 Trish Eadie It is, it’s really high
23:51 Deb Brennan Yeah and those figures are correct to my knowledge Trish. And one issue that I would add into this discussion is that if we think about the funding for the sector as a whole, which sort of ranges (?24:06) Commonwealth, state and to some extent local councils, the Commonwealth is certainly the most significant provider of public funds into early childhood, but those funds go overwhelmingly to support the individual fees faced by families. Now while that’s really important and an excellent thing to do, what we have lost from the system in just the last few years are those elements of funding that I call the stewardship elements of funding. Things for example like the set funding for professional support in early childhood education and care. That used to come from the Commonwealth but that stream of funding was ended a couple of years ago, and what that means is that services themselves have to find ways to fund professional support for teachers and educators. Now fund providers, particularly some of the large non profits, are able to do that very effectively because of their scale and their ability to cross subsidise, but when we think about the individual early childhood setting whether it’s a kindergarten or a long day care
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service, it’s simply not practical, and for many it’s impossible to fund that professional support.
25:33 Trish Eadie I was just going to pick up on the point of educational leadership because I think if there is one lever to be thinking about quality and quality improvement in our early childhood education programmes and practice, it’s the educational leader role. Our National Quality Standards and the framework provide that every service needs to have an educational leader who really leads the pedagogical programme in services. What we haven’t done well I don’t believe to date, is really provide a very clear and structured job description for that educational leadership role, because if we were able to do that and be able to harness every service having a dedicated educational leader whose role was to work with all of the other teachers and educators in the service, to really think about their practice and the teaching strategies they’re using, then we’ve got a really significant lever for change, but we need to do the work on how we build the actual pieces of work that we want that educational leadership role to fulfil.
26:48 Maxine McKew Well look we’re close to time and I did say at the beginning of this discussion there’s you know more heavy lifting to do and you’ve well and truly outlined what that should be. Deb, can I just come back to you I suppose on a more optimistic note? There is a very considerable agenda that you’ve laid out there that in fact a re-elected Federal Government could run with if they so choose.
2:10 Deb Brennan Absolutely and I think it’s also worth saying that lifting our game and its recommendations has been endorsed by literally dozens now of national early childhood organisations, and that’s across the for profit and not for profit divide and preschool, kindergarten, long day care centres. So there is a lot of support for this agenda. And I think there is a feeling too, as I said at the beginning, that Australia has put in place a really positive and innovative policy architecture, and we have as a nation, and particularly in this sector, put an enormous amount of effort into moving towards a high quality education and care system. We know now what more needs to be done. We do have a road
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map, and I don’t want to suggest that this is the only agenda, but we do have a road map for the future and a lot of buy in for this agenda. So there’s a lot of goodwill and a lot of scope and lot of positivity around the future for early childhood education.
28:20 Maxine McKew Well that’s good to hear. Well look Deb thank you very much, and Trish I know that you’re organising a get together in November at the end of the year with a lot of the stakeholders, a summit to range over a lot of these issues?
28:31 Trish Eadie Yes, specifically we’re interested in thinking about the frameworks, the early years learning framework, the National Quality Standards piece that are now ten years old and have stood us in such good stead to build the foundations, but now thinking what happens over the next decade? How do we actually build on that and realise some of the recommendations, some of the road map that the Lifting our Game review brought to light?
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29:05 Maxine McKew Well that’s it for another Talking Teaching. This podcast has been produced at the Hallworth Studios of the University of Melbourne. Our sound engineer is Gavin Nebauer and he has also composed our theme music that you hear at the start and finish of this show. Bye for now.
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Miriam Brown, Trish Eadie and Deb Brennan Talking Teaching – Episode 15