week 4 - website sharing

Week 4 – Blog

The website I read from is www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au/

It is a site targeting at early childhood professionals, policymakers and educators. It is a very content rich website that provides a lot of useful information, updates, news and researches for the targets. It has all the updated information about the policy in Australia, trends and changes about early childhood education.

In one of the articles written by the Editor, Alison Elliot dated 2010, he wrote, “Ambitious and complex policy reform processes to lift quality across early childhood services are well underway. Today, the early childhood sector, government and community are largely united in valuing early education.” (Allison Elliot, 2010) Furthermore, he mentioned that preschools and children centers are developed and managed separately for the last 100 years. It is the first time that a serious national policy shift to put education and care together around the value of education and the need for quality early education programs for all children. Focus is on quality, educational significance and outcomes. To do so, Commonwealth and state governments and expert policy groups have worked with key stakeholders to develop and progress the change agenda. This will be a slow process involving legislative, jurisdictional and funding changes. Various considerations and elements are needed to be considered. It includes early childhood educators professional and career development and incentives, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders ethnics groups, poverty in remote areas, play a foundational role in learning, digital technologies and working with families. Taking the recent research from Harvard University economists, the plan will also stress on the long term value of early childhood education, the value of quality teaching in generating learning outcomes and later development potential for the children. Such investment will be across the board ranges covering all. It is what we are studying about the influences of economists, neuroscientists, and politicians on early childhood field.

There is a media release by the website in May, 2014 talking about parents are paying more for early childhood education and care services, despite a significant increase in government spending. It also discussed the detailed analysis done by Early Childhood Australia indicated that “by the end of the freeze (2017-18), families will be paying thousands more for services, despite the Federal Government committing more than AUS$7 billion per year on subsidies. This information is contradictory to the reform the Editor Allison Elliot refers about. I think more in depth learning of the reform and analysis are needed in order to understand better the two views.

The websites provide information on early childhood news, research papers, best practices sharing and other resources regarding how economists, scientists and politicians support the early childhood field. It is interesting researchers in Australia have proved that children attending just one year of preschool education attains 20 points higher in reading, spelling, writing and numeracy under the national plan of all children attending 15 hours of preschool in the year before school of 40 weeks of the year. However, 25%-92% of children in various States attending the 15 hours a year. There are still a lot needed to be done.

 

References:

Early Childhood Australia website, extracted from www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au