ACECQA Newsletter Issue 4 2016

Beyond the Fence - extending children's experience outdoors

What started as a pilot program has flourished into a program that stretches the realms of everyday practice. Kylie Keane, Educational Leader at Forrest Out Of School Hours Care shares her experiences with a school age care program based on the principles of allowing children to connect with nature, embed sustainable practices and extend children's experiences in the outdoors.

Read more on We Hear You.

Kate Stone and Christina Lipitkas from Gowrie SA share how they involve children in the benefit risk assessment process. 

Tim Gill, one of the UK’s leading thinkers on childhood, visited Australia recently to present his views on ‘rewilding children’ and ‘creating play connect’ at various symposia and community forums. In his Risk and Resilience article for Reflections magazine, Tim outlines the importance of assessing what children are learning from their experiences, identifying the risks and weighing up the benefits for children’s development and learning. He believes that most children are capable of assessing and managing risk, and this can be seen in their competence and confidence when attempting a risky activity. He shares more of his views on his website. 

The Talking about Practice series, Adventurous Play - Developing a culture of risky play supports educators with ideas for balancing risk to enable children to engage in risky play. Most importantly, educators need to ensure there is not an unnecessary and unacceptable risk to children’s wellbeing or safety when they are participating in activities. 

In the Australian Institute for Teacher and School Leadership (AITSL) Illustrations of Practice series, educators talk about risk taking in their environment, the links to children’s play and supporting families to understand the importance of risk taking for their children.

The Department for Education and Child Development in South Australia has published a collection of articles on risky play. The first article in the collection has a useful table explaining the categories of risky play.

To unpack this and reflect on your practices you might like to consider:

• What does your team mean by “risk”?
• Exploring the table linked above, reflecting on your context and the appropriateness of categories and subcategories.
• When do we remember taking risks as a child? How did that feel?
• Are there opportunities for risk taking for the children at our service? How might we assess our environment to ensure these opportunities are available to all children?
• How do we ensure children are alerted to safety issues and encouraged to develop the skills to assess and minimise risks to their safety?
• How do children’s ideas and voice contribute to risk assessment?
• How might we empower our families and community to see the benefits of risky play? 

Productivity Commission to study how education data is collected and used 

The Australian Government has asked the Productivity Commission to provide advice on a national approach to collecting and using data for early childhood education and care and schools.

Improving the collection and management of education data in Australia will help create a more robust national education evidence base, which can be used to inform policy development and to monitor national education objectives.

Have your say on the National Education Evidence Base Issues Paper before submissions close 25 May 2016. Read more about the public inquiry on the Productivity Commission website.

Starting Blocks launches advanced Find Child Care website functionality

Starting Blocks, ACECQA’s family focused website, has launched a new and improved ‘find child care’ feature.

This feature is ideal for new families who are taking their first steps into early education and care and looking for convenient ways to search and review services in their area.

The new feature allows parents to:

• Search via keyword or postcode
• Review services’ quality ratings
• Pick and save favourites
• Share favourites with family and friends.

Starting Blocks wants to keep it simple and aims to assist families with fast, easy and quality focused searches they can do at anytime, anywhere.

Check out Starting Blocks to see this new feature. 

Annual fees coming soon 

Annual fee invoices for the 2016-17 financial year will be issued by email before the end of May. Use the NQA ITS to check and update the contact email address that is recorded for your provider.

The fee is payable in full for all service approvals held by the provider regardless of any subsequent transfers, suspensions or closures.

Contact your regulatory authority if you have questions or for more information.

Translated information for family day care providers and educators

Translated fact sheets to assist family day care educators, providers and families with children in family day care services understand their obligations are available in Amharic, Arabic, Assyrian, Dari, Dinka, French, Hazaragi, Nuer, Somali, Sudanese and Swahili.

Download them from the Department of Education and Training website.

Register for Tasmania and NSW National Workshops

Bookings are open for ACECQA’s National Workshops in Tasmania and New South Wales, which will focus on Educational Leadership.

The free sessions are open to all educators and providers and are led by ACECQA’s National Education Leader, in partnership with local Professional Support Coordinators and regulatory authority staff.

Visit our Events page to register.

Thank you to everyone who joined us in the ACT, Northern Territory, Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia. Details for sessions in Victoria will be made available once finalised.

One in five children developmentally vulnerable

One in five children are developmentally vulnerable according to results from the most recent Australian Early Development Census (AEDC).

Looking at the development of children in their first year of full-time school, the AEDC measured children’s readiness for school and mapped their development against five domains:

• Physical health and wellbeing
• Social competence
• Emotional maturity
• Language and cognitive skills (school-based)
• Communication skills and general knowledge.

The results show that the development of Australian children is improving on the whole, with developmental vulnerability among children in their first year of school decreasing over time since 2009.

Significant improvements were made between 2009 and 2015 in some domains, such as children’s language and cognitive skills, and the gap between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children’s development and other children is narrowing. However, developmental vulnerability persists in several domains and children living in very remote communities remain more developmentally vulnerable.

Despite some  improvements, the results show that more than one in five Australian children are vulnerable in at least one area of their development domains, and one in 10 children are vulnerable in at least two areas at the time they start school.

The report highlights the importance of quality early childhood education and care, which can promote school readiness and assist children to be competent in all five developmental domains.

Read the full 2015 AEDC report.

Universal access to early childhood education signed

All states and territories have now signed the National Partnership Agreement on Universal Access to Early Childhood Education for 2016 and 2017.

Universal access to early childhood education ensures that a quality early childhood education program is available for all children in the year before full-time school (often referred to as preschool or kindergarten).

The preschool program is to be delivered by a qualified early childhood teacher for 15 hours a week or 600 hours a year, with a focus on participation by Indigenous children, vulnerable and disadvantaged children.

Programs will be delivered across a range of settings, including long day care, stand-alone preschools and school based preschools. Visit the Australian Government Department of Education website for more information.