Quality Early Education for All

It is time that quality early education is considered a core entitlement for all Australian children. 2
The evidence for what constitutes quality early education is strong: existing information can provide a reliable
compass for action if backed by ongoing measurement, evaluation and mechanisms to support continual quality
improvement. But there are no perfect answers and ‘silver bullet’ solutions. We need to use this evidence and
develop and evaluate Australian-specific solutions to answer the crucial questions around ‘what works’, for whom
and in what circumstances.
High-quality ECEC is a significant lever for improving children’s outcomes – a critical part of the package of inputs
that sets children up to succeed at school and in life – but it is important that it is not seen as the solution for
transformational change.
High-quality universal
platforms offer the
best opportunity to
shift outcomes at the
population-level and
should be the priority
for investment
Bold policy decisions are needed for Australia to address the huge
downstream personal and social costs of missing the opportunity to act
early – when interventions are most effective. Responding to the
consequences of the stark socio-economic differences evident when
children arrive at school is enormously challenging for the education
sytem. Recent Grattan Institute data on the impact of disadvantage on
educational attainment highlights the difficulty the current education
system has in maximising the potential of all children, including the huge
gulf in learning between the most highly performing and lowest
performing students (Goss and Sonnerman, 2016). This reinforces the
Mitchell Institute’s findings in ‘Educational Opportunity’ that without
additional support, early disadvantage can continue throughout a child’s
schooling.
One of the core issues plaguing social policy and service delivery in Australia is that of funding and delivery
models that are often incapable of servicing the number of people who need them. In the same way that only
taking half a course of antibiotics will not address the underlying infection, a program with the capacity to work
with 30 children in a community of 1000 children will never shift the outcomes measured by the Australian Early
Development Census (AEDC). This is why AEDC results have not substantially altered since 2012, despite
investments in a range of evidence-based programs. These programs have their place, and should be supported,
but will not deliver the population-level change we need unless they reach the majority of children likely to
benefit from them. Similarly, low to moderate quality early education will not be sufficient to close the gap in
school readiness and subsequent achievement.
High-quality universal platforms offer the best opportunity to shift outcomes at the population-level and should
be the priority for investment.
There is, therefore, a clear and compelling rationale to prioritise establishing early education as a universal
entitlement for all Australian children, ensuring that education is delivered with the intensity and with the quality
needed. We also need to build capacity to track the extent to which it is, in fact, benefitting children.
Australia has begun building the infrastructure needed to achieve genuine Universal Access, but a proactive
approach is needed to ensure that previous landmark reforms are able to achieve their intended outcomes.
2 The International Labour Organization contends that broad acceptance of the idea that early education is a public good is
likely to coincide with its inclusion as part of the school system (ILO, 2012, p. 24).
Quality Early Education for All 3