Quality Early Education for All

• parents’ preferences and beliefs about the value of early education and about child development;
• access and availability, including cost, operating hours, location (remoteness and living in disadvantaged
communities) and lack of private and public transport;
• services not meeting need;
• poor coordination between services;
• limited access to specialist supports for children with additional needs;
• lack of publicity about services;
• complex paper work and enrolment processes; and
• lack of trust in services and fear of judgemental attitudes/behaviours (Cabone et al, 2004; CCCH, 2009; Baxter
and Hand, 2013).
Beliefs about the importance of early education appear to be a core driver of parental decisions about enrolling
children in ECEC. As part of LSAC, parents of 4-5 year old children who were expected to start full-time school the
following year but were not enrolled in ECEC were asked why they did not use services. The most common
responses were that parents were available and preschool was therefore not needed (20 per cent) or that the
child did not need it (19 per cent) (AIFS, 2013). These findings are echoed in another study of 101 disadvantaged
families, where 20 per cent of respondents reported that they chose not to participate in ECEC, despite initiatives
to extend hours or provide transport, due to a belief: in the role of mothers as full-time carers of children; that
ECEC does not provide valuable education and/or that education begins when children start school (Grace and
Bowes, 2010).
National and international research has identified a number of best-practice approaches for engaging and
retaining vulnerable families in ECEC:
• strength- based approaches;
• solution-focused approaches;
• family-centred practice;
• culturally responsive and culturally safe delivery;
• relationship-based practice; and
• accessible and family-friendly environments (CCCH, 2009).
There are a number of examples of excellent practice in Australia, and increasingly, these initiatives are supported
by high-quality evaluations. This growing evidence-base must be used to drive scale-up across the system –
changes in outcomes at a population-level will only be achieved through systemic changes of quality provison, not
simply by pockets of excellence.
Examples of promising practice are provided in Boxes 1-5.
Quality Early Education for All 33