United Voice News
Deputy PM launches campaign to fix childcare skills threat
On Friday June 20 Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard launched a childcare industry campaign to address the biggest threat to quality early childhood education and care for Australian families: the childcare skills crisis.
The LHMU’s BIG STEPS in childcare campaign is about creating the best early childhood education and care (ECEC) system for children, families and the economy. This will be impossible without a solution to Australia’s costly childcare skills crisis.
“Parents need to know that up to 60 percent of childcare workers leave the industry every year,” says LHMU National Secretary Louise Tarrant.
“This level of turnover in education and care staff is bad for children. It’s also costly for childcare operators,” says Tarrant, “and that means more worry and expense for parents.”
The Australian Government has committed close to one billion dollars to reform Australia’s childcare system, including $533.5 million for 15 hours of early childhood education for children in the year before formal schooling and $126 million for a Childcare Workforce Strategy.
The BIG STEPS in childcare campaign will look to Australia’s State and Territory Government’s to increase investment in overcoming Australia’s childcare skills crisis.
The campaign will also work with the Australian and State and Territory Governments to ensure childcare training initiatives are accessible to the existing childcare workforce.
Because of the childcare skills crisis, it will be impossible for the industry to implement improved ECEC programs without developing the skills of the existing childcare workforce.
The LHMU’s BIG STEPS in childcare campaign is a working alliance including Early Childhood Australia, the National Association of Community Based Children’s Services and the Children’s Services Policy Taskforce to create a national ECEC workforce strategy that develops the skills of the entire early childhood workforce and creates the career paths needed to stop massive rates of turnover in the sector.
A solution to the childcare skills crisis must include scholarships to assist childcare Diploma holders to upgrade their skills and a nationally coordinated system of Recognition of Prior Learning to recognise the skills of childcare workforce who currently have no formal childcare qualifications.
Download Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard's speech
