TRANSCRIPT
The product of 18 months of work, Australia's first national strategy on the early childhood years puts the focus on children aged between zero and five.
Social Services Minister Amanda Rishworth says that's critical.
"More than one million neural connections are formed in our brains each second in those critical first early years of life. A pace never, ever to be repeated again. So if we can get it right in the early years, we have the opportunity to prevent so many issues down the track. And that is why this strategy is so important. It outlines our vision for young children to thrive in the early years.
4,000 Australians were consulted: including families, workforce personnel, and children aged between three and five.
Ms Rishworth says the new policy document sets a 10-year time frame to fix the "complex and fragmented" early childhood system - replacing it with an more integrated system that has improved accountability.
That includes the establishment of a $100 million-dollar fund to reward local solutions.
"So one of the areas in which we get a lot of feedback is that organisations say that then only funded to do certain activities. They're not funded on the outcomes. They're not funded on the achievements they're able to make working with a parent or family overall. And that's where our a $100 million dollars Outcomes Fund is about paying organisations and states and territories on outcomes achieved for those families, not necessarily siloed program funding. And so that is a change of working that we've committed to do."
The first of three action plans containing concrete measures will be released by the end of the year.
Overseeing the strategy's development will be a new Parents and Carers Reference Group to ensure they can provide direct feedback.
Sylvana Mahmic is the CEO of Plumtree Children's Services - and a member of the expert advisory panel for the government's Early Years strategy.
She says seeing her child struggle with a developmental disability made it clear to her that the system needs to be improved.
"And starting out on the right trajectory is what supports children and families to thrive. He's now 33, if there was a strategy that guided and set the direction for policy to be integrated in a way that supported families and children, I know that our child would've been better off; and our whole family would've been better off. So from my perspective, what I have been able to bring to the strategy is the perspective of parents where there are developmental differences, or concerns or disabilities, to make sure that this strategy is for all children."
Early Childhood Education Minister Anne Aly says a key aspect for her in the strategy is the approach of tackling entrenched disadvantage.
"We know that if we get those first five years, those critical first five years, right? We can make a huge difference, huge difference to a child's life. And that's what drives the federal government on this. That's what drives Minister Rishworth. That's what drives myself. That recognition that we have in our hands, the ability to tackle entrench disadvantage, the ability to change a child's life, and the ability to ensure that no child born into any form of disadvantage should have to carry that disadvantage through their lives."
The CEO of Early Childhood Australia, Samantha Page, says she welcomes the strategy - and she hopes it is resourced and implemented with the goal of alleviating the stress and pressures faced by parents navigating the multitude of different services.
"The strategy represents a very firm commitment to better support for families; and to easier streamline access to services; and addressing that affordability issue. I think it is 90 per cent of brain development happens in the first five years. It's ridiculous that we preclude children from high-quality early childhood education on the basis of family's workforce participation or capacity to pay. By having these high out-of-pocket costs, it really is time that we put the priority on children's outcomes - and children's access to services in their own right."
The acting CEO for the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth, Roslyn Dundas, says she wants to see no time wasted in moving to the implementation stage.
"What the evidence shows us is that one in six children in Australia are living in poverty, and that statistic has not shifted in over a decade. These kind of strategies that we're now seeing from the government that centre children, are so valuable in addressing some of those problems that we've been looking to tackle for so long. But what we now need is true action. We need funding and investment to back in these strategies so they just don't stay words on a page."
She says a federal minister for children could be the missing piece to improve the co-ordination between government departments.
"Wouldn't it be amazing if we had a minister for children who actually oversaw all these different areas that we're talking about that come together for children that oversaw health, education, social services, even planning and transport - that impacts on children's lives. At the moment, we put our children in silos. We only see them as users of healthcare, as users of education services, as users of family and social services. We've never had a minister for children in this nation. It's an amazing and important first step in actually lifting and centering children and seeing them as whole humans. We hope that the federal budget that's coming out next week actually starts to address some of these silos that have been identified in the strategy."
Trawlwoolway woman Catherine Chamberlain is Professor of Indigenous Health at the University of Melbourne.
A registered midwife and public health researcher, she says she is pleased to see consideration of First Nations children, and the take up of ideas mentioned in her submission.
"Tools and resources around fetal alcohol syndrome. There was a focus on better care to prevent and treat hearing loss in children, which is an absolute huge issue impacting children in our communities. And we really need work on that. Addressing developmental delay and partnerships in early childhood care to develop advice and support. So community-led reforms to improve early childhood outcomes for First Nations children. And also something close to my heart as a midwife was that there was funding for dedicated birthing on country centre of excellence, which is a really exciting development."
She says she would like to see more detail on how the strategy can help turn around the situation of the over-representation of Indigenous children in out-of-home care and the youth justice system, following the impact of government policies that made legal the forced removal of First Nations children from their families.
"So we saw in the most recent Productivity Commission report even we've already got rates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait is children that are more than 10 times the number of non-indigenous children in out-of-home care. And these are rates that are getting worse, not better. So we really need a huge focus to be able to turn those trajectories around, so that the numbers of Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care can start to go down. And that families are getting the wrap-around support that we know works."
Professor of health economics and social policy, Leonie Segal at the University of South Australia says finding solutions to overcome the problems of silos is key.
"When we are looking at the issues in early childhood, it's not just about education, it's actually about the whole family context. We actually need to have access to, as I said, speech (development), even nutrition. You'll have children turning up who don't have access to the food they need. They're not going to be able to focus. How do we work with families as a whole? How do we find ways of bringing it all together so that the families who are in greatest need, whose children will benefit most? How do we ensure they get all the things they want without having sort of 50 different programs they've got to connect to?"
That is something that resonates with the CEO of Speech Pathology Australia, Jodie Long.
She says COVID isolation has meant there has been greater demand for speech pathologists to help children during those early years, but the workforce shortage has made it difficult to meet the level of need.
"COVID has also significantly impacted children who are in their preschool years currently. We are seeing significant delays with child development during the children who were impacted by the COVID lockdowns. And so therefore, it is something that needs to be discussed with the government because the demand for speech pathology services will increase."
South Australia's inaugural Commissioner for Children and Young People Helen Connolly says there is great value to having an overarching strategy - both at the federal and state government level - that looks at the issue over 10 years, a new approach.
And rather than a federal minister on children and families, she thinks a Future Generations portfolio - like Wales adopted in 2016 - could be a better way forward.
"To look at whether you have a future generations-type approach, so that you end up with some long-term thinking around where does every policy land? How do we check that they're actually meeting the needs, not just today's generations, but the future generations of children and young people. I think that could be a kind of contemporary approach that builds in some of those key elements of what a minister would do in terms of holding the department accountable and being responsible to cabinet, all those kind of things. But maybe it sits in a future generation space."
