Vocational Voices: Season 9, Episode 1
Facing Australia's transition to electric vehicles
Steve Davis (00:00)
Hello I'm Steve Davis. Welcome to this podcast for Australia's National Centre for Vocational Education Research.
Childcare is an important element in daily life for many Australian families, and for the Australian labour market, for its the availability of affordable childcare that enables many parents to participate in the workforce at all. Some would argue that the affordability of childcare in this country is due in part to its history of being a low skill, low pay trap. But there are signs this is changing and moves afoot to raise the quality, and most likely the cost of childcare, by broadening its focus from care to care and education.
In the paper Developing the childcare workforce: understanding ‘fight’ or ‘flight’ amongst workers, Tanya Bretherton, from Sydney University's Workplace Research Centre, reports on ways for different childcare providers are developing their workforces at a time when national policy for the sector is undergoing change and against a backdrop of high turnover rates.
I began by asking Tanya, what's meant by development of the childcare workforce?
Tanya Bretherton (01:15)
In the context of childcare development, I think means many things. It can mean access to conventional and available vocational education and training, and indeed higher education forms of higher education in the current environment. But it also can mean providing a supportive and supportive structures of work so that workers can undertake work in a manner that maintains high quality for the children in the centres.
Steve Davis (01:49)
Tanya before we move more deeply into some of the principles in the report, I'm intrigued by the terms fight and flight in relation to child care workers. Can you perhaps unpack that a little for us?
Tanya Bretherton (02:00)
The reason why I guess we've used that phrase, it's because it's a very powerful way of explaining the culture that has emerged in the childcare industry, particularly among workers in the childcare industry. Fight refers or is used to refer to the incredibly loyal and passionate way with the way in which many childcare workers undertake their work and in particularly difficult circumstances they commit to maintain standards of quality in a very tenacious way. So there's a group of workers that will stay in the sector, really, no matter what happens, you know, low pay, poor access to skill development and all of those things that we stereotypically know about the sector. So those are the fight workers.
The flight workers are those workers in which, for whatever reason, personally or otherwise, they leave the sector or churn in and out of the sector. So move between childcare and other low paid sectors, because it's simply not sustainable for them to stay.
Steve Davis (03:16)
Can you share a little bit about the four centres that you researched, a little about their background, and perhaps the strategies for workforce development that each was pursuing?
Tanya Bretherton (03:27)
We included a cross-section of what we felt were the main characteristics in terms of delivery. So there are obviously a number of models under which childcare operates in this country. And we selected four main models. One was a private model, one was a non-for-profit kind of independent or community based model. One was a non-for-profit, conglomerate model, so it worked as part of a wider umbrella network of NFP providers. And then there were government owned centres which were often or predominantly local council owned.
There was a variety of strategies. I guess a main finding of the report is that all of those centres, and all were best practice operators within their field, had recognised that a main barrier in terms of the future for the sector and lifting the status of work in the sector, was really about strategies to address turnover. And there were a variety of strategies that those four centres had implemented. But turnover, there was a common recognition that turnover was that was the biggie that they had to confront.
Steve Davis (04:48)
I'm intrigued. You just use the term best practice. What does best practice look like at this stage within the childcare centre? And you mentioning that some organisations seem to be embodying that.
Tanya Bretherton (05:01)
We used a number of core factors or core foundation elements that defined quality delivery. One was continuity of employment. So the employment relationships between the employer and the employee within the centre were longstanding and in most cases were based on stable or permanency of employment.
Another feature related to a commitment to offer child and staff ratios that were lower than required by the statutory minimum. Another element related to an assertion of philosophy. That's the term that's been used in the report. But it's really about a thoughtful process where a centre understands exactly the type of care and education that they want to provide within that care environment, and then mobilising or using that as a uniting force to plan the centre's activities.
A fourth factor related to the way in which staff were permitted to maintain qualifications. So either hiring sufficiently qualified staff or creating arrangements or opportunities for staff to continually access education and training in keeping with the philosophy of the centre, and also so that employees could leave a career path out of the education and training provided.
Steve Davis (06:36)
Tanya is it your recollection that it's this willingness or a desire to create a career path that is leading pressure towards broadening the focus from childcare to childcare and education? Or are there other motivators behind this push, this momentum?
Tanya Bretherton (06:57)
Oh, look, that's part of it. I also think that we are at a unique crossroads, I guess, in policy terms, because so much work has been done internationally where many nations are starting to question their approach to the delivery of education and care services and the extent to which they should either be amalgamated or separated.
And certainly the work that's been done by the OECD, you know, within the last 5 to 10 years has created a baseline, I guess, in terms of comparing the attitudes and the delivery mechanisms of childcare and in, you know, nations all over the world that's provided a baseline. I think we didn't kind of really have.
Certainly people in the industry knew a lot about what was going on. But it's created an environment where people are starting to question or be more directed in the way the choices that we're making in terms of policy.
Steve Davis (07:58)
How disruptive are these moves towards a more skilled childcare workforce likely to be on incumbents within the industry do you think?
Tanya Bretherton (08:07)
That's probably the big question I think everyone is asking within the industry. I think for people entering the industry, the environment is going to be really different. And the issues will not be as difficult. I mean, there's certainly for those workers that have made a long standing commitment to the sector and haven't accessed or haven't maintained, sort of qualifications or continual improvement in qualifications and certainly haven't achieved kind of an early childhood specific focus. It's certainly likely they're going to have to commit to upskill or to undertake training.
It's a difficult question for the sector to confront because without upskilling and without that recognition, it's very difficult for the sector or the sector as a whole to change the status of the industry over time. And certainly it's well documented and people within the industry are very aware of how devalued their work is.
I mean, in one researcher talks about the weight of history or the legacy of the devaluation of care and education activities and childcare, certainly, experiences that.
Steve Davis (09:35)
From my point of view as a parent, actually making use of the childcare sector at least only one day a week at the moment for our child. I fear tensions in the workforce during this transitional period as the, participants who are on the pathway towards higher education in the sector will be treated differently or have different esteem with an organisation compared to those fighters who are staying in there, perhaps those people who are there more for the care focus. Is there much thought about these potential tensions within the sector?
Tanya Bretherton (10:12)
Look, that's an interesting question. And funnily enough, it certainly, superficially you would think, look, that is a reasonable thing to perhaps anticipate might happen given that you've got two very different streams of education and training. But I can only say the experience in the centres that we interviewed, the approach couldn't have been more different.
And it was because the employers, and we've kind of generically labelled them best practice employers, had really undertaken to create a very committed, positive and united culture within their organisations. I mean, many employers talked about the creation of a flat structure and that flat structure or that sort of non-hierarchical approach to managing or workload management. There are obviously still directors and there are managers undertaking certain duties and activities within that structure. But that flat structure or that commitment to everyone being entitled to have a say and to participate fully in the activities in the centre, that was something that really preceded all of this.
You know, the more modern kind of policy frameworks that we're talking about in terms of upskilling and EChF or early childhood focus. So that certainly wasn't a feature in the centres that we interviewed.
Steve Davis (11:50)
Before we finished with some VET sector focused questioning, there is one other parent centred question. And that is the danger of pricing of childcare becoming out of the reach of average families as the workforce does become more highly skilled and therefore in a position to command better pay. What is the thought? What's the thinking process about that looking down the track?
Tanya Bretherton (12:19)
Yeah, look, that obviously is probably the main question that everyone is asking. Looking at the experience overseas. That issue really has been resolved in many cases by there being a commitment by government to provide more funding. And that certainly is the experience kind of in the Nordic regions.
I can say from the interviews that we conducted with these very innovative employers, they have been operating in cost strapped environments for a very long time and have been incredibly resourceful in the way that they have managed to maintain high quality standards and care and yet, maintain very low turnover in their workforce.
I think there are there are options. And I think the fact that those options haven't been considered to this point is because we haven't faced this situation.
Steve Davis (13:25)
At this point in time, do you think the VET sector is geared towards helping the childcare workforce develop both the caring and the educational skills bases, or are there other models that will have to embrace bodies outside the VET sector to help the childcare industry move forward?
Tanya Bretherton (13:43)
I guess there's two ways to approach that question. One is to say that obviously many providers are ex workers themselves who have moved into training. They are very aware of the quality issues, very committed to adapting VET as required in order to kind of embrace some of these new or merged school categories between education and care.
The other way that that question might be answered is really to echo some of the comments made by the employers we interviewed, which is that many VET operators really have fallen short. And work needs to be done in terms of changing the way the training is delivered and also changing the content of VET training in particular so that it can embrace more of a pedagogical focus, I guess, in keeping with this merged category of skill that we're all talking about, early childhood rather than just the division between education and care that the system has been characterised by historically.
Thanks for listening to this podcast produced by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research. To download your copy of Developing the childcare workforce: understanding ‘fight’ or ‘flight’ amongst workers, go to www.ncver.edu.au.