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Good morning

Before I start, I would like to pay my respects to the traditional owners of this land that we meet on today: the Kaurna people and to acknowledge and honour their care and love of the country and their children for over 40,000 years.  

The interests of children aren’t driving key policies

There is no greater policy imperative for any country than securing and sustaining its future: and that means putting children first. And if we are to put children first then we need to look at who cares for them and that means parents.

However in the flurry of current interest in childhood, we need to make certain that the policies we end up with are informed by what we know about children’s wellbeing and development and don’t only represent adult interests.  There is a serious risk that this can happen.

Although there are a number of commentators arguing for the interests of children to be central to policy making, these views compete with other very powerful influences and often the linkages between children’s needs and broad policy perspectives are not understood.

The fragmented nature of our policy on child care demonstrates this. We often have a policy division between child care to promote the labour force participation of parents and child care designed to support children’s development and education. 

The Sydney media have spent this week complaining about non working mothers taking up child care places. It’s as if their children have no right to early education and care experiences because really child care is about mother’s workforce participation not children’s wellbeing. 

This competition between whose interests matter is also seen in economic policy. We all know that child poverty is one of the strongest indicators of poor outcomes for children in Australia so the Welfare to Work policy is designed to help parents enter or re-enter the workforce. However, if this policy compromises an individual’s capacity to be a successful parent or if parents are moved into insecure, low paying employment it is not a positive policy: it does not put children first.

And yet another example of competition between policy interests is in the industrial relations changes. The impact deregulation of the industrial relations setting could have on the care and nurture of young children is yet to be tested.  However, if the result is that parents have less rather than more capacity to balance their work and family lives, then children will be disadvantaged by these changes. They will come off second best.

We are here today because we think children are important.

We recognise that supporting parents is one of the best ways of improving children’s wellbeing.

It is imperative that decision makers also recognise this across all policy areas particularly the broader economic and social policy area, because it’s these policies that create the context for parenting.

I have chosen to focus on the policy context for parenting, rather than on service delivery issues, not because services for assisting parents aren’t important, but because we can’t expect parents to make good choices for their children when other aspects of their lives are making their role difficult.  

Policy settings also need to be able to respond to the variety of choices families make about how they care for their children. 

Cultural values about the care of children, financial demands, parents’ personal needs, access to child care services and the availability of family and friend networks all play a part in the decisions parents make. 

What I want to do this morning is outline how children’s interests are not driving our key policies which I’ve just done, I want to now outline why it’s important that they should.

I then want to look at what objectives the key policies should be aiming for and what the policies underpinning those objectives might look like.

Then I will conclude with how we might move this forward.

Why do we want children’s interests to drive key policies?

So why should children’s interest drive key policies? Well there are two key reasons.

Firstly the early years experiences set the foundations for future health, wellbeing and competence and a population of children who have had positive early years experiences is great for the future productivity of the country which is the second reason.

So I will talk about each of these in turn.

The Early years stay with you forever

We have been hearing about the significance of early childhood experience on early brain development for some time now.

We know that there are windows of opportunity in the development of brain architecture that arise in the early years that close up later on in our development. 

We also know that brain development is dependent upon the development of trusting and nurturing relationships and that development is disrupted by excessive stress. 

The early relationship that develops between a mother and baby strengthens brain architecture and reinforces a baby’s ability to learn.  This provides a foundation for developing future relationships and a broad range of competencies, both cognitive and non-cognitive, needed over a life time. 

It is important that this knowledge is used to influence policy and investment decisions. I understand Jim McKenna spoke about this yesterday when talking about cost keeping with your baby.

Economic value of early childhood

The second reason we want children’s interests to drive key policy is because of the value of early childhood to Australia ’s economic and therefore social growth.

One of the people we can turn to help us make the argument about the importance of early childhood to the economy is Professor James Heckman.

Professor Heckman won the 2000 Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences and he makes a strong case for why governments should increase their investment in early childhood. 

I would like to go through a number of the points made by Professor Heckman because they are important in the broader economic debates on policy and investment priorities. 

Professor Heckman and his colleagues have concluded that both cognitive (i.e. IQ) and non-cognitive (that is things like motivation, perseverance, ability to concentrate) skills are important in the economy. 

He believes that there is often an over- emphasis on the importance of cognitive skills at the expense of non cognitive skills.  He believes that both types of skills are required in the workforce of today and the future.

This of course, is not a new idea to those working in human services.  The ability to plan, communicate and work with others are obviously skills that are needed in most workplaces.

Professor Heckman makes the point that it is the early family environment that predicts later cognitive and non cognitive skills. 

Through his work on the economic return of job retraining programs he has come to the conclusion that this is the more efficient and effective time to build the types of skills needed in a modern workforce. 

He argues that traditionally countries have looked to rectify skill gaps too late in the life cycle. This is due to an insufficient understanding of how skill acquisition occurs early and how resistant to change these gaps can be.

Skill gaps across socio-economic status groups have already emerged and are significant in the pre-school and early school years. 

They are generally constant after 8 years of age with little further change resulting from school education. 

Professor Heckman’s also argues that remediation for impoverished early environments is more costly and less effective the later it is tried.

His conclusion is that rehabilitation and skill development for adults are less successful than we’d hope because participants have not developed the necessary non-cognitive skills early in life.

Therefore he argues we must focus more on helping families and communities provide nurturing environments for young children.

It is at this point that I feel I should qualify that this argument does not mean that supports and interventions should not be provided at other life stages. 

Not at all. 

My assessment of this argument is that we are talking about getting the investment levels right for the early years at a population level and providing ‘top ups’ throughout the life cycle. 

These top ups work better, the better the early years experience.

If we can achieve a broader understanding of the importance of early childhood to longer term productivity we then need to communicate the things that are important in early childhood and build policies from here.

So if childhood is important then what do we want our key policies to?

There are three objectives that I believe should drive our policy making.  These are based on what we currently know is good for children.  These are:

• Helping babies and young children establish secure and trusting relationships
• Promoting stimulating environments that help children build their competence
• Decreasing the incidence of child poverty

I’ll discuss each of these in turn starting with policies that help babies and young children establish secure and trusting relationships

Helping babies and young children establish secure and trusting relationships

Very young children need to establish secure and responsive relationships with a primary caregiver. This ability to attach to a significant adult allows young children to become trusting, confident and capable of regulating stress.

Parents need time to establish this relationship with their baby or young child.

There can be huge pressures on parents to return to work as early as possible – to keep their job and to meet financial commitments.  

If we accept that for most children, parental care is the best option when they are very young, we need to consider how this can be better supported by policy. 

One of the major reasons mothers return to work earlier than they might choose is a lack of paid maternity leave. 

It does appear that many mothers would prefer to have a longer period before returning to work. 

In a survey of mothers in 2001, Mariah Evans and Jonathan Kelley of Monash University found that when asked their personal preferences on staying at home with their young children or working, 81% of mothers expressed warm and strong responses to staying at home, 13% were neutral and only 6% were against staying at home.

If we really want to value children in Australia , the adoption of legislated paid maternity leave should be our number one priority. 

Of course, paid maternity leave is available in some workplaces.  It is a realistic strategy for employers who are keen to retain skilled staff.  The challenge is to have a system that covers all employed women on the birth of their baby. 

And Australia and the United States are the only OECD countries without paid maternity leave provisions.

Parents need a legislated system to provide both paid and unpaid parental leave which gives families the space, without suffering undue financial hardship, to develop strong relationships with their children. 

We should be able to start with 16 weeks paid maternity leave immediately which is the WHO standard and within a decade raise this to 12 months. 

We also need a further year of unpaid parental leave including a statutory entitlement period for fathers.

Promoting stimulating environments that help children build their competence

The second objective that key policies should address is promoting stimulating environments that help children build their competence

There are two policy areas that make a large contribution to children’s development. 

The first are the policies surrounding early education and care including quality and access.

The second is policies surrounding workplaces taking action to provide for family responsibility. 

I’ll start with early education and care policies.

Quality child care

Results from the Child Care Survey released by the ABS this week indicate that 1 in 5 children in Australia attend formal child care. 

With such strong evidence that formal care is becoming a reality for more and more children quality needs to be consistently high across child care settings. 

We know that poor quality services place can be harmful.  Poor quality care and education, is at best custodial and worst damaging. 

Although Australia is fortunate that state and federal governments are concerned with the quality of services.  It is still likely that poor quality care is more prevalent than we would like.

When existing regulatory and quality assurance mechanisms are examined against professionally recommended standards, there is a significant gap.

There has been no validation of the reliability of the National Child Care Accreditation Council’s accreditation program and there is a notable absence of sanctions against badly performing centres.  There is also great variation in licensing standards and coverage of child care settings across Australia . 

Another threat to quality is the serious shortage of qualified staff and a high staff turnover in services. 

Our current approach to the provision of child care is fragmented according to jurisdictional boundaries and service type.  It is imperative that our system be designed on the understanding that children learn in all service types and they learn from birth. 

Finding and paying for child care is enough of a burden for families – assessing quality is a luxury only some can afford.

There are some very basic actions that need to be taken to improve the quality of child care.  These include:

1. Implementing staff to child ratios of 1:3 for children under two
2. Strengthening training and qualification requirements for staff
3. Implementing a national curriculum framework for early education and care and
4. Improving mechanisms for regulatory compliance and quality assurance for all settings.

There is convincing evidence on the benefits of high quality early childhood programs for 3 to 4 year old children before they attend formal schooling.   Although access remains an issue in some areas and for some groups.

Children from impoverished home environments particularly benefit from attendance in programs.  In fact, attendance at early childhood programs can improve outcomes for vulnerable children which persist over the longer term. 

Children learn about and enjoy relationships with their peers and caregivers and they expand their experiences.  It promotes their development and assists them in their transition into formal schooling. 

Whilst there is some concern about the benefits of formal child care for very young children, the exception is where children from extremely impoverished home environments attend high quality early childhood education and care services.

For these children early entry into high quality early childhood care and education services can improve developmental outcome, particularly when supported by sustained nurse home visiting.

Access to early childhood programs, whether provided in formal child care, preschool or other settings vary across jurisdictions.  It is often these children who would particularly benefit from these programs that miss out. 

The way ahead is to provide all 3-4 year olds in Australia with access to some hours of early childhood education and care in integrated programs.   These programs need to be supervised by early childhood trained staff.  

Workplaces help parents be available for their kids

The other policy area in achieving our objective of promoting stimulating environments is workplaces taking action to provide for family responsibilities.

Children and young people are affected by their parents’ working lives. It is not only the issue of time, but also the impact of work on parents’ emotions and behaviour that affects children.

Barbara Pocock and Jane Clarke found, in a study on how parents’ jobs affect young people that ‘children not only observe their parents’ ‘colour’, but many are affected by it themselves and feel its effects through yelling, arguments and household tension.

Findings of a Canadian study show that children with parents who work non-standard working hours - that is evenings, nights and weekends – are more likely to have emotional or behavioural difficulties than children in families where parents work standard hours. 

Participating in the work force should not prevent families from establishing and maintaining secure and nurturing relationships with their children and being involved in their children’s school and social lives. 

However there are observable labour force trends in Australia that pose a threat to the ability of parents to ‘be available for their children’.

  1. More and more people are working non standard hours; 

  2. The average number of hours worked by full-time workers, and the proportion of employees who work long hours, have increased in recent decades;

  3. There is also a perception, noted in the HREOC discussion paper, Striking the Balance, that employees across a range of sectors are required to do more tasks, working harder and faster and that this results in more stress; and  of course

   4. Greater levels of casualisation can bring greater job and income insecurity. 

All of these trends have a capacity to affect parents’ ability to be responsive to their children’s needs.

A range of workplace strategies are required to cover the different needs of children, young people and their families. 

These include the right to work part time until a youngest child reaches compulsory school age with the right to return to full time work as the child gets older. It also means providing for parent’s right to negotiate and vary total hours to meet the changing needs of a young family and to set hours including predictable start and finish times.

However there are significant barriers to the extension of these conditions to all working families.  In our current deregulated workforce we are asking for increased mandatory conditions.  We are going against the policy trend. 

We also have an additional problem that employees are often reluctant to take up opportunities that will allow them to spend more time with their families.  This may be due to perceptions of job insecurity or that it is not acceptable practice in the workplace or with out dated notions of the fathering role exclusively a provider role,

It is time for workplace action to provide for family responsibilities.  We have to make it O. K. for employees to have time for their kids. 

Decreasing the incidence of child poverty

The final objective our key policies should aim for is decreasing child poverty.

Poverty is one of the most consistent indicators of poor outcomes for children in Australia .  Poverty restricts choice and burdens families.  It provides one of the greatest risks to children’s health and development. 

In Australia it is largely related to joblessness and lone parenthood, with Aboriginal children being particularly affected. 

Workforce participation objectives are currently guiding policy in the area of income support.  For example, Welfare to Work will require parents who receive the current Parenting Payment to seek part time work when their youngest child turns six years old and to move to Newstart when their youngest child turns eight years old. 

There is no doubt that paid employment can provide a way out of poverty for families, the right balance needs to be found to both strengthen family functioning and prevent families moving from poverty through joblessness to poverty through low paying and insecure work. 

Current income support and tax benefits give mixed messages about supporting children. 

The system treats families differently according to type and it presents difficulties for families who choose to claim regular family payments throughout the year.  These are the very families who are likely to be most in need of regular income supplementation.

Adequate income support for families with young children needs to remain a key part of our investment in children.  We cannot trade off children’s wellbeing with other policy aspirations. 

It is also essential that children living in poverty and their families have access to the services that maximise social inclusion. 

I have previously mentioned the importance of access to good quality early childhood care and education for children living in impoverished environments.  However, it is important that investment in neighbourhood amenity and service infrastructure is also given priority in disadvantaged communities. 

What do we do now?

I’ve outlined how children’s interests are not driving our key policies, then outlined why it’s important that they should.

I then looked at what objectives the key policies should be aiming for and what the policies underpinning those objectives might look like.

Now in concluding I want to briefly look at how we might move this forward.

To make advances in how we support children’s development we need to:

1. Convince decision makers of the importance of early childhood and the need to support families
2. Build an understanding in the community about the importance of the early years and
3. Find ways where we can practically support children and their families.

Of course the whole purpose of this conference is to find ways we can practically support parents in their relationships and responsibilities to their children.  We are pretty focused on this.  I won’t spend time on this because its been well covered by others in the conference.

The job of changing the environment so that it is more conducive to supporting the wellbeing and development of children is moving into another sphere of activity where chances of success are uncertain. 

Although we have not seen the type of emphasis we would like in policies and budgets from governments at any level, there are encouraging signs that at least the importance of childhood is being recognised in some influential areas.

The early years is now on the Council of Australian Government’s or COAG’s agenda and the debate on access, quality and affordability of child care has focused political and media attention on children. 

We need to use this current interest in the early years to promote what we know about the importance of childhood and the ways we can support children’s wellbeing and development. 

We also need to be in this for the long haul. 

Investment in early childhood will continue to compete with the immediate demands of the ageing population and the needs of adults generally. 

I believe that these issues are of national significance. They require those of us involved in working with children and their parents to communicate the policy implications of what we know about wellbeing in childhood. 

This means that we need to collaborate. 

Of course this has already started. Key collaborations are evident in the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth and the National Investment for the Early Years, generally known as NIFTeY.  

In 2004 NIFTeY and the NSW and Queensland Commissions for Children and Young People developed A Head Start for Australia: An Early Years Framework which provides a blue-print that sets out what we can do - individually and as a community - to give all Australian kids a great 'head start' in life. 

This framework has provided direction for governments, researchers and policy makers across Australia to improve the way we support children in their early years.

As a result of a roundtable held in 2005 to identify ways of implementing Headstart, Fran Press from Charles Sturt University was commissioned by NIFTeY and the two Commissions to look at the issue of parental and non parental care of children under 5 years and recommend a way forward. 

We will be releasing this paper shortly as one way of building spaces that argue our key policies should put children first.

All of us need to find spaces or build spaces where we can argue that our key policies should put children first – at all levels - in our neighbourhoods, in our workplaces, in Cabinet decisions and in business.

We need to help parents to make good choices for their young children and you have been exploring that during this conference but we can’t expect parents to make good choices when our policy settings limit those parenting choices.

A country as innovative, well off and caring as ours should be doing better at giving parents a real choice through its policy settings so that we can continue to be an innovative, well off and caring country.

Our children deserve at least this.

Thank you.

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