A whole system approach to early years reform- Transcript
Interview with Professor Collette Tayler
Professor Taylor holds the Chair in Early Childhood Education and Care at the University of Melbourne. She's the project leader of the E4 Kids longitudinal study and local leader of the triple A Abecedarian approach Australia project.
Collette leads the Master of Teaching Early Childhood focused on birth to aged eight programs, and the integration of care education and health.
She’s deputy chair of the Australian Children's Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA) and a board member of the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority.
Professor Taylor’s key research focusses on young children's learning and development, early childhood program effectiveness policy and strategy.
Her findings are influencing the direction of policy leadership in early childhood education and care.
Collette’s research offers insights into the importance of improving the quality of programs and supports to infants, toddlers young children and their families.
This is new evidence of early childhood education and care quality in Australia.
We’ve been implementing the National Quality Framework since 2009.
It’s a whole system approach to raising the quality of support to infants, toddlers, young children and families.
Addressing only one part of the system won't put us among the best in the world in terms of the quality we provide.
What I want to do here is just cluster the system into three parts for us to consider how we are going four years into this National Quality Framework process.
Implementing an agreed vision and learning and development outcomes
One part is implementing an agreed vision and outcomes for the very young. The Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework helps us to do that.
This framework focuses us on the personal, social and academic capabilities of our young children.
The five Outcomes are daily priorities for any adults who spend time with children from birth through to age 8.
These outcomes make what we're trying to do visible and they give language for families, educators, Maternal and Child Health Nurses and specialist support staff, to talk about children's learning. The outcomes give us a common purpose and focus.
Delivering high quality practice
Another part is about having high-quality practices: centre based, home based, in the school and in the community.
Improving the standard of practice means we pay more attention to staff preparation and planning and ongoing professional learning that helps raise understanding about children's learning and development and how better to support families.
There’s strong research evidence that instructional support within play, what we call intentional teaching, makes a big difference to the very young and to their learning and development.
This is about listening to what children say and do and responding with rich language, expansive language around them.
Seeing what interests them and helping build new concepts and ideas, having lots of conversations that assure, challenge and also help children to grow their understandings.
In Australia the E4 Kids longitudinal study is already demonstrating that there are low levels of this kind of interaction in early childhood settings.
We do need to pay more attention to instructional support in play based situations.
Working closely together with families and colleagues
Yet another part is about working together and showing leadership to ensure every child grows and learns in safe, secure, warm and responsive environments that we make around them and with them.
Families can make the biggest difference of all to children’s success overtime.
We need to pay special attention to this because families are the children's first teachers and we can learn much from working with them: to engage children, to support their learning and to make them more successful in everything that they do.
There’s proven merit in working together to improve practice and support families.
Large-scale research studies show significant pedagogical quality can be demonstrated by working with a colleague, a mentor or a coach on specific skills that are important to children's learning and development.
So the national quality framework is a system that helps us to focus on what makes a difference to children's learning and development.
Four years on, taking a bird’s eye view and stepping away from the micro activity for a moment to think about what best to do at this stage, can actually make a clearer plan to focus on children’s learning.
It’s about ensuring children grow strong identities, get along in contributing to their world, have good well-being, and learn how to learn every day as well is communicate with ease and comfort in all the places and spaces that they find themselves in.
It takes time and thought, but it's really worthwhile.
VCAA Early Years Exchange No. 13 2014Page 1