20 Dec2022 Advocacy in summary
2022 has been an enormous year in advocacy, off the back of a busy 2021.
The year commenced with the continual impact of COVID on early childhood education and care. ELAA’s advocacy helped to ensure that our members were well protected, with access to Rapid Antigen Tests and a one-off payment to support the additional costs of operating during COVID.
Throughout 2022 we advocated for :
- greater workforce support to recruit, train and retain our workforce.
- our Pulse Check surveys showed increasing vacancies at Certificate III and diploma levels, which prompted us to advocate successfully for new Victorian incentives to flow to fill vacancies at these levels, in additional to teacher incentives.
- we also worked with ACECQA to inform the implementation plan for the National Workforce Strategy, collaborating to prioritise strategies and urging fast tracking of initiatives.
- we advocated jointly with peer organisations CELA and CCC on our federal election six-point plan, and post-election have been actively engaging with the new government to highlight the importance of the community sector. We have met with Minister Aly on several occasions in Melbourne and Canberra and welcome her passion for the sector and desire to collaborate.
ELAA has met with many senators and members of parliament to advocate for federal government workforce support, participated in workforce crisis summits and prepared a range of submissions that focus on practical solutions to help to grow and retain the workforce. We have drawn on our industrial relations expertise to highlight how government funding can support teacher retention, given we are the employer representative body for the leading agreement in the country.
We’ve also helped to shape federal government legislation, ensuring the Cheaper Childcare Bill had provisions to ensure families who cannot pay fees electronically can still gain access, and continuing to highlight the imperative of addressing workforce if we want more children to have access to ECEC. We’ve long advocated for changes to the activity test, and the extension of hours of subsidised access for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children is welcomed.
It has been a busy year on the state front. ELAA joined with other sector stakeholders to advocate for free kindergarten, and we were pleased to see this and a wider transformational investment in early childhood education and care that will support our sector to grow and deliver quality kindergarten to more children for longer across the state. ELAA was thrilled to see over $700 million announced for community sector infrastructure as this is a key barrier, alongside workforce, that limits our sector’s capacity to expand.
We’ve worked extensively behind the scenes with our federal and state departmental colleagues to test and shape initiatives and provide insights and feedback to improve outcomes and reduce burden in the sector.
We capped off the year with a state election. Our forum, co-hosted with CCC and ECA, saw a welcome commitment from all parties to early childhood education and free kindergarten. Over the course of the year, it has been great to see ECEC accepted as an important issue across all sides of politics.
We also saw reinvigoration in our membership, with new approaches to EYM meetings trialed and welcomed by members and increasing engagement across the year.
