Many in the Northern Suburbs are voting with their children in mind. So what do educators say they need most?

Ninety percent of human brain development happens by age five, so learning and care at this time is incredibly important. Australians currently have access to early childhood education. The government subsidises this education at varying rates, depending on how much a person earns. 

But there’s a catch, known as the Activity Test, introduced by the Turnbull Government in 2018. This test determines the amount of subsidised childcare based on the number of hours parents spend on approved activities, such as working, studying and volunteering.

Labor is scrapping it, meaning from January 2026 every household earning under $533,280 dollars a year will have access to three days of subsidised childcare a week. 

According to Labor, scrapping the activity test would cost $427 million over five years. However, draft modelling from the Productivity Commission says it would cost $1.1 billion a year. The commission also supported the removal of the activity test in its final report. 

Labor says it’ll benefit 66,000 families. 

The Coalition, on the other hand, wants to keep the activity test, and would reinstall it if elected on Saturday.

What do the educators say?

The majority of the policy debate has taken place between spokespeople representing various political parties. Little room is made for community members. 

The Lorikeet spoke to Nina Isho, an early childhood educator and supervisor of a community-based preschool located in the Forest District. 

North Shore Lorikeet: How do you feel about the Activity Test? 

Nina Isho: I know that universal access is beneficial to everybody regardless of income, so whether somebody is — in terms of socioeconomic status — low or high, [children and parents] both benefit. 

And there's so much administration that goes into these tests; it’s quite frankly a waste of time and money. It would be more beneficial for all children if that wasn't the case.

As someone working in early childhood education and care, what do you think gets left out in these parliamentary debates? 

The perspective of children.
I work with three- to five-year-old children and I can ask them questions like “what would make the world a better place for children?”, and they give me these beautiful answers … completely unprompted. 

So I just say “what would make the world safer for all children?” and some of the responses we've gotten recently were “we should stop cutting down trees” [and] … “when people are hurt,
we need to look after them”.

And I think they're quite profound because they've been on this Earth for three, four, five years and they know what's right. 

Elements of quality that you need in a service for children to thrive [include] educator to child ratio, group size, the qualifications of staff and the consistency of staff … institutional knowledge.

There's these elements of quality that sort of don't get discussed … and these go alongside policies and procedures: the physical environment, working conditions. 

Do you think educators are valued? 

It depends on where you are working. I'm quite privileged in that I work in a community-based preschool and the parents do value us; they want an education and care setting for their child that they are a part of as well, and so it's a two-way relationship between us and the parents.  

I personally feel valued. But I have been in places where you don't feel valued and you're just there to babysit their child because they need to work. I think you'd get a different response from anybody you asked with that question. 

So long daycare, because they're federally funded, are subjected to the Activity Test, whereas [with] any community-based preschool, you don't even have to be an Australian citizen to send your child to one. We don't have to deal with that. And so there is less admin for us because of that. It's just all children are eligible for Start Strong funding, which is state-based funding.

[Start Strong is a NSW Government program aimed at delivering affordable preschool education to children enrolled in community and mobile preschools in NSW.]

Nina volunteers with Social Justice In Early Childhood. In response to a recent Four Corners report, which revealed that tens of thousands of children attend childcare centres that fail national standards, Social Justice In Early Childhood launched a petition urging NSW politicians to “address the hyper-privatisation and profit seeking in early childhood education & care.” 

This article has been partially syndicated from our national masthead, the National Account, with additional reporting. Read more here.