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RECENT AUSTRALIAN REFORMS IN early childhood education have incorporated a focus on strengths-based practices. These practices have been supported in a range of professional resources and professional development. Despite this, there has been limited interrogation of the ways in which strengths-based practice is interpreted and employed by educators. This paper reports an investigation of prior-to-school and school educators' references to strengthsbased practices in their communication with each other as children made the transition to school. To assist in the analysis of this communication, we draw on a categorisation of strengths-based practices developed from analysis of cross-disciplinary research literature. Three categories of strengths-based practices-derived from the fields of positive psychology, social work and organisational practice-provide the theoretical framework for analysis of this communication data. Data reported in this paper were contributed by 22 educators as part of a broader investigation of preschool-school communication around children's transition to school. Secondary analysis of a subset of data, including questionnaire responses, interviews and documents that referred to strengths-based practices, were analysed. Results indicate that educators interpreted strengths-based practice as the sharing of positive information about children. We argue that this positive psychology approach presents a limited view of strengths-based practice and suggest that the organisational practice category offers the potential to communicate about children's strengths, as well as the challenges they may face, as they start school.

Child maltreatment is a serious problem, worldwide. Children and young people who have experienced maltreatment face multiple physical and mental health challenges which hinder their success at school and these adverse experiences makes them more challenging to teach than their non-maltreated peers. Increasingly, teachers are considered as an important part of the wider the child protection workforce as they are well-placed to intervene and prevent further harm. To fulfil this role effectively, teachers require requisite training beginning in initial teacher education programs. This paper is a protocol for a systematic scoping review that asks: "What is known about preservice/initial teacher education for child protection?" Systematic scoping reviews are worthwhile and necessary in fields where research is diverse and needing of synthesis to identify strengths in the body of evidence and identify gaps to set new research directions. We will draw on Askey and O'Malley's six-stage scoping review methodology to assess the scope, range, and nature of research activity on this topic. We will add an innovative seventh stage involving a commitment to disseminating and applying knowledge generated from the review. The research question has been established, and key terms defined (Stage 1). The search strategy has been devised, and searches have been run (Stage 2). Round 1 screening of titles and abstracts is completed and full text screening is currently in progress (Stage 3). To our knowledge this is the first attempt to systematically map the empirical literature on child protection in pre-service teacher education. When completed, this systematic scoping review will offer a comprehensive, transparent, and replicable way to assess the full scope of empirical research on this important topic of utmost educational relevance.