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Growing numbers of young people are disclosing that they are trans or gender diverse, requiring affirming and informed responses from schools. This article reports on a survey examining attitudes towards inclusion, comfort, and confidence amongst 180 South Australian primary school teachers and pre-service teachers. The findings suggest that women held more positive attitudes and greater comfort in working with trans and gender diverse students, and that awareness of programs designed to increase understanding was related to more positive attitudes, greater comfort and confidence. The article discusses the need for further training alongside additional resourcing of initiatives aimed at facilitating inclusion.

Despite increasing attention being paid to early childhood services as the foundation for lifelong learning, one issue seems to be consistently ignored -staff wages. The authors argue that this constitutes ongoing exploitation of childcare staff, and that this exploitation is a result of gendered and classed discourses around caring labour. As with other feminised fields, this caring labour involves a high level of emotional management, of the self and others, which remains undervalued as a skill within discourses of professionalisation. The authors suggest that only by recognising the unequal distribution of wages across the education sector and significantly increasing the pay of early childhood staff will early childhood services deliver the educational advantages hoped for by governments.

This article examines the value of work in childcare, and the ways this is impacted by historical schemes of value in relation to social class and gender. It critically examines the push for professionalism within the field, showing that this favours particular classed forms of cultural capital, while rendering other forms of capital invisible. Drawing on interviews with childcare workers in Australia – overwhelmingly female and with little access to symbolic capital – the data shows an ambivalence towards the professionalisation process and frustration about the lack of recognition for their work, either financially or culturally. The workers’ views highlight emotional and relational skills, which are at odds with traditional definitions of professional skills. The author argues that what is needed is a new concept of childcare expertise, which acknowledges the classed and gendered histories of workers, and the already significant worth of the work they do.

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