The Professionalization of Children’s Services in Australia

Abstract

This article examines the concept and practice of the 'professionalization' of children's services in Australia, emphasizing the importance of gender, skills and regulation. Children's services practitioners have difficulty in reaching professional status -broadly defined. Tertiary-level training and credentials alone are insufficient as the expertise of the work in centre-based services is not 'socially sanctioned'. The coexistence of family day care diminishes the status of centrebased workers. To achieve professional status a clear delineation between less formal child care arrangements and domestic parenting is required. This process demands the use of new titles for employees, their workplace and their tasks. In addition, practitioner labour must have scarcity value by excluding the untrained and unqualified from centre-based employment.

Rethinking early childhood workforce sustainability in the context of Australia's early childhood education and care reforms

“…The likelihood of wage equity being successfully addressed through market mechanisms seems remote however, as the costs and wage implications of better-paid educators are often seen as antithetical to the interests of employers and/or families (Woodrow 2007;Lyons 2011). Recent Productivity Commission reports (2011, 2014), for example, have recorded the reluctance of educators to ask for higher wages, and of employers to offer them, because increased costs would be most likely passed on to families in the form of higher fees, potentially leading to the removal of some children from services.…”

“…Seen in this way, educators' rights to fair pay, and children's and families' interests, need not be seen as mutually exclusive. It could also be argued that if calls for improved public recognition of professional status are not matched by improved remuneration, the undervaluation of educators' practice might be perpetuated (Lyons 2011).…”

Discourses of Professionalism in Family Day Care

“…As quality assurance standards seeks to homogenise the evaluation of service quality in centre-based and family day care, the possible ways of describing family day care service quality are reduced. Given the already marginalised position of family day care within early years discourse (Lyons, 2012), it is likely that the particularities of family day care, such as childhood freedom, an authentic home environment and connection with community (Hand, 2005) may be lost. Detached, observable, measurable service quality overrides the quality of human experience.…”

Private Sector Early Child Care and Education in Malaysia: Workforce Readiness for Further Education

“…In doing so, motivation and pride for the profession would be fostered (Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, 1992). For example, Lyons (2012) examined the concept and practice of "professionalization" of children's services in Australia, and found that gender, skills and regulation played an important role. As long as the society does not recognise the expertise, there will be real challenges to reaching professional status even if the workforce had the relevant credentials.…”