WA Early Childhood Education and Care Conference

Posted on: Tue 15 September 2009

Perth hosted the inaugural biannual WA Child Care and Early Childhood Education Conference from 3rd to 5th April. The theme of the conference was Quality and Collaboration Matter! Over the course of the weekend there were a large number of concurrent workshops, and key note speakers including the Parliamentary Secretary for Early Childhood Education and Care, Maxine McKew MP. We were fortunate enough to have Minister McKew visit Ngala the Friday before the conference. She publicly recognised Ngala in her opening address as a high quality integrated service.

The conference hosted an amazing 490 delegates from local, national and international early childhood areas. There were eight educators from Bluebird who attended the conference on the Saturday and Sunday. We would like to thank the Durstan family for their fundraising efforts which enabled us to purchase these tickets.

The conference was extremely interesting and we all found the presentations valuable and relevant to our profession. Some of the key ideas we took back to share with the team at Bluebird were:

• How the current trends in Early Childhood Education are moving towards high quality standards in all services that cater for children in the early years, collaboration between professionals and integrated services.
• The need for professionalism in the language that is used.
• Early Care and Education is at the forefront of the COAG agenda which supports current research into brain development.
• The importance of the early years in relation to children’s development and therefore the importance of early intervention.

One of key discussion points was the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) which is a National quality framework that is currently being developed as part of the COAG agenda. This framework is due to be implemented throughout Australia in July this year.

Ngala Early Learning and Development Service is one of 29 sights across Australia currently involved in trialling the framework in partnership with Charles Sturt University in Sydney. We have also been working closely with Charles Sturt to provide feedback to the document which is currently in a draft format. More information on the EYLF will be available in the next newsletter.

Article submitted by Karen Mitchell, Senior Team Leader, April 2009

Back to News Archive