Oral Language Development Recommendations Can’t Be Delivered For Free

The Early Childhood Council is concerned the Education Review Office’s early oral language development report and recommendations increases unfunded workload on ECE teachers.

“Early childhood education (ECE) centres provide the kind of quality interactions recommended in the report every day. But when ERO says that oral language learning progress should be monitored, measured and reported to parents, the problem is that this type of work happens during a teacher’s non-contact time, for which the ECE centres don’t get any funding for at all. Increasing expectations in this area will simply lead to significantly increased fees for parents, so prolonging the cost of living crisis for parents.”

ECE teachers need support and recognition, not constant harrying and interference from the government. Increasing expectations now is unhelpful and unrealistic and makes teaching more unattractive while ECE operators are facing a teacher shortage crisis.

“If requirements continue to be added to centres, fees will have to increase to provide them. Recommendations for improving oral literacy are great but how do you actually deliver this? Even if we did have tools that could help, the real priority is addressing the thousands of children who are missing out on ECE every day, not making an already expensive service more unaffordable and giving teachers another reason to leave because it seems the government constantly mistrusts what they’re doing or not doing.”

“If parents have concerns about their child’s oral development, they should talk to their ECE. If they want to help, turn off the screens and spend time reading or telling them stories. Quality interactions like this happen in all ECEs – but part of the reason we have the most unaffordable childcare in the world is because we keep thinking we can improve service standards without funding it.”

“We welcome the focus on this issue because children’s development is so important. Everyone wants the best oral language development for our children, but it must be funded and delivered more effectively, with support not moral judgement, which just piles on top of everything else,” said Simon Laube.

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