Friends like us

Dr Jennifer Cartmel wrote the first PhD on outside school hours care (OSHC) in Australia. Dr Bruce Hurst remembers the day someone handed it to him – it was ‘the pebble that started the avalanche’.

More than fifteen years later, Community Child Care Association (CCC) met with Bruce and Jennifer to reflect on the sometimes lonely journey advocating for OSHC, and their joy in finding each other in the struggle.

CCC: First, can you tell us how you found your way into this work? 

Jennifer: I was always really interested in how children grow and live their lives. I started in a teacher education program, but it wasn’t until I had my first child and was looking for part-time work that I started working in outside school hours care. That was over 35 years ago. Jump forward a bit, and I went to work in a university and started my PhD. I remember going to pick up my second child from OSHC and someone said to me, “If you want to do an important PhD, do one on OSHC” – so I did! And it was the first PhD on OSHC in Australia. 

Bruce: My career started with a teaching degree back in the 1980s, and it’s fair to say I wasn’t the most enthusiastic classroom teacher. I only worked as a teacher for a brief time and then spent five years overseas working at a summer camp in the United States. I was very fortunate because that camp had a play-based structure, which is the curriculum structure we use in early childhood and OSHC. For me, those five years were quite transformational – I realised I could still do important work with children, just not in a classroom. Then I came back and started working in vacation care (and later OSHC), applying some of the ideas I learned at the summer camp and really enjoying it. I had a number of different jobs and found myself working at Community Child Care Association (CCC), both as a consultant and running the training program. And eventually, I decided to go back to further study.

CCC: How did you two find your way to each other? 

Bruce: I was sitting at my desk at CCC and someone handed me a copy of Jennifer’s thesis – they said, “Look at this, a PhD in OSHC!”. I read it and was quite inspired by it. Around that time I went back to study – eventually switching from coursework to Masters by research – and Jennifer’s PhD was a primary motivation in that. Her PhD was the pebble that started the avalanche – the motivation for me to realise that postgraduate education and OSHC were perfectly complementary, and I could do both together. When I started doing my own research I sent Jennifer an email telling her how important her PhD was, and we met over coffee and cake.

CCC: Can you tell us more about that journey of advocating for the OSHC sector? 

Bruce: I had this very romantic notion of what my research career would be like when I started it. There were only three of us at the time who had done a PhD and I thought, governments will be just lapping this up, waiting for it! I think the status of our sector meant that even though we’ve done all this work and it’s important work, it was almost ignored, wasn’t it Jenny? There’s a history of early childhood research – which is great research – being the knowledge that’s consulted for OSHC policy. So it was really a battle for Jennifer and I to get to this point where people were actually starting to pay attention to the research – and they’re only just starting. 

Jennifer: The evidence base for OSHC is not where we need it to be, and people don’t always understand that. There is a perception that children are only at OSHC for a really short period of time and it doesn’t matter. Our work in advocating has made people realise that children are in OSHC for equally the amount of time they are in school! What are the resource implications of that? You can’t run OSHC on a shoestring.

Bruce: And Jenny, the advocacy we do is not dissimilar to the struggle a lot of educators have. We both know this because we’ve come from OSHC, but the reputation of the sector is something like ‘big kids babysitting’. It diminishes the work educators do.

I know so many educators over the years who have left OSHC because the sector has such a low status. While we struggle to find an audience for our research, educators as well find it difficult to get the recognition of the importance of the work. It’s the same but different.

CCC: What’s the piece of research you’ve done together that you’re most proud of? 

Jennifer: I had the opportunity to write the first framework My Time, Our Place, based on the Early Years Learning Framework. When I wrote that, I was really concerned that I had changed the shape of OSHC and that it didn’t necessarily have that strong valuing of children’s play and leisure that Bruce and I so value. You know – children’s agency to choose what they want to do in the afternoon – their time, their place. So in the update to the framework, Bruce and I had the opportunity to chat to children and that was just profound. We are really proud of what the children could add and the updated framework speaks more to what they’re really interested in. 

Bruce: For me, my motivation is often political. I do take a certain amount of adult mischievous joy that children’s voices are sometimes disrupting what adults want to do to their leisure spaces. That My Time, Our Place work Jenny and I did with the children was really significant because we had ideas we thought were important and were perhaps struggling to get acceptance for, such as the focus on gender and passive leisure, and children’s voices really played a critical role in getting some of those changes and initiatives over the line.

CCC: And what do you admire most about each other? 

Jennifer: I really admire Bruce’s capacity to read theoretically and examine ideas from a number of different perspectives. You know, he never just layers one lens on something. He tries to look at it from multiple perspectives to unpack what it really means. 

Bruce: I admire that Jennifer’s willing to go on my theoretical explorations, and the way that they complicate the work we do! [Laughs]. No… I think for me, I admire Jenny’s extraordinary energy and drive to do this work. I’ve never come across anyone like Jennifer in that respect. 

Jennifer: We never travel on the same plane together. [Laughs]. If anything happens, we’ve got each other’s back – we’ve got that emphasis on sustaining the sector until it’s grown a little more.

This article was originally published in CCC’s member magazine, Roundtable, and has been reshared here with permission. Find out more about CCC at cccinc.org.au or via their Facebook page.