Why regulation alone won’t fix early childhood quality and safety

Australia’s early childhood sector is at a turning point. In recent times, we have seen a troubling slate of safety and quality incidents in early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings. Governments have responded with a new reform package reinforcing incident-reporting, digital-safety protocols, and governance standards in ECEC.

These steps are necessary and welcome. But they are not sufficient. Regulation and compliance alone cannot deliver the transformation we need. The focus must go deeper, into the heart of early childhood education: the educators themselves. If we are serious about eliminating risk and lifting quality for our youngest citizens, we must shift from simply strengthening regulatory frameworks to truly professionalising the workforce: attracting, training, rewarding, and retaining the very best people in early childhood education and care.

Regulation, standards, inspections, and compliance undoubtedly matter. The NQF and associated systems provide a strong foundation for the sector. But we are increasingly seeing that simply tightening rules is not enough if the human, relational underpinning of early childhood care is weak. Providers who have higher staff turnover, more casual employment, fewer experienced educators, and lower wages, tend to have lower quality ratings. In other words: staffing, qualifications, job security, and pay matter as much as, if not more than, checklist compliance.

When educators are under-resourced, overburdened, underpaid, or treated as ancillary rather than professional, the inevitable consequence is quality erosion: less experienced staff, weaker relationships with children, higher turnover, lower morale, and thus greater risk.

So while the new reforms are essential, they should be understood as necessary but not sufficient. Without addressing the workforce challenge, how to attract the smartest people, raise professional standing, build career pathways, and ensure remuneration that reflects the societal value of the work, we will continue to see problems at the margins. You cannot regulate your way to highly motivated, well-trained, experienced professionals who choose to stay for years and deliver safe, high-quality learning through the early years.

If the early years are foundational (and they are), then the educators who guide, nurture, and protect children in those years are among the most important professionals in our society. Neuroscience tells us the first five years of a child’s life are critical in brain development, in social, emotional, and cognitive domains. The evidence is unequivocal. Yet, when we look at the early childhood workforce, we see a mismatch between the importance of the work and the conditions of the work.

Consider the professions that consistently attract the highest calibre candidates, medicine, law, engineering, research. Why? Because they offer (a) high prestige, (b) rigorous entry requirements, (c) structured advancement, (d) competitive remuneration, and (e) societal recognition. In contrast, early childhood education has too often been treated as an auxiliary service rather than a profession in its own right.

We must ask ourselves: why do our society’s most gifted potential educators, those with a flair for relationships, child development, pedagogy, and leadership, choose other fields? The answer lies partly in status, partly in pay, partly in career structure. If we want a transformed early childhood sector, the only way is to professionalise it from the ground up.

Here are the key reform directions the sector must embrace, and treat as urgent:

1. Raise the Status and Income of Early Childhood Educators

We must recognise early childhood educators as full professionals, with wages and conditions that reflect the complexity, responsibility, and value of their work. Evidence links lower pay with higher turnover, less experience, and lower quality. If comparable qualifications in other professions attract much higher pay, the sector will struggle to draw the ‘best and brightest’.

The Commonwealth Government’s worker retention payment, which funds a wage increase of up to 15 per cent, is a start. But a short-term uplift is insufficient, this must become sustained, proper professional remuneration.

Medicine, law, and other high-status professions attract top candidates because of strong pay, clear career progression, and societal esteem. Early childhood education must be seen as equally important: the first five years are the foundation of life, learning, citizenship, and productivity.

We need public campaigns, scholarship paths, career ladders, and endorsements that recognise this. We must aim to attract people who might otherwise choose higher-status professions, targeting high-school students and career-changers, offering scholarships, bursaries, and alternative pathways. We need the smartest people in this profession because we are talking about our children, the most valuable asset of society’s future.

Make early childhood education a visible, respected career choice, not “childcare” in people’s minds but a profession of education, pedagogical leadership, and research-informed practice. Encourage high-achieving students, more men, Indigenous educators, and people from diverse backgrounds to join.

2. Elevate Entry and Qualification Standards

To attract and retain the brightest human talent, we need university-level entry and completion to be common, if not standard, for lead educators. Currently, certificate and diploma-level qualifications exist, but we should move toward higher-level initial qualifications, with recognised career progression (e.g., lead teacher, specialist educator, pedagogical coach). This elevates prestige and draws wider talent.

3. Build Meaningful Career Paths and Professional Development

Unlike many professions, early childhood education too often lacks visible career ladders, specialist roles, and leadership tracks. A transformed sector would include specialist roles (in pedagogy, inclusion, leadership), mentoring and scholarship schemes, and continuous professional development akin to medicine or teaching in schools.

4. Improve Staffing Ratios and Stability

Staffing levels matter for both safety and quality. Under-resourcing leads to reliance on casuals and weaker relationships with children. The reform agenda must allocate resources to ensure stable, experienced core teams in every centre. Regulation recognises this, but we must invest to make it real.

5. Promote Educator Wellbeing and Retention

A professionalised workforce is as much about retention as it is about entry. That means working conditions, mentoring, manageable workloads, leadership opportunities, and recognition. Educators are deeply committed; we should support them accordingly.

6. Strengthen Service Leadership and Governance

Effective services combine strong leadership, collaborative cultures, reflective practice, and high expectations. Supporting centre directors and lead educators with leadership development, governance oversight, peer networks, and data-informed practice is critical.

7. Embed a Culture of Continuous Improvement Beyond Compliance

The focus must shift from “meeting minimum standards” to “relentless improvement to world‐leading standards.” That means research translation, peer review networks, incentives for innovation, and a sector culture that values excellence, not just compliance.

Why must we do this now, and properly? Because children are our society’s most valuable asset. When children thrive, the benefits ripple across generations, stronger schooling outcomes, better health, improved social cohesion, greater productivity.

If we accept that a nation’s future depends on the competence, health, and wellbeing of its children, then we must treat early childhood educators as among the most important professionals of our time.

If we truly believe that the first five years matter, and they do, then we cannot afford to treat early childhood education as a “lower-level” service or sideline career. We must elevate it. If we do not, we consign ourselves to a future where too many children start school developmentally vulnerable and where risk and harm creep in through weak staffing and under-investment.

The recent incidents in the sector are not indictments of the many dedicated educators; they are indicators of a system run on compliance rather than professional excellence.

To the workforce reading this: you are the linchpin of our nation’s future. You deserve recognition, reward, development, leadership, and status equal to the responsibility you bear.

The reform agenda calls you, invites you, empowers you. If we get this right, if we elevate the profession, then we do more than respond to incident reports and regulatory failings; we build a high-performing, high-trust, high-impact system that our children and our national future deserve.

Our children, our future, depend on it.

Author

Roger Chao writes across the major debates shaping contemporary Australia, examining political conflict, social change, cultural tension, and the policy choices that define national life. His work draws on a wide constellation of ideas, disciplines, and global perspectives to illuminate the deeper patterns beneath the headlines. Roger’s commentary connects immediate events to larger social currents, offering analysis that challenges orthodoxies, reframes familiar debates, and encourages a more reflective public conversation. His writing is guided by a belief that ideas matter, not as abstractions, but as forces that shape how societies understand themselves and decide their futures.