Over 60 early childhood education and care (ECEC) professionals gathered at Mingara earlier this week to hear from local candidates ahead of the NSW election, to be held on 23 March 2019.

Parents and families in the rural South Australian town of Padthaway have spoken out about the challenges of extensive commutes for working families in rural areas to access childcare, and the challenge of finding viable alternatives to care in small communities.

Playgroups and toy libraries have been promised federal funding should the Australian Labor Party (ALP) be successful in securing Government in the (as yet unannounced) 2019 Federal Election, Shadow Minister for Early Childhood Education Amanda Rishworth has said.

Parliamentarians in the United Kingdom have called on the sitting Government to urgently review the 30 hour childcare package to address what they termed as the “perverse consequences” of the programs implementation, which they say are contributing to a “growing gap between disadvantaged children and their peers”

In a joint statement to the Senate Inquiry into the Federal Government’s ParentsNext program, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and human rights organisations have called for the program to be scrapped, describing the program as “punitive”, and “raising concerns about compliance with Australia’s sex and race discrimination laws”