Reforms to early Childhood Education and the Inclusion and Professional Support Program.
The Australian Government has set out a comprehensive plan to make the early years a national priority. This plan involves reforms to early childhood education and care and focuses on healthy child development and greater social inclusion especially for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children.
The Government is working with the states and territories through the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) to create a National Quality Framework (NQF) for early childhood education and care services. NQF will include a nationally consistent, streamlined and integrated licensing and accreditation system that will ensure quality standards are implemented and maintained across all services.
The Inclusion and Professional Support Program Handbook, Office of Early Childhood Education and Child Care, Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations provides information to Inclusion and Professional Support Program (IPSP) service providers on how the IPSP 2009-2012 will contribute to the Australian Government's reform agenda.
By working with, and supporting child care services, the IPSP aims to provide quality care through the provision of inclusion and professional development. The IPSP will achieve this through the:
- Inclusion Support Program (ISP), which funds the Inclusion Support Agencies (ISAs) and Inclusion Support Subsidy Provider (ISSP) to support child care services to develop their capacity to include children with ongoing high support needs.
- Professional Support Program (PSP), which funds the Professional Support Coordinators (PSCs) and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Professional Support Units (IPSUs) to provide professional development, advice or resources to assist child care services to provide quality child care.
The first phase of the IPSP (2005-2008) focused on the establishment of a new service system to address the professional development and inclusion support needs of child care services.
The current or second phase of the IPSP (2008-2012) will focus on ensuring that:
- child care workers have access to high quality, evidenced-based professional development and support
- Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander child care services have access to relevant high quality professional development and support
- all child care services are generally better informed about quality issues and have strategies in place to address them;
- the relationships between current service providers is strengthened to develop and maintain integrated approaches to service delivery
- an evidence base of what constitutes good practice in inclusion support and professional development is built.
The IPSP will support services to understand and work actively to adopt and improve their practice in line with the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF).
