When Anne Aly was a young, first-time mother, a childcare educator pulled her aside to suggest she take her son to a doctor because they were worried he wasn’t interacting with the other children in the usual way.
She did, and discovered a series of chronic ear infections had led to Adam having profound deafness which needed surgery to fix.
The surgeon told her the toddler was lucky not to have any long-term damage because if the problem had been left longer it could have resulted in permanent hearing loss.
“As soon as Adam’s hearing was fixed, he started talking and he’s not shut up since. He became dux of his school. He was reading by the time he was three,” Dr Aly, now the Early Childhood Education Minister, told The West.
“And if it hadn’t been for (early childhood educators) picking up that in Adam, he may well have gone on to have permanent hearing loss.”
She says the experience highlighted to her how central early childhood education was to a child’s development and entire lifetime.
Dr Aly and Social Services Minister Amanda Rishworth are jointly developing an early years strategy across the Government, with experts from around the country joining a major summit in Canberra on Friday to inform the work.
People working in the sector, researchers, doctors, parents, Indigenous representatives and policymakers along with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers will attend. There is a solid WA contingent, including Telethon patron Fiona Stanley, autism expert Andrew Whitehouse and trailblazing psychiatrist Helen Milroy.
“We have a huge opportunity here to really change a child’s trajectory,” Dr Aly said.
“My son is an example of that. But there are possibly millions more examples out there.
“And if we have that opportunity, we have that power in our hands to change a child’s life course, why wouldn’t we use that?’
Their vision is to end the silos of policy areas — health, education, social services, Indigenous supports — and take a holistic approach to the way children and their families are supported during the first five years of life.
It’s something many in the sector have been calling for over years.
Penny Dakin, chief executive of the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth, said there were decades of solid research showing the first five years or 1000 days of a child’s life were the best time to set them on a solid path.
Investing in the early years would go a long way to fixing big problems like entrenched disadvantage and inequality, she told The West.
“It’s not the only opportunity, but it is often the most powerful opportunity,” she said.
“If we can’t come up with some really creative and clever ways to improve the experiences that children and their families and their communities are having during that period of time, how can we hope to be able to address some of the big underlying issues that our society is facing?”
While the strategy is being developed over the next 18 months, Ms Dakin was hopeful of concrete outcomes from Friday’s gathering, similar to the Government’s jobs and skills summit last year, even if it was just a commitment to working in different ways.
She said there were already a lot of answers out there based on evidence and community-driven practice, but it needed governments to embrace them and be willing to make investments in change.
“I would be very disappointed if we spent all day talking and it didn’t lead to anything,” Ms Dakin said.
The Australian Education Union wants to see progress on delivering universal access to free three-year-old preschool across the country as well as action to deal with the childcare workforce crisis.
“At the moment, too many children are missing out on early learning because of the design of the current system,” national secretary Correna Haythorpe said.
“The best head start we can give Australian children is at least two years of high-quality, play-based learning delivered by a qualified early childhood teacher.”
Early childhood advocate Georgie Dent, from The Parenthood, urged politicians to be ambitious and for the sector to seize the opportunity of a government that was listening.
“This is the start of an important shift from managing the current issues of the existing model, to system-wide reform that truly delivers for all children in Australia,” she said.
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