For millions of Australian families, early learning is part of the fabric of daily life. They entrust these services with their most precious responsibility: caring for their children during the most formative years. This requires enormous faith that the early learning system will keep children safe.
Recent reports of repeated safety and quality breaches have shattered that trust for many families. As parents and grandparents, we feel this violation deeply. Our children deserve to be safe in their early learning environments, and anything less is unacceptable.
These events have highlighted the many challenges faced by the early learning sector. The need for stronger oversight, better-resourced regulators and stricter accountability measures to ensure no child is ever put at risk has never been greater.
The calls for reform are not just justified, they’re essential. Parliament’s move to strip funding from providers that fail safety standards is a necessary first step, but more must be done to restore confidence and ensure every centre meets Australia’s world-leading early learning quality standards.
Yet as we work through this difficult moment, we must not lose sight of the fact that access to safe, high-quality early childhood education can transform lives.
Some are using this crisis to question early learning’s place in society. But this thinking misses the point entirely. We should absolutely demand better: strict and rigorous enforcement of our safety standards, properly funded oversight, and zero tolerance for those who breach our trust.
What we shouldn’t do is question the value of early learning itself, which gives children their best start in life and enables women’s workforce participation across every sector of our economy.
More than 90 per cent of brain development occurs before the age of five. During these crucial years, high-quality early learning helps shape children’s cognitive abilities, social skills and emotional resilience, enabling them to start school ready to learn.
The benefits are even more profound for children from vulnerable backgrounds, who stand to benefit the most from access to safe, high-quality early learning and care. In many ways, a robust early learning system can be, as Peter Hurley from Victoria University’s Mitchell Institute calls it, Australia’s great equaliser. The same pattern holds for primary carers, who are predominantly mothers.
For disadvantaged mothers, access to affordable early learning is often the difference between participation and exclusion from economic life.
In my conversations with Chief Executive Women members, leaders across corporate Australia, I consistently hear how access to safe, affordable early childhood education is critical to their businesses. They understand that improving access boosts women’s workforce participation, strengthens our economy and drives productivity.
For women pursuing leadership roles, reliable early learning can mean the difference between staying on track and stepping back. Too many talented women face impossible choices during these years, missing crucial career-building opportunities, turning down promotions or leaving the workforce entirely.
But it’s not just professional women who benefit. Think of the shift worker who starts work before dawn. The retail assistant who is juggling unpredictable rosters. The small-business owner who is trying to keep the shop afloat.
For these women, access to early learning isn’t a luxury. It’s the infrastructure that makes their work possible. This is why treating early learning as expendable is so dangerous. It would wind back decades of progress towards women’s economic independence. It would entrench disadvantage for the very families who most need opportunity. It would deny children the strong start that can help shape their futures.
In my decades advocating for gender equality, I’ve learned that progress is fragile. Hard-fought, hard-won gains can evaporate quicker than we think.
That’s why the federal government’s commitment to building a universal system matters so deeply. The three-day guarantee of subsidised care ensures families can access early learning regardless of their work patterns. The $1bn Building Early Education Fund will establish new centres where they’re needed most, not just where they’re most profitable. These aren’t just policies: they’re recognition of the fact that early learning is an essential service.
But building this system requires confronting hard truths about the current market. With 70 per cent of services now run by for-profit providers, quality and access have become secondary to profitability. Not-for-profit providers, who consistently deliver a higher quality of care, have seen their market share shrink dramatically. Supporting these community-focused providers is essential to ensuring every child, not just those in wealthier postcodes, has access to high-quality early learning and care.
Equally vital is proper oversight. State regulators need to be properly resourced to monitor a sector where government spending will reach $16bn annually by next year.
We also need a national body to co-ordinate between state, territory and federal governments. Without national stewardship of the sector, we risk repeated safety failures.
Central to any reform must be the educators themselves. We must resist knee-jerk reactions such as calls to ban male educators, who provide important role models. Early educators shape young minds during the most critical developmental years, yet remain among our lowest-paid workers. The recent 15 per cent pay rise acknowledges this injustice, but genuine reform requires ongoing commitment.
I often think of the generations of women who fought for the opportunities we now take for granted. They understood that true equality required more than changed attitudes: it demanded practical support structures that enabled women to participate fully in economic life. Access to affordable, safe and high-quality early childhood education is perhaps the most fundamental of these structures.
To the parents grappling with fear and anger, I say this: your feelings are valid, your demands for change are right. We must channel that energy into building the system our children deserve, one with robust safeguards, genuine accountability and uncompromising standards. We shouldn’t let fear dictate our response to this crisis.
We must not let this crisis undermine the progress we’ve fought so hard to achieve. Instead, we should seize this moment to build the universal early learning system Australia needs: one that’s safe, high-quality and accessible to all families. Our children are counting on us to rise to it.
Helen Conway is president of Chief Executive Women.
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