Support for striking childcare workers

Today (Wednesday) at 1pm I will go and pick my son up from childcare. Nurruby will be shutting its doors as the staff go on strike. Despite the inconvenience of rescheduling meetings and clearing the afternoon, I have to say I couldn’t be more supportive of their decision or happier to be a part of it.

Today staff at childcare centres are striking for three reasons, firstly for an increase in their wages, secondly to raise awareness of the value placed on the service they provide, and thirdly what they have termed “putting children before profit” – to highlight the issues across the sector about the pressure placed on childcare services to meet the needs of private providers to generate a profit and not just to provide the best quality care, education and support to children.

The future outcomes of our kids and access to the workforce our town needs to thrive depends on parents’ access to high-quality childcare. I say “high-quality childcare”, not just “childcare”, for good reason.

As a parent, I didn’t want my children simply to be watched or babysat while I went to work. I wanted them to be cared for in the true sense of the word – to be known deeply as who they are, to be encouraged to explore their world, to be supported fully through the critical years of development before school, to be made to feel safe, loved and calm, and for their little lives to be enriched in ways I couldn’t imagine through the creative, innovative and highly skilled teaching of their educators.

This has been the experience of all my kids. They have thrived. They have been given an incredible gift through the education and care they have received at Nurruby.

Research shows that an experience like my kids have had has multiple benefits, especially for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Benefits can include less impulsivity, more advanced expressive vocabulary, and greater social competence, it can promote both cognitive and social development, with evidence of improved performance in standardised tests in the early years of primary school, and high-quality, focused preschool programs have been shown to reduce the effects of social disadvantage, developing children’s social competency and emotional health, and preparing children for a successful transition to school.

Not only do children benefit in this way, but the whole of the economy benefits when parents can return to work. For our town, this has flow-on benefits for everyone – the kids at the school with better access to teachers, the small businesses who can attract locals to work for them, the people needing medical attention who need qualified professionals to see them and the elderly needing care and support as they get older or move to nursing homes. We all win.

I don’t have the solution to the problems childcare workers are raising today, which needs to be sector-wide, structural and fundamental. But what I can do is voice my support for their cause. I hope the strike today gets the conversation going and the attention of the policymakers. We need to treat childcare workers like educators – with a fundamental role in the lives of our children. We need to value them more. They need to be paid more – how can they be paid so little when the well-being of our children and the capacity of parents to enter the workforce depends on them?

And how can we not treat them as part of the education system when the educational outcomes of all our children, but particularly the most vulnerable in our society, are meaningfully and significantly improved through their work? I can’t speak highly enough of the Nurruby educators.

They have been my kids’ friends, supporters, encouragers and teachers. They have set them up for school and enabled me to do meaningful, interesting and fulfilling work. They have been part of our family in every sense of the word. I hope their strike has some effect and that those who need to listen hear their voices, and the voices of parents like me standing behind them.

Merry Conaty, Narrabri