Recent safety failures have triggered tighter regulation in early childhood education and care. But compliance alone cannot deliver quality. Real reform begins with professionalising the workforce.

Australia’s early childhood sector is at a turning point. A troubling slate of safety and quality incidents in early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings has prompted governments to reinforce incident reporting, digital-safety protocols, and governance standards.

These steps are necessary and welcome, but they are not sufficient. Regulation and compliance alone cannot deliver the transformation we need. The focus must go deeper, into the heart of early childhood education: the educators themselves. If we are serious about eliminating risk and lifting quality, we must move from simply strengthening regulatory frameworks to truly professionalising the workforce: attracting, training, rewarding, and retaining the best people in early childhood education and care.

Regulation, standards, inspections, and compliance matter, and the NQF and associated systems provide a strong foundation. But tightening rules is not enough if the human, relational underpinning of early childhood care is weak. Providers with higher staff turnover, more casual employment, fewer experienced educators, and lower wages tend to have lower quality ratings. Staffing, qualifications, job security and pay matter at least as much as checklist compliance.

When educators are under-resourced and underpaid, quality erodes: less experience, weaker relationships with children, higher turnover, lower morale, and greater risk.

So while the new reforms are essential, they are necessary but not sufficient. Without addressing the workforce challenge – how to attract the smartest people, raise professional standing, build career pathways, and ensure remuneration that reflects the value of the work – we will continue to see problems. You cannot regulate your way to highly motivated, well-trained, experienced professionals who choose to stay for years and deliver safe, high-quality learning.

If the early years are foundational, then the educators who guide, nurture, and protect children in those years are among the most important professionals in our society. Neuroscience tells us the first five years of a child’s life are critical for brain development in social, emotional, and cognitive domains. Yet we see a mismatch between the importance of the work and the conditions of the work.

High-status professions attract strong candidates because they offer prestige, structured advancement, competitive remuneration, and societal recognition. In contrast, early childhood education has too often been treated as an auxiliary service rather than a profession in its own right.

Potential educators with a flair for relationships, child development, pedagogy, and leadership often choose other fields because of status, pay, and career structure. If we want a transformed early childhood sector, the only way is to professionalise it from the ground up.

Here are the key reform directions the sector must embrace – urgently:

Raise the status and income of early childhood educators

We must recognise early childhood educators as full professionals, with wages and conditions that reflect the complexity, responsibility, and value of their work. Evidence links lower pay with higher turnover, less experience, and lower quality. If comparable qualifications in other professions attract much higher pay, the sector will struggle to draw the ‘best and brightest’.

The commonwealth government’s worker retention payment, funding wage increases of up to 15 per cent, is a start. But a short-term uplift is insufficient; this must become sustained, proper professional remuneration. Public campaigns, scholarships, career ladders, and endorsements should make early childhood education a visible, respected career choice – not “childcare” but a profession of education, pedagogical leadership, and research-informed practice.

Elevate entry and qualification standards

To attract and retain the brightest human talent, university-level entry and completion should become common, if not standard, for lead educators. Certificate and diploma-level qualifications will remain important, but we should move toward higher-level initial qualifications with recognised career progression (e.g., lead teacher, specialist educator, pedagogical coach).

Build meaningful career paths and professional development

Early childhood education lacks visible career ladders, specialist roles, and leadership tracks. A transformed sector would include specialist roles, mentoring and scholarship schemes, and continuous professional development akin to medicine or school teaching.

Improve staffing ratios and stability

Staffing levels matter for both safety and quality. Under-resourcing leads to reliance on casuals and weaker relationships with children. The reform agenda must allocate resources to ensure stable, experienced core teams in every centre, not just on paper but in practice.

Promote educator wellbeing and retention

That means decent working conditions, mentoring, manageable workloads, leadership opportunities, and recognition.

Strengthen service leadership and governance

Effective services combine strong leadership, collaborative cultures, reflective practice, and high expectations. Centre directors and lead educators need leadership development, governance oversight, peer networks, and data-informed practice.

Embed a culture of continuous improvement beyond compliance

The focus must shift from “meeting minimum standards” to “relentless improvement to world-leading standards.” That means research translation, peer review networks, incentives for innovation, and a culture that values excellence, not just compliance.

Why must we do this now? Because children are our society’s most valuable asset. When children thrive, the benefits ripple across generations: stronger schooling outcomes, better health, improved social cohesion, greater productivity. A nation’s future depends on the competence, health, and wellbeing of its children, so we must treat early childhood educators as among the most important professionals of our time.

If we truly believe that the first five years matter – and they do – we cannot afford to treat early childhood education as a “lower-level” service or sideline career. If we do not elevate it, we consign ourselves to a future where too many children start school developmentally vulnerable and where risk and harm creep in through weak staffing and under-investment.

The recent incidents in the sector are not indictments of the many dedicated educators; they are indicators of a system run on compliance rather than professional excellence.

To the workforce reading this: you are the linchpin of our nation’s future. You deserve recognition, reward, development, leadership, and status equal to the responsibility you bear. If we get this right, we build a high-performing, high-trust, high-impact system that our children and our national future deserve.

Our children, our future, depend on it.