Australian Community Children’s Services is proud to launch our report TICCSS In Context revealing on how the experiences of the community sector influenced public debate during a significant period of positive change for children and families across Australia.
The Trends In Community Children’s Services Survey (TICCSS) is our ground-breaking longitudinal study of how children’s services stepped up to the challenge of each step in the improvement of minimum quality standards in child care and pre-school/kindergarten from 2012 to 2020.
TICCSS In Context sets the findings of this research in the context of the lively debate leading up to and during this seminal reform.
It examines how this research contributed to crucial policy discussions especially in defence of the reforms in the context of doubts about affordability, the administrative burden and the availability of an appropriately skilled workforce. Our research was influential in demonstrating that the new quality standards were achievable without causing services to become unaffordable for families and that it is possible to build the workforce by starting with upskilling existing educators.
It includes forewords from the Members of Parliament who drove the quality reform process and from Professor Deborah Brennan, author of The Politics of Australian Child Care: from philanthropy to feminism and beyond.
The reports on the six waves of the survey research and this contextual report will stand as a testament to the resilience of the community ECEC sector, showing leadership in times of positive change and speaking out about the impacts of calamitous events like fires and pandemics as well as the everyday vulnerabilities experienced by children and families.