“If we can’t advocate for ourselves, nobody else will”: Teacher agency during early childhood reform

Abstract

The Victorian Government has engaged in multiple reforms in early childhood education and care, marketed to support quality education and increase investment in social reform. Initiatives accompanying reforms, aiming to assist teacher knowledge and skills. However, with each new initiative more pressures are placed on early childhood professionals. Throughout 2021 and 2022, a group of early childhood teachers employed in kindergartens across Melbourne participated in focus groups and interviews, sharing experiences of working with these initiatives and providing recommendations for their roll out. The Capability Approach has been used to analyse their experiences and recommendations to identify how teacher's agency was enabled and constrained. We identified three key recommendations for Governments to consider during current and future early childhood reforms to support an agentic profession. Specifically, focused support for teachers, an urgent need for increased consultation with the EC community and new opportunities for career progression were identified.