Anna Whitty | Time to put children first in early childhood education policies which affect them

I stood with them as an early childhood teacher, as a former Centre Director - but also as the CEO of one of Canberra's oldest not-for-profit organisations, Northside Community Service.

There was no way I was going to miss it. Early childhood educators undertake one of the most important roles in our nation, supporting the learning and wellbeing of young children.

But because they're overwhelmingly women - 96 per cent at last count - they're paid appallingly and not respected for the highly complex and demanding work they do.

Affordable access to early education is so often framed as a feminist issue, and seen as a means for women to overcome the structural gendered inequities of our working lives.

This is an important goal, and one I wholeheartedly support. But after 30 years working in this sector, I fail to see why we are OK with having a workforce underclass of women in place to support other women.

But if the voices of the incredible women in the sector are barely heard, it's a roar compared to another group that are not heard at all. Children.

It's easy to forget in every discussion about "childcare" that the beneficiaries of early education are meant to be children. The brain research is irrefutable - 95 per cent of a person's brain is developed by the time they are five, before they set foot in a primary school. And yet our system of markets and subsidies for early education is entirely focused on the adults who spend five minutes in an early education centre each day, and not the children who spend the entire day there.

I've never understood why we are so uncomfortable with positioning young children as important, as citizens of our communities in their own right, with rights and needs that are separate from the important people around them. I knew this was a problem in the early education sector, but it wasn't until I became a CEO last year that I realised the full extent of the issue right here in the ACT.

The silencing of children (and young children in particular) is everywhere in Canberra. I attend consultation sessions where children aren't even listed as a cohort or participant in our society, but are lumped in under "families" or "women and children". I read strategies for improvements to our social systems that don't even collect data on children. I work with programs funded to support women recovering from the effects of domestic and family violence that work with more children than women, but receive no additional funding to meet the individual and contextual needs of those children.

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I want to be clear - I am not suggesting we dilute, reduce, or remove funding and attention from any other group. This is not an either/or proposition, but a call to recognise that children have just as much right to be supported, valued, and heard as any other cohort in the ACT.

It shouldn't be controversial, or difficult, or confusing to ask that services focused on children put children first. Let's design an early education system that isn't based on the roster or payslip of their parent, but on a child's right to access early education.

Let's develop responses to domestic and family violence that acknowledge children are victim-survivors too, and need their own specific responses. Let's acknowledge the facts of the first five years and invest in the first five years to address disadvantage and vulnerability when it is most effective to do so.

To do all that, we have to do what seems to be a huge challenge right now. We have to listen to children, including the youngest of children, and not ignore what they are telling us.