What Can We Learn from 'Innovative' Child Care Services? Children's ...

Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, Volume 8, Number 3, 2007 SYMPOSIUM JOURNALS

What Can We Learn from ‘Innovative’ Child Care Services? Children’s Services Purposes and Practices in Australia’s Northern Territory LYN FASOLI Batchelor Institute of Tertiary Education, Northern Territory, Australia BONITA MOSS Charles Darwin University, Northern Territory, Australia

ABSTRACT This article explores the diversity of services designed for young children currently operating in Australia in remote Northern Territory (NT) Indigenous communities as a provocation for the renewal and revitalisation of mainstream (typical Australian conventional, Western values oriented and urban-based) child care services. Australian society has accepted a standardised model of child care and conceptualised it as a service designed primarily for parents who work. It has become remarkably uniform in look, nature and purpose, regardless of where it is located. The article refers specifically to ‘Innovative’ Indigenous Children’s Services (the term ‘Innovative’ refers to a federally funded government initiative called the ‘Innovative Child Care Scheme’, an initiative stemming from the 1992-96 National Child Care Strategy) as a new kind of children’s space in the child care landscape. The authors reflect on the findings of recent research which explored what could be learned from remotely located Indigenous children’s services staff, particularly in relation to the important questions the research raised for the social agendas and public policies that underpin development and theory currently shaping mainstream centre-based long day care programs.

Introduction The Northern Territory (NT) is entering a new phase in relation to the care and education of young children (0-5 years) in rural and remote areas where the mainstream and relatively uniform program model of the child care centre, one that is widely accepted throughout Australian urban contexts, is not seen as adequate. Government strategies to increase access to early years services and to address gaps and inefficiencies in service delivery in remote areas has fuelled a rapid development of fresh new ways of conceptualising the notion of child care. A mix of service types has emerged, addressing broader purposes than the care of children primarily for the benefit of employed parents. In remote Indigenous communities in the NT, the introduction of ‘Innovative’ [1] children’s services is supporting the development of alternative models of child care that meet a range of specific local needs. These alternative services provide inspiration for more traditional, mainstream services as they create new spaces for thinking about what a children’s service is and what it can be. The authors are non-Indigenous early childhood professionals who have worked with Indigenous colleagues in a range of human services and teaching roles, including children’s services, for over 20 years. In the NT a large number of Indigenous non-government organisations are working to advance Indigenous aspirations for their children. The authors have worked for and with these organisations to promote Indigenous perspectives and goals, and, although from non-

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http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/ciec.2007.8.3.265

Lyn Fasoli & Bonita Moss Indigenous backgrounds themselves, aim to make a contribution to a wider ‘Indigenous project’ (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999). Programs in early childhood (for children aged 0-8 years and their families) have become priority areas for government development and support at local, national and international levels. This is due in large part to an upsurge in national and international research which unequivocally demonstrates the negative short and long term consequences of neglect in the early years and the benefits to children and society of providing high-quality programs and support (see McCain & Mustard, 1999; Press & Hayes, 2000; Shonkoff & Phillip, 2000; Ochiltree & Moore, 2001). Mainstream programs often do not translate into Indigenous contexts as they fail to recognise such things as differences in parenting styles, cultural mores and customs, community responsibilities for children, and the lack of physical infrastructure which much of mainstream Australia takes for granted (Press & Hayes, 2000). Indigenous children remain the most disadvantaged in Australia, particularly those children growing up in remote communities (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 2000; Secretariat of National Aboriginal & Islander Child Care [SNAICC], 2004). The incidence of child health problems, poor school achievement and child abuse remains alarmingly high for many children living in remote Indigenous communities (Cadd, 2002; Commonwealth of Australia, 2003; Pocock, 2004; Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2005). Family and Community Services at Commonwealth level (FaCS) (now Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, FaCSIA) and the Department of Health and Community Services (DH&CS) in the NT collaborated throughout the 1990s to invest in new children’s service development and support, much of it located in remote Indigenous communities. In 2000 there were barely 30 children’s services operating in remote Indigenous communities in the NT. In 2007 there are nearly 90, creating a range of new kinds of children’s spaces in the landscape of remote NT Indigenous communities. Their purposes and practices are as diverse as their locations. New forms of child care are making major positive contributions to children’s development and wellbeing through their diversity (Fasoli et al, 2004; SNAICC & Centre for Community Child Health, 2004). The Context of Indigenous Child Care in the NT One of the most striking features of the NT is the youth of its population. Children grow up surrounded by other young people; families are larger and parents are generally younger than the Australian average. Older people are comparatively fewer. The NT has an extremely large land mass; it comprises more than 17% of Australia. Of its 207,000 residents (often termed Territorians), 30% are Indigenous and the median age of the indigenous population is 23 (Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS], 2006a). Forty-five percent of the population of the NT lives in a remote or very remote location, which is higher than any other state or territory (ABS, 2006b). Remoteness affects Indigenous communities disproportionately with 60% of under 12 year-old children in the NT living remotely. Approximately 26,000, or 42% of all of the children living in the NT are Indigenous children (ABS, 2006b). Nationally, Indigenous claims over the welfare of their children have been persistent and continuous (Pocock, 2004; SNAICC, 2004). The first response to these claims was the development of Multifunctional Aboriginal Children’s Services, known as MACS. Three MACS were provided to the NT; one in Batchelor and one each in Darwin and Alice Springs, the largest population centres in the NT. However, MACS were not designed to meet the range of needs that came with living in remote areas. There continue to be many large Indigenous population centres where there are no Indigenous child care services (MACS or otherwise). The ‘Innovative’ Child Care Scheme started out as a solution to a problem for remote areas identified by the federal government although not limited to Indigenous communities. It was a flexible response designed to meet the demand for child care in locations where other types of services were not sustainable, appropriate or which could not be achieved using a standard service approach. According to the report Child Care beyond 2001, the innovative aspects were primarily in ‘the use of existing mechanisms or exemptions to standard requirements to enable a child care

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‘Innovative’ Child Care Services project to go forward which would otherwise have proved impossible’ (Commonwealth of Australia, Child Care Advisory Council, 2001, p. 88). In the NT an ‘Innovative’ funding approach for Indigenous remote area child care services became available in the early 1990s through the introduction of the ‘Innovative Child Care Scheme’, an initiative stemming from the 1992-96 National Child Care Strategy. The scheme reflected a new appreciation, at both Australian and Territory government levels, that an innovative approach to service development was required for small and remote areas where there were no services for children that could meet local needs. ‘Innovative’ child care is one service type adopted increasingly in the last five years. Communities targeted for ‘Innovative’ program funding received capital funds for purpose-built buildings. Grants were generally allocated to communities with a viable population, i.e. that could support a minimum of 20 child care places. At the same time, there was a more modest, largely uncoordinated growth in professional development training and support for staff in these new services. The ‘Innovatives’ have created new spaces for Indigenous childhoods in the NT. This article focuses on ‘Innovative’ remote Indigenous child care services for their potential to challenge some taken-for-granted views of child care held by the mainstream child care community. Their example provokes us to consider our assumptions about what child care is for. As Peter Moss (2001, p. 14) says in relation to international developments in childcare, ‘Looking at these complex issues in contexts we don’t and can’t fully understand is full of potential to surprise us’. With this in mind, the time is ripe for thinking critically about children’s services. Diverse ‘Innovative’ Child Care Services In 2002-04 Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers from Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education (BIITE) and the Northern Territory University (now Charles Darwin University), funded by the Bernard van Leer Foundation, investigated the development and sustainability of children’s services in six remote Indigenous communities in the NT, four of which were identified as ‘Innovative’ child care services. The project involved over 75 community participants. Using a participatory action research approach, researchers and participants reflected on stories of practice, observations, documents and photographs to identify key issues in children’s services development and sustainability (for more information on this project see Fasoli et al, 2004). Findings from this project provide insights into the ways these services have developed to meet a range of purposes relevant to their communities and cultures. Some of the practices identified by the Indigenous children’s services participants and researchers as important to services and their communities suggest a new breadth of purpose for child care. Services involved in the project were diverse, with each following a different pathway produced as a response to their communities’ unique needs. They were also diverse because of their differences to mainstream and urban Australian child care services, having developed in relative isolation from other similar services and from mainstream services. ‘Innovative’ child care services could be seen as local, grass roots and emergent, tailored to meet a set of local and specific needs and conditions and to reflect their communities’ cultural expectations. A community’s location, size, history, relations amongst the children’s service staff and amongst staff and families, the ways they handled staffing, absences, regulations, activities for children and so on, were essential elements of their diversity. The children’s services reflected a whole of community concern that prioritised young children’s health, safety, learning and overall well-being. However, staff could not act fully on all of these issues simultaneously. As services gradually developed they addressed their most pressing needs first, in their own ways. A number of key practices emerged as critical to the development of the services and included practices clearly ‘borrowed’ or adapted from mainstream child care as well as practices that responded directly to community-specific perspectives, realities, and challenges. They included: • Practices for working with children: what are these services doing with children? • Staffing practices: who works in the service? • Practices concerned with who the service is for: who uses the service?

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Lyn Fasoli & Bonita Moss Practices for Working with Children: what are these services doing with children? Understanding what happens for children in these remote Indigenous contexts required a ‘wide angle view’ of what a children’s service could be, often moving well beyond what a mainstream urban children’s service might look like. Practices tended to be geared around local needs and activities seen as appropriate for their children and, therefore, varied with the community priorities and values. The strongest example of these practice priorities in all of the children’s services related to nutrition and a focus on meal preparation. The types of kitchen equipment and food found in a remote Indigenous children’s service are often not available within people’s homes, making the service very attractive places to both adults and children. A persistent lack of housing results in severe overcrowding in most remote communities and, coupled with a very limited selection of food items in the local shop, creates nutritional challenges that are not easily resolved. In many communities, up to 40% of a community’s children may be in danger of becoming ‘skinny kids’ [2], making the provision of appropriate food for children a critical and time-consuming component of the children’s service program. Anaemia, gut infections, dietary insufficiency and food affordability are also well-documented challenges to children’s development and create constant stress for families. All of the children’s services focused on reducing this stress through programs directly targeting childhood nutrition. Alliances built between children’s services and other community services had a strong influence on children’s service programs and orientations. For example, one service very successfully collaborated with the local health centre to provide children with vitamins and iron supplements. A walk to the health clinic was the first activity of the day for everyone in that service. Another service provided a community education program through conducting a series of cooking classes in collaboration with the local nutrition worker. They also offered a ‘Babies’ First Foods’ education program for young mothers. This service proactively negotiated a new practice for their service with a team of external researchers who regularly visited their community to monitor hearing loss. They asked them to teach child care staff how to assess children’s hearing, making the capacity to detect ear problems and have them attended to early a sustainable practice after the researchers left. Another service aimed to reduce scabies and other skin infections by washing all the children’s clothes every morning and changing them into centre clothes which were then washed at the end of the day. This was a very time-consuming practice but one that everyone agreed was vital. In one centre it took a year to build up the children’s health to the point where they were able to devote effort and attention to other areas of priority. Obviously, the amount of time undertaking these health-related activities, such as washing all the children and their clothes, cooking frequent nutritious meals, offering supplementary, community-oriented programs, and negotiating with other community services, meant there was less time and inclination to offer more traditional early childhood activities such as story reading or painting activities. The fact that all of the services were staffed primarily by local Indigenous people meant that the nature of their work with children within and beyond the centre was always embedded in the particular values and practices of their local culture. Taking children ‘out bush’ to swim in water holes, to teach them about bush tucker, to share knowledge of country or simply to get away from the centre and spend some time in the bush was a common practice undertaken in diverse ways depending on the context. These trips were much more than mere ‘excursions’; they were considered to be critical opportunities for cultural learning. Adults in all of the services wanted children to learn how to find bush tucker and to get to know their land beyond the centre and the immediate community. These activities were undertaken as often as staff could arrange given that they rarely had a vehicle for their own exclusive use. As services evolved they were, to varying degrees, different kinds of places from local home environments. At home, children tended not to be the main or only focus of activity for adults in the family whereas in the child care services, the main purpose of adults’ activity was looking after children. As a result, the services could be seen, by both children and staff, as somewhat separate and alien places to the rest of the community. Some of the services considered their community embeddedness in terms of what children and staff could see through the fences and what other community members could see of the service from the outside, overcoming to a degree this feeling

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‘Innovative’ Child Care Services of separateness. When they were consulted, communities helped to design their children’s service to be ‘open’, emphasising visual and physical access to the surrounding community. This openness allowed local community people walking by to call out to the children or staff inside, to drop in spontaneously when it was morning tea time or to chat through the fence about community business (Fasoli et al, 2005). These services were not disconnected from what else went on in their community. Children used these programs in a variety of ways. Some children brought themselves to the service. Sometimes they would be waiting when the staff came to open up or arrived mid morning after they had woken up. One service collected the younger children when they collected the school-aged children in a bus. In one community, as soon as school finished, older children could be seen running from the school to the child care centre because they wanted to be at the gate first, knowing that the service could not accommodate all of them. This service offered outside school hours care, as well as care for younger children. The older children were provided with a large meal and snacks as well as play activities. Some remote children’s services made themselves available for children of community visitors. For example, in one community a grandmother and her nine month-old granddaughter arrived from another community and were staying on the verandah of a house next door to the children’s service. The grandmother decided to come to the service. She was welcomed and stayed for three days, eating with the children, sleeping with her granddaughter in the air conditioned sleep room, playing with the toys and the children and generally contributing to the activities of the service. When her visit was finished she left and went back to her own community. Staffing Practices: who works in the service? Staffing practices in every community were challenging and each found different solutions. The question of who should work with the children was an important issue for each community to resolve. Two of the services with stable staffing took action to ensure a mixture of staff. Older and younger women and family, clan or skin groups were employed. The way this was organised in one service was to consult all staff members about filling a position, rather than relying on more typical means of finding new staff such as advertising and interviewing all candidates. Staff recognised the need to keep the staffing profile balanced, particularly in relation to different clan groups. Grandmothers and older aunts have been the traditional carers for young children and continued to act in this role. There were families who did not use the community’s children’s service and continued to care for their children in traditional ways. The introduction of a centrebased approach to the care of children in remote communities is a significant change from this traditional practice. Therefore, all of the participating services aimed to involve older women in their services. In one service this became a problem when staff realised that nearly all of the staff were older women. For any staff member, but particularly older women, child care is hard work. The job begins before any other in the community and is the last to finish. In response, this service decided to hire some younger women because they would have more energy. Another service employed younger women before or soon after they had become mothers to help them learn from the older workers how to look after children. Each staff member brought with them unique skills, knowledge, experiences and training which were highly influential upon the types of activities undertaken in each service. In one service nearly all the staff were undertaking training on the job through a visiting lecturer from Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education. These staff aimed to provide child care activities in much the same way as an urban centre. Child care workers in this service sat close to children, showing them how to use equipment, talking to them and helping them solve their problems. In another service staff rarely did activities explicitly with children or talked to them about their activities although they always intervened to keep them safe. Instead these children were included in whatever staff were doing, whether they were cooking or cleaning, talking or drawing pictures in the dust. In another service, the director had been the principal of the local school. In her service educational activities that helped children learn colours and numbers were priorities. This service

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Lyn Fasoli & Bonita Moss also employed women who spoke ‘strong’ language as well as English speakers, so that children would be sure to learn both English and their own local language. In all cases, the people who worked with young children had to be seen by their community as trustworthy. Qualifications were much less important to families than trust and community endorsement. Hence, in one community a woman was trained but she was not seen as an appropriate person to care for children. Unlike urban contexts where a number of people might be ‘passing through’, in remote communities everyone knows each other. Unless the community trusted the service, they would not use it. Practices Concerned with Who the Service is For: what influences the use of the service? There were many differences in beliefs about ownership and use of the services, including issues of ‘belonging’ and which families should/could use the service in the different communities. Each service was working to develop local solutions to suit their context. In every community, a proportion of families chose to make other arrangements for the care of their children and did not need to use the children’s service. However, where family members worked in a service, relatives often felt more comfortable about using the service. Another key influence was the location of the service. The traditional ownership of land on which the service was located could contribute to a view that only some families should use the service. Most communities located their service on neutral ground and near other communal facilities to ensure that it would be accessed widely by the general community. Services were used for a variety of purposes and this brought different people into them in addition to the parents receiving care for their children. This was seen in the way meetings that involved the whole community occurred in some services or, more informally, when people dropped by to have a chat or cup of tea. The services created space for engagement around community issues related to child rearing. For example, mothers attended one service to access community education programs even when they had no children currently attending the service. Fathers came to one service to eat lunch with the children. A group of young people undertaking a tourism training program in one community made regular visits to the child care service. They brought animals and fish they had caught on field trips for the children to eat and as a way to share their knowledge with the younger children. Whether a community had enough children to be eligible for the provision of a formal preschool program [3] (i.e. at least 12 children of pre-school age) influenced the age group of children who used the service. Where there was no pre-school in the community, children from birth to five years old used the service. In some communities the pre-school teacher was located in the child care centre, which meant that all three and four year-olds in the community used the service. In one service out-of-school-aged care was run through the child care service. Older children to age 13 regularly used the service. Family eligibility to use the services varied. In one community, working parents were prioritised; nevertheless, parents who left the community for any number of reasons knew that they too could find daytime care for their children at the child care centre. One service saw its purpose as helping children to learn to get along with all kinds of children, especially those to whom they are not related. This service was the only one that catered to both Indigenous and nonIndigenous children. The child care service in each case seemed be connected to their whole community, despite the fence surrounding the building. When something important was happening in the community, such as a community consultation with a visiting mining company, a funeral or a major sporting event, many services would close. Staff in these services were key members of their communities and had multiple responsibilities that went beyond the service. It would have been unreasonable to run the service and thus exclude child care staff from important events such as these. The community users of these services understood this. The strong embeddedness of multiple relationships amongst services users, providers and their communities could be seen as strengtheners to the fabric of the community and to augment the extended care of children. It is rare to see this kind of networked support in Australian urban child care settings.

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‘Innovative’ Child Care Services Viewing these practices in light of the broader mainstream national child care landscape is informative and is the focus of the next section of this article. The Evolving Purposes of Australian Mainstream Child Care Addressing the field in the mid 1990s, McGurk (1996) asked a key question that has seemingly been forgotten: ‘What else can child care be?’ For McGurk, child care was fundamentally about socially distributed parenthood. He talked about child care providing the ‘intimate care’ of babies and children in a social environment that could secure not only children’s futures, but their ‘current happiness’. We would ask whether mainstream children’s services sector have forgotten this purpose. Reflecting on these examples of Indigenous community child care reminds us of McGurk’s questions, and provides us with a way to revive some of these core ideas for mainstream services. The growth in mainstream children’s services has been primarily a response to the need for safe care for children while their parents work (Press & Hayes, 2000). The services discussed in this article often prioritised what counted in their communities, at a particular time. They recognised child care as an opportunity to promote a range of community priorities. They chose specific people to work with their children. They stayed connected to their immediate community and allowed it to shape what they did and how they operated. They reflected and responded to their communities. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Background Report for Australia describes the predominant purposes that child care has played in Australia as driven by economic, family and, more recently, education policy (Press & Hayes, 2000). Increasingly child care quality and how to achieve ‘best practice’ dominates current policy and public discussion. For many years child care has continued to develop and expand without enough attention being given to its purposes and practices. It is easy to forget that contemporary mainstream child care in Australia has been available for little more than three decades and is still a very new institution. Yet, already, it is a fixture in contemporary life, a taken-for-granted solution to a taken-for-granted problem of caring for young children while their parents work. Jim Greenman, a noted US child care commentator, has always seen child care as a place whose purpose is primarily for children, a place where childhoods happen. In a recent article he cautions against this new and increasingly exclusive focus on education: Full-day child care centers are not just settings for learning; they are places where many children spend most of their early years. The learning requirements may be identical, but the living requirements are far more significant and should be acknowledged and not lost in the emphasis on school readiness. (Greenman, 2005, p. 3)

‘Quality assurance’ has become a near universal mantra applied to any publicly funded program regardless of who it serves or for what purposes. In this movement there is an assumption that we all share the same values and want the same things from child care. However, as this reflection on remote Indigenous ‘Innovative’ services reveals, there is a range of values and perspectives available for conceptualising child care. In the early care and education field there are new voices contesting universal notions of quality. Quality is seen as relational, a set of factors that varies according to the images held in society of children and childhood (Dahlberg et al, 1999; Moss, 1999; Penn, 2004; Priest, 2005). At the most basic level, definitions of quality are tied up with notions of childhood and beliefs about how and under what circumstances children learn. There is no international consensus on what constitutes an appropriate curriculum or daily regime of activities for young children. (Penn, 2004, p. 9)

The all-pervasive language of ‘quality assurance’ reduces the vocabulary available to caregivers and early years teachers for talking about what they are doing in children’s services, as well as their capacity to explore, describe and debate the complex issues involved. Instead of focusing on what ‘could’ we do in child care, we have become obsessed with what ‘should’ we do. For Indigenous

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Lyn Fasoli & Bonita Moss children’s services, it is important to think about more diverse, locally embedded, value-based notions of quality, as suggested by Priest (2005). Conclusion Moss (2004) insists that a healthy democracy provides space for debate about what public services should look like and that these conversations should include recognition of diverse values, agendas and theory. He argues that children’s services are political arenas. The current rhetoric surrounding the development of mainstream children’s services restricts us from privileging children as a unique social group and childhood as an important time in life. The experience of innovative Indigenous child care reminds us of these issues, and others we seem to no longer question or think about. These include: • the key purpose of child care as the intimate care of children, their happiness, here and now, their health and well-being (McGurk, 1996); • the concept of child care as more than simply looking after children while parents are at work or for preparing them for their future lives as students; • the relevance of child care as a direct response to its local constituents, to the needs of the community it serves; • child care as providing avenues for local cultural maintenance and renewal; • a recognition that what happens just outside the child care gate is as important as anything else and needs to be a part of the everyday activity within the service; and • the potential for true partnership and community engagement when a whole community recognises the worth and invests in its children’s service. We can all benefit from engaging in the debate about what child care is and could become rather than accepting the status quo as the only vision. We pose the following questions: • Whose agendas for children are we responding to? • Is child care a place for reproducing and maintaining current understandings and cultures? Whose understandings? Whose cultures? • Can we ensure that care by strangers is intimate? • How can we make child care a place for the here and now childhoods of the children it serves? • What kinds of relationships have we created between our services and our local communities? • How can we encourage true innovation and change in mainstream services? • What can child care be? The experience of Indigenous ‘Innovative’ children’s services provides a provocation to reflect on the ways mainstream services have organised the care and education of young children in the past 30-40 years. They provoke new thinking about what child care could become. If we pay attention, they create new spaces for thinking about what a children’s service is and what it could be, reminiscent of the concept of ‘local political projects’ discussed by Moss (2004), and they remind us that children’s services need not be simply for working parents or for improving educational outcomes. As Greenman (1987) told us so long ago, children’s services are the places and spaces where, increasingly, childhoods are happening. Correspondence Lyn Fasoli, Academic and Research Division, Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education, Batchelor, NT 0845, Australia ([email protected]). Notes [1] The term ‘Innovative’ child care or children’s service refers to a federally funded government initiative called the ‘Innovative Child Care Scheme’, an initiative stemming from the 1992-96 National Child Care Strategy. The initiative aimed to create more flexible services for young children and families living in rural or remote areas of Australia where no services for children existed or where existing services did not meet community needs.

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‘Innovative’ Child Care Services [2] ‘Skinny kids’ is a term used to describe young Indigenous children who are failing to thrive and thus are smaller and thinner than their age cohort, an unfortunately common challenge for many Indigenous families in remote communities. [3] In the NT, pre-school is a half-day, educational program for four year-old children, provided by a teacher with a four-year degree. In remote Indigenous communities three year-olds may attend preschool if a parent or guardian attends with them. To be eligible for pre-school funding, the community must have at least 12 children in the age range (see Walker, 2004).

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