The framing of Australian childcare policy problems and their solutions

Abstract

Using discursive policy analysis, we analyse recent Australian childcare policy reform. By examining the policy framings of two successive governments and a childcare union, we demonstrate how the value of care work was strategically positioned by each of the three actors, constructing differing problems with different policy solutions. We argue that women’s care work was recognised by one government as valuable and professional when it aligned with an educational investment framing of enhanced productivity. This framing was capitalised upon by a union campaign for ‘professional’ wages, resulting in a government childcare worker wage subsidy. However, prior to implementation, a change of government re-framed the problem. The new government cast mandatory quality standards as placing unnecessary financial pressure on families and business. Within this frame, the remedy was to instead subsidise employer staff-development costs without increasing workers’ wages.

Keywords

daycare early childhood education interpretive policy analysis professionalisation

Introduction

Formal care work has long relied upon the labour of low-paid, working-class women, often from racial and ethnic minorities (Duffy, 2007). Here, intersectional experiences of gender, race and class align, with care workers and the work they conduct positioned as being of low value to society. Major Australian childcare policy reform presented an opportunity for a re-evaluation of women’s caring work, which was taken up and then rejected by consecutive Australian governments.

In this article, we use discursive policy analysis (Bacchi 2009) to examine the framing of Australian early childhood education and care (ECEC) policy problems that justified subsequent policy responses. We examine two rounds of recent national ECEC reform as they drew on contradictory discourses of the value and nature of ECEC work and the ‘problems’ with the workforce that require solution. We begin by describing the incremental professionalisation of ECEC work in Australia before locating this within broader theoretical and policy contexts. Using the methods of policy trajectory analysis (Ball, 1993; Gale, 1999), we then trace the temporal development of three policy actors’ accounts of the problems facing the ECEC workforce and identify the consequences for the valuation of women’s caring work.

The valuation and professionalisation of ECEC work

Recognising the gendered, largely devalued and often invisible nature of formal and informal care work, feminists have long argued the importance of exploring the linkages between the family, the state and the market in order to deconstruct taken-for-granted assumptions underpinning the organisation and value of care (Lewis, 2000; O’Connor et al., 1999). By way of example, the financial valuation of formal childcare work in Australia, like elsewhere, has been a significant source of feminist concern (Andrew and Newman, 2012; Sevenhuijsen, 1998, 2003; Tronto, 2013), and one that has not been actively taken up by governments until very recently (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR), 2013a; Productivity Commission, 2011). Historically within Australia, and mirroring the valuation of ECEC elsewhere, childcare work was not recognised as a profession carried out by professionals. For instance, in 1970s America, childcare work was rated lower than that of parking lot attendants in terms of skill and complexity (Kapp Howe, 1977: 239 in Brennan, 1998). More recently, the Australian Standard Classification of Occupations bureaucratically legitimised such constructions, classifying childcare workers at level 6 (alongside other gendered occupations, including receptionists and hospitality workers), which corresponds to work of ‘low to moderate skill’ carried out by ‘workers’ rather than ‘professionals’ (Australia Bureau of Statistics (ABS), 1997).

ECEC work has traditionally been seen as an extension of innate, maternal duties, differing only in the fact that it is carried out by paid workers, typically located outside the home (Jovanovic, 2013). Further, caring work is considered a role that almost any woman can play, particularly women with less access to power and resources that can be employed cheaply, such as working-class and migrant women. As a result of these constructions, caring for children has long been incorrectly considered a natural, and unskilled, role that suits women’s innate skills and desires.

The construction of childcare work as naturally able to be conducted by ‘nice ladies who love children’ (Stonehouse, 1989: 61) has had ongoing negative implications for the valuation of ECEC work, yet one that is now being actively challenged. Across a range of developed countries, the ECEC sector has moved to reconstruct its practice as requiring specialised knowledge and skills (Harwood, et al., 2012; Taggart, 2011). This reconstruction positions ECEC work as of educational benefit to children and, as such, reframes ECEC workers as educators (Cook et al., 2013; Osgood, 2006).

Recently in Australia, ECEC was described as ‘meeting policy objectives of increasing equity through children’s exposure to high quality ECEC and also boosting workforce productivity’ (Productivity Commission, 2011, pp. 84–85). The focus on ECEC as a driver of women’s workforce participation and national productivity created opportunities for the valuation of ECEC within the logics of neoliberalism, providing economic benefits both immediately and prospectively through the effective educational development of future workers. As has been documented extensively elsewhere (Dean, 1999; Lemke, 2001), the neoliberal project is less an explicit political enterprise and more of an assemblage of techniques of governmental control that serve to collapse the epistemological distinctions between economy and society (Shamir, 2008). Here, discourses of neoliberalism extend economic calculation into traditionally non-economic arenas (Pollack and Rossiter, 2010), such as ECEC. As Ajzenstadt (2009: 70) describes, ‘this mode of rationality removes the responsibility of caring for individuals’ wellbeing from a collective, state-based risk management system to individuals, who are expected to act rationally and responsively in order to manage risk’.

When the logic of neoliberalism is applied to ECEC work, uneasy tensions are produced, which focus on how an understanding and valuation of caring as professional is made possible only through the lens of economic relations. As several researchers have noted (Boyd, 2013; Cook et al., 2013; Moss, 2006; Osgood, 2006), the professionalisation of ECEC work produces tensions between detached, standardised, technical processes and the fluid, personal and situated nature and practice of caring. As Osgood (2006: 8) suggests in relation to UK ECEC policy reform, ‘in neo-liberal discourses there is little room for emotionality or such feminine characteristics that are seemingly unquantifiable or auditable’. Where emotionality and femininity do exist, they are often contained within neoconservative accounts that locate ECEC work within the maternal realm of the home that stand outside their neoliberal concerns with the free market and small government (Teghtsoonian, 1993).

Exemplifying the tensions facing the ECEC sector, professionalisation can be read equally as: an example of the encroachment of neoliberal governance into an area of social life previously unconcerned with economic calculation; and the rejection of neoconservative ideas that conceive of ECEC work as best conducted by women, ideally within the private sphere. How these intersecting, yet discordant logics applied to the framing of policy problems that were addressed in recent rounds of Australian ECEC reform, and what these logics meant for the valuation of women’s caring work, are what we examine here. However, before describing the nature of our analysis, we situate our article within feminist ethics of care, followed by a summary of the Australian ECEC policy context.

Feminist ethics of care

Our analysis is guided by theoretical ideas developed within the feminist ethic of care approach (Jaggar, 1991; Sevenhuijsen, 2003; Tronto, 2013). The feminist ethic of care challenges Enlightenment sensibilities regarding the primacy of the autonomous individual, and neoliberal sensibilities regarding the primacy of the market, arguing instead for a more relational and interdependent understanding of the human condition (Sevenhuijsen, 2003). Importantly, caregiving work is understood within a context of gendered, classed and racialised social norms rather than as a naturalised or essentialist characteristic of women (Jaggar, 1991). Furthermore, feminist theorists acknowledge the political dimension of the practice of care (Sevenhuijsen, 1998; Tronto, 2013). Care work is recognised as a politicised practice, where individuals have uneven access to resources. Privileged members of society purchase low-wage care from marginalised, often minority women, a practice that Tronto (2013) calls ‘privileged irresponsibility’. Acknowledging that care work is gendered, racialised, marginalised, and politicised, we now explore the framing of ECEC work in successive Australian governments.

ECEC in Australia

The Australian ECEC sector, operated by an extensive system of community co-operatives, non-government, government and private (for-profit) organisations, provides services to most of Australia’s 3.7 million children (Productivity Commission, 2014a). This workforce is deeply gendered, as well over 90 per cent of ECEC workers are female (Productivity Commission, 2014b). This ‘pink collar’ workforce is also largely working class (Andrew and Newman, 2012) and increasingly, includes migrant women (for example, 30 per cent of the family daycare workforce in Australia is comprised of migrant women; Williamson et al., 2011).

In Australia, formal ECEC is positioned as providing a critical service to families, employers and society and one that is essential infrastructure that ‘underpins Australia’s labour market’ (Masterman-Smith and Pocock, 2008). Currently, Australian government investment to support ECEC quality, service provision and access for families through childcare subsidies and rebates has grown to approximately $7 billion dollars annually (Productivity Commission, 2014a). But despite this sizable figure, the proportion of GDP that Australia invests in ECEC has remained steady at 0.1 per cent compared to an OECD average of 0.8 per cent (Melbourne Graduate School of Education, 2014; OECD, 2013).

In recent years, Australia has also seen significant reform in the ECEC sector, beginning in earnest with the introduction of a National Quality Framework (NQF) in 2008 and an Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) in 2009. Here, historically dominant discourses of care and development were downplayed in favour of ‘new discourses for the early childhood field of education and learning’ (Ortlipp et al., 2011: 62). For example, within the EYLF, all ‘early childhood practitioners who work directly with children in early childhood settings’ are now referred to as ‘educators’ (DEEWR, 2009: 5), a change that focuses attention on worker qualifications and frames their work as being of educational benefit. As a result, ECEC work has been reframed as ‘professional’, amendable to quality assurance assessments and foregrounding children’s ‘learning’ as a key focus of work that was previously considered an extension of mothering (Jovanovic, 2013).

Of particular note is the requirements that all workers have a minimum of Certificate III in Children’s Services, 50 per cent of staff hold or be working towards a Diploma qualification, and for centres with more than 25 staff, to have at least one staff with a Bachelor’s Degree in Early Childhood Education (Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA), 2011). These new qualification requirements, in particular, exposed the gendered devaluation of women’s ECEC work in Australia, as workers with comparable qualifications in male-dominated industries were paid substantially more, whereas ECEC workers receive lower wages than workers in other sectors with similar qualifications (Brennan and Adamson 2014). However, ECEC wages were not commensurate with educators’ work prior to the introduction of the NQF and were only exacerbated given their increasingly professionalised status.

To manage the growing political problem of educator demands for increased wages in the context of already high childcare fees born by parents (Productivity Commission, 2014a) and relatively low government expenditure on ECEC, two vastly different policies were introduced by consecutive Australian governments – first by the centre-left, union-affiliated Australian Labor Party (ALP) and then the conservative Liberal/National Party (LNP) coalition.

In response to continued union lobbying and strong community support, the 2007–13 Rudd/Gillard-led ALP governments introduced a funding package, known as the Early Years Quality Fund (EYQF), that would provide ECEC workers with a wage supplement to increase educators’ wages without increasing costs for providers or parents (DEEWR, 2013a). At the same time, the government established the Pay Equity Unit within the Fair Work Commission to review the wages and conditions of the ECEC workforce. The United Voice union responsible for ECEC workers filed an application for an Equal Remuneration Order with the Fair Work Commission on 15 July 2013 for which a decision has yet to be made despite final documents being filed in May 2014 (Fair Work Commission, 2015).

The EYQF wage subsidy was designed to recognise the increased level of qualifications and higher standards required by educators in daycare settings. This funding was available only to approved daycare centres and limited to those centres whose wages were determined through an Enterprise Bargaining Agreement (as opposed the vast majority of staff whose wages referenced the Children’s Services Awards (DEEWR, 2013a; PriceWaterhouseCoopers Australia, 2013). Available funds were capped at $300 million nationally, which was insufficient to provide all eligible centres with the subsidy. As a result, the Fund operated on a ‘first come, first served’ basis, with a significant proportion of centres either not applying, or missing out on funding (PriceWaterhouseCoopers Australia, 2013). Over 453 letters of offer for EYQF funding were made just prior to the federal government entering ‘caretaker mode’ before the September 2013 election (PricewaterhouseCoopers Australia, 2013). However, before any payments were made, the incoming LNP government abandoned the scheme.

The EYQF was subsequently replaced by a new scheme, known as the Long Day Care Professional Development Program (LDCPDP), which provided up to $50,000 in funding to individual centres for professional development training for workers (Department of Education, 2014). The LNP government also initiated a 2013–14 Productivity Commission inquiry into the ECEC sector, focused on delivering flexible, affordable and accessible childcare (Productivity Commission, 2014a, 2014b). In response to the Productivity Commission findings, the LNP government made further ECEC policy reform, including piloting the provision of subsidies to families who use nanny-provided care (Commonwealth of Australia, 2015).

As our analysis will reveal, these two policies held with them competing accounts of the ‘problems’ facing the ECEC sector and the valuation of workers therein (Bacchi, 2009). These competing accounts provide a lens into the gender politics of ECEC policy as it navigates the terrain between maternal caregiving and professionalised educational service. These issues, and how they speak back to the societal valuation of women’s ECEC work, are what we examine here.

Approach and method

We employ an interpretive approach (Bacchi, 2009) to examine how the problems faced by the ECEC workforce were framed by a childcare union and two consecutive governments. By concentrating on these three discursive sites, we seek to illuminate official expressions of ECEC policy problems, echoing Ball’s (1993) assertion that policy texts point to the micropolitics of legislative formulation, parliamentary process and interest group articulation. Within the context of ECEC, we agree with Osgood (2006) that government policy is a tool of governance that seeks to promote a ‘correct reading’ of discursive truths. These ‘truths’, as we explicate in our analysis, redefined the problems faced by ECEC workforce and thus the array of appropriate solutions (Bacchi, 2009).

By analysing the history of ECEC policy in Australia from 2012 to 2015, we present a case study of the unsettling of existing policy framings and a re-ordering of the discourses in dominance (Gale 1999). In focusing on this time period, we acknowledge that the history of ECEC policy reform extends well beyond recent union lobbying and government responses (see Brennan, 1998; Wong, 2007) and the breadth of ‘texts’ that informed the current analysis. However, these policies differ significantly and, as such, shed light on the diversity of possible framings, their ideological underpinnings, and the valuation of women’s caring work.

Data sources

Ethics approval was obtained from the (RMIT University) Ethics Advisory Network for the collection of de-identified email and written communications between one ECEC service in Melbourne, Australia and the United Voice union, the ALP and LNP federal governments, and other entities, such as the Productivity and Fair Work Commissions. This ECEC service applied for, and was successful in being offered funding from the EYQF. However, before any payments were made, the offer was withdrawn by the LNP government. The service subsequently applied for and was successful in obtaining LDCPDP funding.

The data collected from the ECEC service included bulk emails and hardcopy materials posted to the centre by the union and various government departments. The emails also included material from the each of the two governments justifying the benefits of their funding package, and the rationale for disbanding the previous scheme in the case of the LNP government.

These data were supplemented by searches of each policy actor’s website, including the union and its Big Steps campaign website, Facebook and Flickr pages, the websites of the relevant government departments and members of parliament, and other sources, such as the Fair Work (2015) and Productivity Commission (2011, 2014a, 2014b) reports, and the 2015–16 federal budget (Department of Social Services, 2015).

To analyse these data, we constructed a chronological account of the communication made by each policy actor, and traced how the documents referenced each other over time. We identified segments of the text that illustrated explicit or implicit policy problems, paying particular attention to how such claims were justified and the logic used to support them (Jäger, 2001). Through this process, we constructed a description of each actor’s policy rationale, in particular the purported nature of the policy problems and their identified solutions (Bacchi, 2009). The gender and ideological assumptions underpinning each account were then assessed through a critical analysis of their alignments with logics such as neoliberalism, neoconservatism and the feminist ethics of care.

Findings

Our results are divided into three sections, following a loose chronology. We first describe ECEC workforce remuneration problems as presented by the United Voice union, in particular in their Big Steps campaign. We then describe the response of the governing ALP, followed by the shift in both problem and solution representation that occurred with the commencement of the LNP government in September 2013.

Union lobbying: The case for change

The United Voice union was explicit in their framing of the problem as a mismatch between the professionalisation of employees and their remuneration. Here, low wages were cast as a problem that had important ramifications for staff retention and care quality:

Early childhood education and care is a profession with specialised expertise. This [EYQF] funding will ensure that this professional job will be remunerated with better wages. This will help stem the crisis in staffing, reduce staff turnover and keep quality and experienced educators in the sector, which mean greater stability and continuity for your child in these important first five years of development. (Big Steps, 2013a).

The union’s problem framing was achieved most visibly in a Flickr photo-petition conducted in 2012 by the Victorian state branch of the union that encouraged members to take photos of themselves holding a placard noting the discrepancy between the financial valuation of ECEC work and the professional status of workers (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Photo petition by the United Voice union for Early Childhood and Care workers.

As a result of this campaign, a total of 862 photos were uploaded, the majority of which showed workers holding the ‘Professional Wages for Professional Work’ placard. Other, personalised placards noted the devaluation of care work and the financial insecurity of ECEC workers, highlighting the disjuncture between the ‘professional’ construction of ECEC work and the remuneration of staff. In the photo petition, and throughout the Big Steps campaign, the work of ECEC was described as ‘education’ rather than ‘care’, with the former referencing the professionalisation of the sector and marking this work out from other forms of unregulated childcare that lie outside of the National Quality Standards (ACECQA, 2011), such as care undertaken by nannies and babysitters.

Over the course of the Big Steps campaign, the succinct, yet powerful statement of ‘Professional Wages for Professional Work’ was reiterated in more detail in other formats. For example, in a joint submission to the 2013–14 Productivity Commission Inquiry, ECEC Providers and Peak Bodies of Early Learning in Australia stated:

The wage of a Certificate III educator is $19.07/hour, similar to the wage of a fast food worker and well below the wages of workers with comparable qualifications in other sectors. It does not reflect the high level of responsibility, training and expertise of educators. (Providers and Peak Bodies of Early Learning in Australia, 2013: 1)

By framing the problem as the need for higher pay, the union was able to highlight the high rates of turnover that plague the sector and, in doing so, also frame the problem in the interests of parents. For example, the Big Steps (2013b: 1) campaign reported that ‘because of the low wages in our sector, staff are leaving our sector every day’. By foregrounding threats to the continuity, and thus quality, of care, the union was able to link low worker wages with the government’s own ECEC agenda, as the following excerpt demonstrates:

continuity of care … is included as an assessable standard in the Federal Government’s new National Quality Standards as an indicator of a high quality child care centre (United Voice, 2012: 2).

Positioning low worker pay as a reason why the ECEC sector could not achieve the government’s recently introduced Quality Standards was a politically expedient strategy, as it foregrounded the need for higher wages, and located these in the interests of government who sought to achieve their ambitious ECEC quality reform. This approach also located the solution to the problem at the feet of government, rather than requiring wage arbitration to force employers to raise wages, or funding wage increases through increased childcare fees, as recent ‘market failure’ (Press and Woodrow, 2009) meant that wage increases could not be delivered, regardless of demand, due to parents’ and businesses’ inability and/or unwillingness to pay more (Productivity Commission, 2014b). As the United Voice union put it, ‘the government already funds essential services … the work we do is also an essential service that should be funded by government’ (Big Steps, 2013b: 2). This framing positioned the funding of ECEC as in the national interest (Wong, 2007), foregrounding national productivity gains and the enhanced prospects of the next generation of workers.

ALP reform: Quality assurance and the professionalisation agenda

The ALP government’s union ties meant it was ideologically primed to hear and respond to union concerns, and actively committed both to the professionalisation of the ECEC sector and the fair valuation of women’s caring work. For example, key ALP policy initiatives included the 2009 introduction of the EYLF (DEEWR, 2009), the implementation of National Quality Standards in 2012, and the establishment of the Pay Equity Unit of the Fair Work Commission in 2013.

These initiatives made reference to gains in ECEC worker qualifications and their highly skilled educational role; providing discursive alignment with union calls for greater financial and professional recognition:

The National Quality Agenda reforms saw the implementation of a National Quality Framework which set a new national standard for education and care services. An underpinning component of this standard is improved educational requirements for educators to ensure children have the highest quality of education and care. To achieve this objective there must be a high skilled and qualified workforce. (DEEWR 2013a: 1)

As this excerpt exemplifies, the primary focus of the Labor government’s reforms were increasing ECEC workforce quality through mandatory qualifications and quality assurance processes. This framing foregrounded the need for a highly skilled workforce, and in doing so, buttressed union claims for a more highly paid workforce. The introduction of the National Quality Agenda (Productivity Commission, 2011) thus created space for the revaluation of ECEC work, and public recognition of the mismatch between the newly required qualifications and expectations and lagging rates of remuneration.

In addition, the ALP government was acutely aware of the financial impact that increased qualification requirements and reduced staff:child ratios had had on service providers and parents. There was increasing government recognition that the cost of increased wages was unaffordable for parents and that passing on the costs would be politically unpalatable. As a result, the EYQF was introduced to, ‘maint[ain] the balance of affordability to families and quality of education and care services’ (DEEWR, 2013b: 30).

The policy problem thus became the government’s need to have high-qualified staff in order to deliver quality ECEC as set out in the National Quality Framework, and the recognition that current pay rates were inappropriate given this newfound politically endorsed professionalisation. The solution to this problem was greater government expenditure, provided specifically for the purpose of increasing worker wages without services increasing fees for parents:

The Fund will assist with maintaining the affordability of early childhood education, along with the … substantial financial assistance to families … while ensuring the high-quality of education and care for children (DEEWR 2013c: 1).

Providing families with quality ECEC was the focal point of the Fund, and the assessment criteria required services to demonstrate their commitment to quality improvement and to meeting the qualification requirements. In addition, it was a requirement that successful services include the following statement when notifying parents of their EYQF funding:

This service has successfully applied for a grant to supplement the wages of the educators in this service. This grant will operate until 30 June 2015 and will:

- Assist the service to meet the staff and qualification requirements of the National Quality Framework by providing wage supplements for staff.

- Assist the service with maintaining affordability for parents through fee restraint.

- Increase the availability of fee information for parents.

(DEEWR, 2013d: 8)

The logics that underpinned Labor’s response to ECEC workforce issues, which were framed primarily as staff retention and remuneration, operated somewhat outside the neoliberal logic of the market provision as they sought, in part, to challenge the gendered financial valuation of women’s caring work by directly supplementing wages. However, the need for reform was cast in educational and productivity terms that viewed increased quality standards as investments in the future generation of workers. In these terms, wage supplements were cast as a societal issue, and the responsibility of governments as opposed to business. However, women’s caring work was valuable only in reference to the productivity gains of children as future workers, mirroring feminist critiques made decades earlier (Waring, 1999). What remained unchallenged were the social, political and economic contexts in which gendered, classed and racialised ECEC work occurred (Sevenhuijsen, 2003).

By institutionalising pay rises – at least in the short term for the two-year duration of the EYQF – and by encouraging a review of wages through the Pay Equity Office, the Labor government’s response endorsed union framings of the problems facing the ECEC workforce as issues of national, and thus government, concern. However, the problems with the ECEC workforce, and more so the solutions that they precipitated, ran counter to prioritisations of reduced government involvement and familial-oriented valuations of ECEC work that were favoured by the LNP. In this context, it was unsurprising that the change of government brought with it the scrapping of the EYQF.

Coalition reframing: Individualising and de-professionalising

Two days before the 2013 federal election, the LNP coalition released its childcare policy. In these documents, it was noted that ‘if elected, the Coalition will honour funds contracted from the EYQF but no further expenditure will be approved’ (LNP, 2013: 8). It also foreshadowed a review of the EYQF, as it was claimed that the fund was inappropriately ‘established in response to an on-going union campaign seeking wage rises for the childcare workforce’ (LNP, 2013: 8).

According to LNP election campaign materials, the problems with the EYQF were: that funds were not sufficient to cover the entire ECEC workforce; centres were required to sign an Enterprise Bargaining Agreement to be eligible; the funds lasted only two years, after which the Coalition claimed ‘then it runs out, leaving centre owners to pick up the ongoing wages bill by increasing costs for parents’ (LNP, 2013: 8); union bullying; circumventing the Fair Work Commission decision; and that some workers would miss out on funds secured by their service, creating inequity and division between staff.

While the Coalition was adamant that the EYQF was the wrong solution to the problem of poor worker remuneration, they were also unconvinced of nature of the problem and the need for professionalisation of the ECEC workforce in order to meet quality standards:

While the Coalition supports the National Quality Framework in principle, we are concerned by reports from child care centres and parents that its implementation is causing administrative and staff problems, which are passed on as cost increases for families.

(LNP, 2013: 2)

In response, it proposed a review of ‘whether the implementation of the National Quality Framework has achieved its purpose and any other impacts’ (LNP, 2013: 4), which was later included in the 2013–14 Productivity Commission (2014a) Inquiry into the ECEC system. The LNP also reverted to past terminology, using ‘carers’ and ‘staff’ rather than ‘educators’ to refer to workers and separating childcare from education by referring to the sector as ‘Child Care and Early Childhood Learning’. This reframing purposefully removed ‘education’ from the remit of childcare workers and assigned it instead to pre-school services, delegitimising union and Labor claims for greater ECEC professionalisation.

At the level of ECEC work, the primary concerns of the LNP were to ensure that ‘carers can spend less time doing paperwork and more time with children’ (2013: 5) and to ‘ease the financial burden placed on child care centres and families without compromising the standard of care that must be provided’ (2013: 2). Here, the Coalition’s critique of the implementation of the NQF coupled unnecessary quality assurance ‘paperwork’ with the ‘financial burdens’ that the reduced staff:child ratios and worker qualifications entailed. These costly and unnecessary indulgences of professionalisation then produced financial ‘challenges for child care providers’ (LNP, 2013: 6), threatening the financial viability of the ECEC sector.

While the union claimed that low wages were the key reason for staff leaving ECEC, the LNP suggested that it was instead the imposition of mandatory education requirements that was of primary concern:

The sector is at risk of losing many highly skilled and experienced child care workers … to other industries because they don’t want to undergo burdensome and unnecessary training to formally recognise skills they already have

(LNP, 2013: 6).

Framing the problem as the qualifications themselves tied neatly into discourses of ECEC provision as innate and natural for women (Jaggar, 1991; Jovanovic, 2013) and care ideals entwined with traditional family values and the gendered willingness of women to make sacrifices (Sevenhuijsen, 1998). This framing positioned ECEC as drawing on skills that women already had; were willing to provide either for free to their own families or for little remuneration to others; and could hone through on-the-job practice, thus casting the qualifications of workers, and the higher wages these would command, as unnecessary. As a result, the policy problem of highly qualified and under-paid staff was rendered irrelevant. The LNP drew together cost and efficiency concerns with discourses of the maternal and innate nature of caring work to problematise the ALP policy provisions, echoing the intertwinement of neoconservative economic and maternal discourses that was identified in Canadian and US conservative policymakers’ opposition to ECEC reform some two decades earlier (Teghtsoonian, 1993).

After winning the 2013 election, the Coalition ceased the EYQF. Despite campaign materials stating that the Coalition would ‘honour funds contracted from the EYQF’ (LNP, 2013: 8), and, despite intense lobbying from individual ECEC providers, the union and opposition members of parliament, all centres with conditional offers had these rescinded, though some centres who had contracts in place may have received payments. In its place, the government announced the LDCPDP (Department of Education, 2014).

The LDCPDP redirected $200 million of the EYQF’s original $300 million budget into a three-year program that ‘responds to concerns in the sector that quality and tailored professional development activities can be difficult to access for a variety of reasons’ (Department of Education, 2014: 4) including: backfilling staff while they are on training; the costs of training; costs of travel to attend activities; available training not matching the needs of staff. This funding was introduced despite the LNP’s pre-election proclamation that ‘the quality of child care courses on offer is of concern to the child care sector’ and ‘the Coalition supports a review of child care qualifications’ and ‘will seek … to pause the requirement that all staff should be qualified’ (LNP, 2013: 6). Taken together with their pre-election rhetoric, the introduction of the LDCPDP reframed the ‘problem’ with the ECEC workforce from being highly qualified and undervalued to unnecessarily qualified yet requiring more specific ‘training’ that was overly costly for business.

Contrary to the LNP’s (2013) critique of the NQF in the lead-up to the election, and in response to significant pressure from the ECEC sector, the LDCPDP retained the NQF as its focus. However, the focus of the NQF was cast as outcomes, albeit not learning outcomes, for children and any reference to the professionalisation of the ECEC workforce that accompanied the Quality Agenda was reframed.

The Government supports the quality outcomes for children that are the central goal of the NQF. The objective of the [LDCPDP] programme is to provide funding for professional development to support educators and providers to meet these quality goals

(Department of Education, 2014: 4).

Here, professionalisation was re-cast as professional development, individualising the problem of ‘skill shortages’, rather than addressing structural concerns regarding the valuation of work undertake by the sector as a whole. This reframing narrowed down the definition of professionalism to ‘technical professionalism, focusing on “skills” rather than a reflective professionalism’ (Vandenbroeck et al., 2013: 114), where the focus is on workers ‘doing things right’ rather than workers drawing on professional discretion to ‘do the right things’ (Coussée et al., 2008, cited in Vandenbroeck et al, 2014: 114). To remedy this problem, services were provided with funding, while individual workers received no additional remuneration. A focus on technical professionalism also resulted in a concentration of surveillance activities on the conduct of less powerful and resourced ECEC workers.

These outcomes, while built on neoconservative logics of the naturalness of women’s ECEC work and the concomitant unnecessary nature of professionalisation, can also be read as consistent with the logics of neoliberalism. Here, the financial ‘training’ needs of service providers were prioritised, and individual workers were positioned as responsible for managing the risks associated with their daily practice, and their future labour market competitiveness, through the acquisition of professional development (Ajzenstadt, 2009). In these terms, ECEC businesses were valued, while the caring work of the individual women therein was less so. The actions of the LNP government further entrenched the prevailing assumption that care work is peripheral – something that should happen naturally, invisibly, without cost, and outside the boundaries of the market – performed by women who are equally undervalued and invisible.

Discussion

Our analysis of the trajectory of the union campaign for increased ECEC wages and consecutive government responses provides evidence of a strategic reframing (Bacchi, 2009) of the problems facing the ECEC workforce. The reframing shifted the focus away from issues of entrenched gendered wage inequity and on to issues of business sustainability, where ECEC workers were re-cast as largely unskilled workers. Our analysis has shown, unsurprisingly, that the original government framing of ECEC work as a ‘profession’, foregrounding the societal benefits of the ECEC workforce to the next generation of workers and national productivity, was strategically useful to union claims for greater financial remuneration. However, the cost of this professionalisation became the policy problem to be solved by the incoming LNP government, which led to its eventual reframing in more neoconservative and neoliberal terms (Jaggar, 1991; Jovanovic, 2013; Teghtsoonian, 1993).

The current policy framing has returned to a construction of ECEC workers as women with ‘pleasant dispositions and limited abilities’ (Taggart, 2011), who require technical skill development rather than professionalisation as reflexive practitioners (Vandenbroeck et al., 2013). The resultant policy solutions have prioritised investments in ECEC businesses, with grants for staff training in place of the previous government’s promised wage supplements. The abandonment of the EYQF and implementation of the LDCPDP relegated the concerns of the ECEC workforce to the political margins. In doing so, the social organisation of caring women’s financial oppression has been rendered politically impotent, while simultaneously reinforced.

Most strikingly, our analysis reveals the political power of problem framing (Bacchi, 2009). In recent years, the problems faced by the ECEC sector in Australia have faced significant reframing, moving towards professionalisation and higher wages and then retreating from this position due to cost imposts on business. While the framing of the problem has shifted significantly in only a small space of time, both of the policy and funding packages failed to fundamentally challenge the status quo regarding the valuation and status of women’s caring work. The ALP’s short-term wage subsidy could be considered as a first step towards cultural shift in how women’s work is valued, but its commitment to this change was only ever temporary. On the contrary, the current LNP coalition government has re-entrenched women’s ECEC work as something of low-value and not requiring significant skills. Both policy approaches have failed to address the gendered, structural issue of how women’s care work should be valued. Rather, Australia has moved away from this debate and the political push for greater financial recognition of women’s ECEC work in Australia has stalled. Australia’s recent policy history gives credence to Tronto’s (2013) claim that society’s consideration of ‘care’ is failing due to its privatised and peripheral status. The market has trumped all other considerations and buttresses existing social hierarchies that conform most easily to market ideals. Men tend to get a pass from caring work based on their production. Middle-class women who aspire to greater access to market citizenship through paid work in turn pay other – classed and racialised – women to do caring work for low wages. In this context, care work is exploitative and marginalised, as we see embedded within the current Australian policy settings.

The current policy offering provides a counter-point to most international ECEC policy development, yet it reveals a framing that is understandable and explainable given neoliberal logics of marketisation and alignments with neoconservative prioritisations of traditional family regimes (Shamir, 2008; Teghtsoonian, 1993). These same logics and policy framings mirror the market-maternal rhetoric that has underpinned ‘counter-professionalising trends’ in conservative, Flemish Belgium (Vanerbroeck et al, 2013: 113), and those underpinning the lack of regulation, accreditation and professionalisation of ECEC in the (until recently) staunchly neoconservative province of Alberta, Canada where childcare accreditation is voluntary and regulated spaces exist for only 17 per cent of Albertan children under five years of age (Tough et al., 2013).

Conclusion

Our analysis has shown that in recent history, the most successful strategy for revaluing women’s caring work in Australia has been to align ECEC workforce problems with the facets of neoliberal thinking that value investments in the early education of the next generation of workers (Osgood, 2006). However, the deployment of ‘professionalisation’ as a strategy in this context remains contentious, as it is argued that this jettisons claims for women’s work to be recognised on its own terms, and instead ties ECEC work into masculine conceptions of quality assurance, measurement and standardisation (Boyd, 2013; Cook et al., 2013; Moss, 2006; Osgood, 2006). In any case, current approaches that serve either to align with neoliberal future-worker-investment discourses or enshrine ECEC as women’s work will not achieve a re-imagination of the value of care, as they do not address the ‘excuses’ (Tronto, 2013) afforded to middle-class parents that legitimate their abdication of their responsibilities for care on the basis of their labour market engagement.

As an alternative to privileged irresponsibility, Tronto (2013) suggests that the solution lies in providing opportunities for all citizens to be able to share the burden of care. In a similar vein, Kershaw (2005) calls for a vision of society which he calls ‘carefair’. In this vision, parents (mothers and fathers) have entitlements and obligations related to paid work and parenting, thus removing gendered, classed and racialised evaluations of care, and resulting in ECEC work being central and valued. Those who advocate for a feminist ethic of care call for a significant shift in orientation where care is no longer residual and undervalued, but rather a central element of the social fabric (Sevenhuijsen, 1998; Tronto, 2013). However, the most recent chapter in Australia’s policy intervention into the ECEC sector takes a step further away from this ideal.

The LNP’s framings of ECEC work as innate and natural, as shown in our analysis, provided possibilities for greater investments in privatised forms of care, such as that provided by unregulated nannies. Following the 2013–14 Productivity Commission Inquiry, initiated by the then Prime Minister Abbott in order to ‘focus on more flexible, affordable and accessible child care’ to boost workforce participation (Prime Minister of Australia 2013: 1), the Treasurer announced in the 2015–16 federal budget a pilot program to provide childcare subsidies and benefits to families who use nannies due to their non-standard work hours. This program returned the provision of ‘in home care services’ (Department of Social Services, 2015: 1) to the unregulated private realm ‘of the family home’ (2015: 1). Rather than connecting these services to the ECEC system, this policy further entrenches and renders invisible the subordinate gender, racial and class positions of such workers and poses further threats to claims for greater ECEC remuneration and professionalisation. As such, in the current Australian policy landscape, women’s ECEC work has been confined to the margins and framed as a private issue. How the current Australian policy approach, including the subsidy of private, unregulated nannies, aligns with parents’ desires and children’s needs for high-quality, low-cost ECEC can be regarded as the next policy challenge, one that is unfortunately likely to be resolved through the continued devaluation of the caring work of working-class, and increasingly migrant women.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Author biographies

Kay Cook, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University, and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Family Studies. Her work explores how new and developing social policies impact relationships between the state, individuals and families. Recent publications include (with H. McKenzie, K. Natalier and L. Young) ‘Institutional processes and the production of gender inequalities: The case of Australian child support research and administration’ (Critical Social Policy, 35(4), 2015) and (with K. Natalier) ‘Selective hearing: The gendered construction and reception of inquiry evidence’ (Critical Social Policy, 34(4), 2014).

Lara Corr, PhD, is a Research Fellow at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University. She is a public health (sociology & social epidemiology) and social policy researcher specialising in child care labour markets, care work and mental health. She works on a range of issues including gender inequities, child care, women and children’s mental health and wellbeing, work and mental health, social, health and education policies related to women, families and children. Recent publications include (with G. Carey, ‘Investigating the institutional norms and values of the Productivity Commission: The 2011 and 2015 childcare inquiries’ (Australian Journal of Public Administration, 2016, DOI: 10.1111/1467-8500.12194) and (with E. Davis, K. Cook, E. Waters and A. D. LaMontagne, ‘Fair relationships and policies support family day care educators’ mental health: A qualitative study (BMC Public Health, 14, 2014, DOI: 10.1186/1471-2458-14-1214).

Rhonda Breitkreuz, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Human Ecology at the University of Alberta. She works in the area of gender, family, and policy studies. Her research interests include: social policy related to the wellbeing of children and families; social policy paradigms; poverty; gender analysis; citizenship; and feminist critical theory. Previous research focused on the health, childcare and family-functioning of parents with preschool children making the transition from welfare-to-work. Recent publications include (with R. Horne), ‘The motherhood sacrifice: Maternal experiences of child care in the Canadian context’ (Journal of Family Studies, 2016, and with D. McConnell, A. Savage and R. Sobsey, ‘Sustainable family care for children with disabilities’ (Journal of Child and Family Studies, 25(2), 2016, DOI: 10.1007/s10826-015-0245-0).

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