Abstract:
With the onset of the COVID 19 pandemic, the Australian government deemed early childhood educators as essential workers with early learning centres (long day care) expected to remain open to support other essential workers. As numbers of children attending centres declined, and amid fears of an economic collapse, the government instituted a radical policy change, making child care free, and supplementing centres’ income through the provision of operational and wage subsidies.This paper presents a case study analysis in one early learning centre located in an economically and socially complex suburb, of the consequences of rapid and radical government and service-level decisions on educator practises and decision making in this context. The study was nested in a larger doctoral study exploring the perspectives of early childhood educators working with children and families in two early learning services located in different low socioeconomic metropolitan areas in South Australia. The overarching research was designed as a mini-ethnographic study combined with principles of design-based research, which enabled an inductive and iterative approach to data collection and data interpretation. Combined with the creation of dialogic spaces involving the educators and the researcher, the gathering and analysis of comprehensive, context-specific, richly descriptive data was possible. This approach to the collection of data enabled the emergence of descriptions, themes and interpretation opportunities (Creswell, 2014). The application of intersectionality theory complemented this approach by exploring and elaborating educator understandings of multiple social identities, including gender, income, qualifications and culture. Analysis through the application of an intersectional framework, revealed how the wages and hours of an already low paid, female workforce were reduced, yet with increasing family enrolments, educator workloads increased during the period of free child care. When free child care ended, enrolments reduced and cost saving measures such as reduced access to relief staff remained, placing additional pressures on educators and creating significant tensions within the team, reflecting both cultural tensions and the impact of qualification levels, income and conditions.Preliminary findings demonstrate a link between broad, non-contextualised government policy on service-level decisions. Such decisions had an emotional and financial impact on a poorly paid, female dominated, culturally diverse and minimally qualified workforce. Such findings are important in supporting advocacy for changes in government policy responses which consider educator and service demographics through an intersectional lens.