National Interdisciplinary Education Framework for Professionals working in the Early Years : Helping future generations of professionals to collaboratively care for children from birth to five years

Abstract

Content created by this project is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.The first five years of a child’s life are irrefutably important, establishing life-long health, social and economic outcomes. The early childhood workforce is charged with delivering early childhood development services in a framework of quality and national consistency for the safety of all Australian children and their families. This requires development of a national framework for learning and teaching that incorporates common outcomes for children, an interdisciplinary map, and universal essential elements. The National Interdisciplinary Education Framework for Professionals Working in the Early Years is designed to be used to inform education curriculum for preparing early years professionals across disciplines. The framework attends to the diverse demands of multiple professions, qualification levels and workforce agendas. This National Interdisciplinary Education Framework for Professionals Working in the Early Years contains: • A statement of common outcomes for children from birth to five years that recognises various disciplinary foci • An interdisciplinary map highlighting training and professional requirements in selected children’s services professions • A statement of universal essential elements (knowledge, skills and attributes) required for working with children from birth to five years of age • A self-evaluation tool to guide reflection on how the resources are being taken up in programs and curricula within and across courses and across disciplines. These resources can be integrated individually or as a collective into existing learning and teaching curricula to provide a platform for shared understandings for workers with children from birth to five years