To improve children’s safety, we need a well-trained workforce with specialist courses designed to develop and support them, writes Andrew Taylor.
Highly qualified and experienced teachers and educators are critical not just for children’s learning and development, but also their safety.
Yet substandard teacher training risks the safety of young children in early childhood education and care, says University of Sydney early childhood governance professor Marianne Fenech.
“Across Australia, the diversity and inconsistency of teacher-preparation programs means that not all graduates are equipped to provide high-quality education and care,” she told the Early Childhood Education Summit held at the University of Sydney earlier this year.
Fenech says serious safety breaches in the sector prompted state and federal governments to implement reforms focused on staff and providers.
“I would like to see this spotlight extended to tertiary institutions that deliver early childhood degree programs in ways that compromise quality standards and thereby contribute to the safety issues the sector is experiencing,” she says.
Questionable programs
Media reports last year raised alarms about thousands of students enrolling in accelerated early childhood programs, with some purchasing fake credentials and others using the sector as a route to permanent residency.
An ABC investigation found Southern Cross University offered graduate diplomas that take as little as 10 months to complete, with no prior teaching or childcare experience required, to international students seeking pathways to residency.
“A large number of these students are not genuine in their desire to work in the childcare sector,” immigration expert Mark Glazbrook told the ABC.
Fenech blames the poor quality of some teacher training on a lack of rigorous oversight and an undervaluing of the work of early childhood teachers.
“The shortage of, and demand for, early childhood teachers and educators provides a lucrative opportunity for training providers to target international students through fast-tracked degree pathways,” she says.
Fenech says urgent reforms are needed to ensure a high-quality system of initial teacher and educator preparation: “One that does not compromise children’s safety, and one that equips graduates to offer the high-quality education and care that every child deserves.”
Serious red flags
Australia’s national regulators for higher education and vocational training raised serious concerns about early childhood teacher and educator training programs in a joint alert issued in November 2025.
“The alert outlined 10 concerns linked to substandard preparation of early childhood teachers and educators,” Fenech says. “Its release was alarming and a serious red flag that quality standards are being compromised.”
The regulators’ concerns included:
- students being admitted without meeting entry requirements
- poor-quality placements and inadequate oversight of students
- pre-placement mandatory checks not being undertaken compromised assessment integrity.
Quality placements crucial
Fenech says placements with rigorous standards and appropriate supervision are integral to the development of quality early childhood teachers.
“Poor quality placements can lead to students not receiving the support and mentoring required to develop their practice,” she says.
“It can also lead to students being passed irrespective of whether they have met placement standards.
“Both outcomes compromise children’s safety and development, as they don’t have access to competent early childhood teachers.”
Courses under scrutiny
Graduate teaching diplomas in early childhood education and care are a key workforce strategy to address staffing shortages by attracting career changers and international graduates.
The Productivity Commission in 2024 suggested accelerated degree programs for qualified educators to become early childhood teachers in its report, A path to universal early childhood education and care.
The IEU in response welcomed discussion of accelerated qualification pathways to help address staff shortages but cautioned against compromising on quality.
“We need to ensure quality is maintained in training, and that universities are not pressured to cut corners,” said IEUA NSW/ACT Branch Secretary Carol Matthews.
“Rushing through training will not solve staff shortages if teachers end up leaving the sector over pay and workloads. More still needs to be done to ensure teachers receive pay comparable to teachers in schools.”
The 2023 Strong Beginnings report, which focused on strategies to support better-prepared, classroom-ready teachers, rejected the notion that teaching can be learned in a single year.
A one-year graduate diploma is “not academically and professionally proportionate with the complexity and status of teaching”, the report found.
A 2025 study of accelerated programs by University of New England lecturer Lauren Brocki questioned whether graduates were properly equipped to meet legal and ethical child safety responsibilities.
“The current design of many of these programs does not guarantee that child protection is taught as a foundational professional competency,” she wrote in Child safety in early childhood teacher education: Gaps in Australia’s accelerated Graduate Diploma programs.
Assessing teacher quality
Fenech leads the Teachers in Early Education (TEE) research project, which aims to tackle staff shortages by tracking the careers of early childhood teachers and developing a tool to assess early childhood teacher quality.
Unpublished findings from the TEE project show students in birth-to-12 programs (teaching degrees for early childhood and primary school) were less confident about their capacity to work effectively with young children than students in specialist early childhood teaching degrees.
“Early childhood teachers need broad and specialised skills, which I don’t believe can be adequately developed in short one-year programs or courses designed mainly for primary teaching,” Fenech says.
The 2020 study, Employers’ perspectives of how well-prepared early childhood teacher graduates are to work in early childhood education and care services, found more than half of employers were concerned about the quality and commitment of students in birth-to-12 programs.
“Employers see patterns in the calibre of students who undertake professional experience from varying institutions,” Fenech says. “Some have already signalled that they will only employ graduates from certain programs.”
Published in the June 2026 edition of Bedrock.
