Parents and caregivers are vital partners in education, and together, educators and families can ease back-to-school jitters and help make this an exciting and positive transition for children.
Where new early learning and child-care programs are located, how they are designed, built and resourced, and what they teach can either add to the problem of climate change or help mitigate it.
The lack of a fully interactive environment in kindergarten due to pandemic school closures may negatively impact some children’s learning in later grades.
The system has several elements and many problems. Making it fit for purpose will take a lot of work and even more resources than those that have just been announced.
Marilyn Campbell, Queensland University of Technology and Yan Qi, Queensland University of Technology
This week’s announcements will add to the need to train more early childhood workers and to ensure they are more diverse in a way that better reflects our multicultural society.
A study of students across Canada between 2004 and 2015 provides an estimate of anxiety symptoms in kindergarteners, and can serve as a baseline for comparing children’s anxiety after COVID-19.
Kindergarten educators who taught from home during COVID-19 and who were primarily responsible for their own children self-reported poorer mental health than those without these responsibilities.
Staff recruitment and retention challenges aren’t seen in public child-care centres, where educators are paid substantially more, are unionized and have professional development opportunities.
Among provinces, Ontario is the least generous supporter of its childhood educator workforce. Parents pay the price in available child-care spaces if a staffing recruitment crisis does not improve.
A chasm has opened up between early childhood learning and the first years of compulsory schooling. Kids go from playing to being tested in the blink of an eye, and their learning is poorer for it.
The pandemic highlighted Australia’s reliance on early childhood educators, while adding to their existing stresses. A study of how educators fared identifies three key factors in their well-being.
Adjunct Professor, Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development at Ontario Institute for the Study of Education (OISE) and Senior Policy Fellow at the Atkinson Centre, University of Toronto
Professor, Canada Research Chair in Determinants of Child Development, Owerko Centre at the Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute, University of Calgary