When Our Children Start Strong, They Stay Strong
First Nations-led early childhood education and care is the key to ensuring every child gets the best start in life.
Walk into any Aboriginal community-controlled early childhood service and you’ll feel it immediately: a sense of belonging, familiar voices, cultural strength, and tiny feet running across the playground, learning and laughing in environments where they feel safe, proud and loved. This is what early learning looks like for our children when Aboriginal communities and Torres Strait Islander communities lead the way.
For years, Aboriginal-led and Torres Strait Islander-led early years programs have quietly been doing some of the most impactful, transformative work in education. And we are seeing the evidence reflect what our communities have always known for millennia – when our children start strong, they stay strong.
The most recent Australian Early Development Census (AEDC) paints a powerful picture. While the data shows children across the country are slipping backwards developmentally, Aboriginal children and Torres Strait Islander children are showing greater resilience to this trend.
In addition to that, the proportion of Aboriginal children and Torres Strait Islander children assessed as developmentally on track in all five AEDC domains has stabilised, halting a previous downward trend.
That’s not luck. That’s what happens when we invest in culturally safe, community-led care, and wraparound support for families.
While there is still much work to be done, it’s not just a win for our communities, it’s a win for the entire education system that has been grappling with how to close the gap for our children.
What The Data Is Starting to Capture
We know the early years are everything. They are the building blocks for a child’s whole life, how they learn, how they feel about themselves, how they connect to others.
Too many Aboriginal children and Torres Strait Islander children start school already behind. Not because they lack ability, but because they’ve been locked out of the systems meant to support them.
Barriers like poverty, remoteness and systemic racism don’t just appear in high school or in justice statistics. They start impacting Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islander people as babies, even in utero, when families can’t access support services, then during early learning, where they feel alienated by services that don’t reflect who they are and make assumptions based on race or connections.
Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisation (ACCO)-led early childhood education and care (ECEC) services don’t just enrol children. They embrace them and their whole family. That means doing things differently – and it’s getting results.
Evidence shows these services are delivering the gold standard in early learning by bringing language, culture and kinship into learning spaces. They are improving school readiness and building identity, wellbeing and connection for our children.
I am often asked why ACCOs are best placed to deliver services to our children. The answer is so simple it’s easy to overlook.
Our incredible ECEC staff in community-led services are so great at what they do and so connected to the children and families around them because they are community. They know the aunties, the cousins and the community leaders – in fact they may be them. They understand a family’s strengths and understand how to respond to trauma when it is present.
That makes them accountable to their communities and to their mob, not just government contracts. It means they respond to the needs of our community first, not to the KPIs of the government contract.
Change Is Happening and It’s Coming From Community
It’s taken years of advocacy to get here, but the signs of progress are real.
That resilience we’re seeing in the AEDC data? That’s community leadership in action.
Programs like Connected Beginnings, operating in over 50 sites and supporting more than 24,000 children and families, are showing what’s possible when communities and governments are given the opportunity to work together. There’s magic in that space.
Connected Beginnings connects health, education and culture, providing an option that doesn’t ask a family to fit into a system, but builds the system around them, their communities and needs.
Programs and policy like this do more than strengthen an individual child, they build the whole system. Because when children enter school developmentally ready, confident in themselves and their identity, everyone benefits.
If we move from AECD data to NAPLAN (National Assessment Program-Literacy and Numeracy), we show that if children start school with a gap, that gap gets bigger at every stage of their learning journey.
Aboriginal students and Torres Strait Islander students are not meeting the standards at up to four times the rate of their non-Indigenous peers. In some remote areas, up to 90 per cent aren’t meeting minimum standards in literacy and numeracy.
Now while I don’t believe NAPLAN tells us the whole story because it’s inherently missing cultural competency, it is still an important indicator of what’s going on in our school systems.
This isn’t about individual students falling through the cracks. It’s about a system that’s failing to catch them because there are not enough culturally safe ECEC placements.
Policy changes help to clear that path and with a new government, we have new opportunities. One of the biggest breakthroughs for our children in recent years was the removal of the activity test.
SNAICC advocated for the removal of the activity test for many years because our members kept telling us it was a punitive and discriminatory barrier for many Aboriginal families and Torres Strait Islander families.
Now with a guarantee of five days a week of subsidised early childhood education and care, more of our children will access of learning, play, connection and growth. This is an indication of a shift of government policy that centres children and their needs first.
That’s in itself a generational shift, but there is more work to do, to ensure access for our families and opportunities for workers in ACCO centres.
The federal government’s Building Early Education Fund represents a real opportunity for change if governments work in equal partnership with ACCOs on locations and investment. That means listening to community voices and letting the services already doing the work lead the way.
The Right Support for the People Doing the Work
None of this change happens without the people on the ground. Our early childhood educators are the heart of this story.
They embed culture and identity into everyday learning, all while juggling the challenges of limited funding, workforce shortages and complex policy requirements.
At SNAICC, our Early Years Support program is all about walking alongside these educators and services, helping them build stronger learning environments, better training pathways and a more sustainable future.
Whether it’s supporting remote teams with infrastructure upgrades, helping access qualifications, or linking services together to share knowledge, our goal is simple – to make sure those doing the most important work have what they need to keep doing it.
We’ve heard from ACCOs across the country that current funding models aren’t working. They need stable, reliable and long-term investment, not short-term ‘pilot’ projects or endless reporting cycles. When the evidence and community say a program is working, it needs to be sustained. We’ve taken that message to government, and we’ll keep pushing for funding models that reflect the real cost of high-quality, culturally strong education and care.
A Better Future for All Children
This isn’t just about Aboriginal children and Torres Strait Islander children. It’s about building a better education system for everyone.
The Productivity Commission has made the case for a universal early childhood education and care system. We have seen bold aspirations from Albanese government for the same.
What we have seen from the Commission and other enquires recognise that Aboriginal-led services are delivering the best outcomes for our children and that access to these services must be at the centre of any reform. This means reform that recognises ‘universal’ does not mean ‘uniform’.
That’s the future we should all want for children. A future where early learning isn’t a privilege, but a right.
What does that mean on the ground? It means more children growing up surrounded by culture, by language and by strength. It means families feeling connected, empowered, and supported. It means communities being recognised for the priceless knowledge they’ve always had about raising children.
Because if we can get this right, if we keep investing in ACCO-led services, in early years support and in community leadership, then we’re not just changing outcomes. We’re changing lives.
Let’s build a future where every child gets the best start in life by backing what works.
This op-ed was originally published in Australian Educator Magazine on September 2, 2025