Developing a national interdisciplinary educational framework for professionals working with children in the early years

The first five years of a child's life are irrefutably important, establishing life-long health, social and economic outcomes. To optimise these outcomes, national and state policy is directing professionals from a range of disciplinary backgrounds involved with children to work more collaboratively than ever before. As pre-service education varies across the professions, such collaboration to support the early years has proven problematic. The diverse demands of multiple disciplines and professions, qualifications and workforce agendas does little to reduce this concern in integrated service delivery work. Australia is uniquely primed to offer rich insights given our recent policy shifts towards service integration as a means of attending to the complex challenges associated with optimising every child’s health, care and educational outcomes in the present and into the future (DEEWR 2011; Mustard 2008; Press, Sumsion & Wong 2010). This report documents the processes and outcomes of a project designed to address the challenges of interdisciplinary work with young children. The project did this by developing a national interdisciplinary learning and teaching framework to inform any curriculum in health, education or welfare for people studying to work with children from birth to five years and their families.