Recently, a delegation from the Australian Childcare Alliance (ACA) NSW, led by President Lyn Connolly, met with the Executive Director of the NSW Department of Education’s Early Childhood Education Directorate’s Tracy Mackey and her senior officers to discuss their assessment and rating process.

“Based on feedback from ACA NSW members, we believe there are real concerns that the NSW Department of Education’s assessment and rating process can be subjective and not consistently measurable,” said Lyn Connolly.

Submitted to the NSW Department of Education was a three-page document outlining 12 areas of concerns, including the amount of paperwork and time required of both childcare services and field officers, the limits imposed on services providing examples and key quality areas, the non-empirical and subjective standards that are being used for assessment, the inconsistent and ambiguous terminologies, as well as the fatigue the field officers from doing often 12-hour days.

“We were heartened to hear that the NSW Department of Education agreed the assessment and rating process was previously prone to be subjective and inconsistent. However, under their current eSAM tool and process, ACA NSW still believes centre-based childcare services can still be unfairly assessed and rated due to subjective and unmeasurable nature of standards used,” said Mrs Connolly.

The NSW Department of Education responded that they are confident of their current eSAM-based assessment and rating process, and suggested that ACA NSW’s experiences were the exceptions rather than the norm.

Included in the same three-page submission to the NSW Department of Education was a list of 15 constructive suggestions for practical reform that can produce measurable, consistent and more confident results for both services and the Department.

“Instead of cooperation and collaborations, we are at a stalemate. The ACA NSW Executive Committee will be reviewing how best to advance our concerns about assessment and rating on behalf of its members,” said Mrs Connolly.