Interview with Myra Geddes from Good Start Early Learning in Australia

Dr. Katie Herron, Director of the Early Childhood Center, interviews Myra Geddes, the General Manager of Social Impact at Good Start Early Learning, Australia's largest child care provider.

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Welcome to the Early Childhood On The Go podcast, where the Early Childhood Center team shares ideas and strategies for professionals and families. Dream big. Start early. Hello, and welcome back to Early Childhood On The Go, the podcast where we bring you practical insights, inspiration, and real-world ideas for early educators and early intervention professionals who support young children and families every day. Today, I'm thrilled to be joined by a leader whose work spans practice, policy, research, and inclusion at scale. Our guest is Myra Geddes, Chief Impact Officer at Good Start Early Learning, Australia's largest not-for-profit early childhood education provider, serving tens of thousands of children and families across hundreds of centers. Myra leads Good Start's social impact strategy, including policy, research, measurement, and inclusion programs that help ensure high-quality early learning is equitable and accessible for all children. Her career began in the classroom in Brisbane, and she later served as senior social policy advisor to two Australian prime ministers. She's a passionate believer in the power of early learning to transform children's lives and a strong advocate for practices that support families, educators, and communities. Myra, welcome to Early Childhood on the Go. Thank you so much, Katie. It's great to be here. So let's start at the beginning. Tell us a little bit about yourself and about Good Start's mission and work. Yeah, so you've sort of already summarized a little bit about who I am. And I think the only thing I would add to that was that, you know, I was really motivated early in my career, like when I was teaching, you know, that opportunity to make a difference for individual children. And then I was just really, really fortunate that I had the opportunity to do some work in policy and eventually work for Australia's prime minister. I actually got to meet Barack Obama when he came out to Australia and talked to him about education policy, which was a real career highlight. And I think in all of that, like many of your listeners, the thing that just really motivated me was the opportunity to make a difference. And working across the education spectrum, then the more that I learned about the early years, the more I realised if you want to make a difference for children, the early years is where it's at. And so that's really what's taken me to where I am now. And then, as you said, I work for Good Start Early Learning, which is the nation's largest provider of early learning and care in the country. We support around 64,000 children. Our purpose at Good Start is really unique. We're not only interested in serving the 64,000 children that come to our centres every day, our mission is for all of Australia's children and especially for those children that might be experiencing vulnerability or disadvantage and so that particularly means that we have a special focus on children with disabilities and additional needs. So that opportunity that we have at Good Start by being the largest provider with this unique mission focused on what can we learn about the children that we serve. And then how do we take that and share that across the rest of the nation? And, you know, indeed today, the world is something that makes Good Start really unique and makes my job just an absolute joy. Absolutely. Yeah. And, you know, one of the things that you've touched on a little bit here, but you've had such a range of experiences. How has your professional background and the range of experiences you've had kind of shaped the way that you think about including all children you mentioned mentioned wanting to serve all kiddos including marginalized kiddos and you know we particularly at the institute here think about our children with delays and and disabilities um but what what have you all learned about that and what have you brought to that work i think what is so uh interesting for me personally is through the breadth of my experience you know you reflect back and you think about the mindsets and the assumptions that you made early in your career about what children are capable of. And, you know, I started with a mindset that was probably quite narrow about what I thought children with disabilities might be capable of. But as you spend time with children in classrooms, as you spend time with families and with parents, and as you learn about this area, you know, I'm almost ashamed of the views that I held back then. And you now realise that actually every single child has potential, every family has potential. And it's the job of us as professionals working in that system to unlock that potential for children and that we can do that in a one-on-one, everyday way with our practices and how we support children and how we welcome children and families. And then I've been fortunate enough to also work in the systems lens where it's like what are the conditions that we need for all children so that and all of the professionals working with them and their families so that children can truly reach their potential. Absolutely yeah I love that I think that so many of us in early childhood end up feeling like that that we as we continue through the journey we learn so much and then we look back and we're like gosh what an interesting place I started at because you don't know until you're you have the experience. No I think that's right and I think the other thing um if I can just add to that is that that has really changed my view over time is you just see the power of early intervention you know I started in schools and I think you start with older children and then you go oh this isn't we haven't got this early enough we need to start earlier we need to start earlier we need to start earlier and now that I'm in the birth to five space I feel like we're finally really focusing in the areas uh where you can just make the biggest long-term difference for children and their families. And that's really exciting. Yeah, it is. And one of the things that we're always talking about when we talk to professionals here is that it's not only the right place to be in terms of starting these things, but it's the perfect place to start helping families to think about this entire journey. So at the Institute, we're a Lifespan Institute. So I'm the director of the Early Childhood Center. But next door, we have a center that focuses on school age, supporting disability in K through 12. And then next door to that, there's a center that works on transition from school to adulthood. about helping families when they're just starting out, not just dealing with the day to day of how do I get through this day with a young child, but how do I think, how do I dream, how do I make plans so that they're successful in, you know, fifth grade, in high school, in college, you know. So, yeah, absolutely. Well, are there any particular frameworks or strategies that guide the way that you all think about inclusion? I noticed that you, the Good Start website talks about a framework, well, a few frameworks, but there was an early childhood framework, at least, but I wasn't sure if there was anything in particular that guided your thoughts on inclusion. And look, I think for us, there's sort of three specific frameworks that I thought it was worth mentioning. And so the first one is progressive universalism. So I don't know if that's a concept that you're familiar with. So in Australia, it's very, very common, and it's sort of a policy approach. And it's the, you know, the kind of what is it that we're trying to do. And what that means, progressive universalism basically means everybody gets something, but the children and families who need more, get more. So you have a universal base and the bit that is progressive about it is that if a child needs additional support, if a family needs additional support, if educators and practitioners need additional support to serve their children, you know, particularly a child with a disability, then they get what they need to do that. But you don't actually need to provide that level of intensive investment and support to children and families that don't need it. And so it's an important framework for us at Good Start because of our size and scale. we just simply couldn't afford to deliver the, it wouldn't be an efficient use of our resources to deliver intensive targeted speech pathology in every single centre. In some places, that's just not required. And so where that's not required, we don't deliver that. But where it is required, we make sure that that's there. So that first sort of framework around progressive universalism is really important. And then sort of the how does that work in practice is we have a multi-tiered system of supports. And that is what you might have seen on our website, our recognition and response model. And that's really, well, how do you recognise and identify what the needs are so that you can then respond with that additional support or that additional resource for educators? So, they're two really, really, really important parts of our framework. of our approach to inclusion sorry and then how do we know where to focus effort we have a big focus on data collection and that really helps us understand where do we have educators working with children with autism who for example might never have had a child with autism in their class before that educator is going to need different types of support and professional development than an educator who has children with autism but who has had children with autism in their class for the last three years and has already accessed a lot of professional learning. And, again, that sort of comes down to how do we really build the capability of our people that are closest to our children. And the last part, which is not part of a framework, but it's definitely our secret sauce at Good Start, which is the dedication and commitment of our people on the ground because they are the ones who every day are relentlessly focused on what children need, identifying children that might have additional needs of course in the early years you know diagnosis that can all be very very complex so the secret source is the people closest to children and making sure that they feel empowered and supported to do the work with children and families to deliver the quality early learning that they deserve. Yeah and I saw on your website that you had, I don't know if it was recent or not, but had made an investment in that workforce so that you could have lower turnover and really keep that consistency. Because that is, we have that conversation here all the time and it's a conversation that's happening all over the country. And, you know, there's some funding challenges that we're experiencing, what we've always experienced and are currently experiencing maybe a bit more where people don't recognize the struggle that early childhood educators experience. Some of our early childhood educators don't earn enough money to live without government assistance because they're paid in that way. And so I thought it was very interesting that you had made that a priority. We absolutely, you are spot on. So we've always paid above the minimum standard and the conditions here are very similar to the conditions that you have there in terms of low pay and requiring being then eligible for government assistance. So we've always paid above that. And then we've recently, as part of a big nationwide advocacy effort, secured a 15% pay rise for all early childhood professionals working in Australia. And that has hit their pockets. The last part of that hit their pay packets in December last year. And one of the reasons why we were able to secure that investment was we could demonstrate through some of our research that, you know, particularly for children with additional needs or disability, that stability of the educator relationship is so critical, but it's also highly valued by families. Families really want to have the same educator working with them in their early learning journey. And, you know, once you can get families really caring about it at a large enough scale, and that's something that all families are interested in, not just families of children with a disability. That was sort of then how we got the political momentum to get what was a $3.5 billion funding commitment. So it was, yeah, really substantial for us here in Australia, but something as early childhood professionals across the globe, I think we've got to keep focused on because, yeah, we've still got a long way to go before we're recognised like our colleagues in schools and universities. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, this kind of is a nice segue into the what I was going to ask next, which is really focused on on families, because, as you mentioned, I mean, this continuity of care and this professionalization of early educators also impacts families and the family engagement that we can do and the way that families feel about education from the very earliest years. And I know here in the U.S., at least, that families of children with developmental delays often hit barriers in early childhood settings. For us, we hear a great deal about preschool suspension and expulsion, sometimes suspension and expulsion from child care earlier than preschool due to behavior or other challenges around addressing disability or delay. and we also hear just a lot of fear from families about can an early childhood setting accommodate my child's needs particularly if that child is non-verbal that's a fear that a lot of families express so I'm curious what are some of the common challenges that that families face in your programs and and how do you how do you attempt to address them yeah and so I feel like I just want to say same same so absolutely yeah I agree with everything that you've said And, you know, here in Australia, we have a mixed market for childcare and kindergarten and preschool. And so what that means is there are for-profit providers and not-for-profit providers. And Good Start is a not-for-profit provider, which, as we've already talked about, has a specific focus on inclusion. And so what we see is that families do experience what we would call here discrimination, you know, where they go to enrol in a provider. and, you know, we have stories of families who, you know, and these are parents who need to go back to work to provide for their families. They need to go back to work to pay the rent, to put food on the table. And, you know, there's a place available for them until they arrive and until it's identified that the child has an additional need or challenges, you know, challenging behaviours. and so many of those families do end up at good start and you know we take a social justice kind of view of disability which is it's our responsibility to make sure that we have services that are ready to welcome all children and so um for us that's um but but that really we really recognize that that requires investment and it's that progressive universalism idea i was talking about before. When you have children who have additional needs or families that have additional needs, and it's not just disability, it could be a family or a mother escaping domestic violence. It could be a refugee family or a family that doesn't have English as their first language. We need to make accommodations so that we can welcome that child and that family and make sure that they can access the quality early learning experiences, which is our sort of reason for being so you know i think i think that's um making sure that educators and the center uh managers have the time and the space to be confident that they can get the support that they need to support children i think is really really important because what we have found is um very understandably is you know professionals will be anxious about how are we going to include this child? How do we make sure that this happens without disrupting the learning of all of the other children? And so we take a very deliberate approach to the enrolment and the onboarding of children who might have additional needs. But it's certainly a challenge that exists right across the sector here in Australia, and particularly because Goodstart's only about 9% of the market, even though we're the biggest. So there are many communities in Australia where if you are a family that has a child with additional needs, you can wind up being turned away from multiple early learning centres. And then ultimately, you know, we hear stories of families not being able to participate in work and getting trapped in poverty, just because their child needs a little bit of extra help. And, you know, really, as a nation, we should be able to do better than that. Yes. And one of the things, we did a small study last year where we spoke with families who had experienced suspension and expulsion in early childhood and one of the things that they said over and over was that they didn't have good experiences in schools and then this was their first experience with their child going to school and something like that happened and they talk about this broken trust and we talk a lot about family engagement here and and how to build good relationships with families in early childhood but when I hear families talking about that broken trust I just think about how long it's going to take schools if they can ever get it back and so I do wonder I mean and we're also talking about families that you know have other things going on sometimes like you said it's not just disability it could be language or other things but how how do you support your teachers and your staff to build that trust yeah it's so we have similar research as well and isn't it isn't it interesting that you know you have these common trends across the globe. And I think, so the way that we, the approach that we've taken to supporting those teachers is kind of founded in that progressive universalism and recognition and response model. So we have, we're lucky enough to be large enough that within our network, we have professionals, family and community engagement partners. They're probably a bit similar to some of the skill sets that your early intervention professionals listening might have. And really, you know, they play a really important part between building trust with the family as well as trust and capability uplift with the educators. So it's about understanding, like, what might the triggers be for the family, you know, and asking questions about the lunchbox or asking questions about uniforms might be things that are extremely triggering to a parent who has had a very bad experience in school. And actually, in the scheme of things, they're just not that important. we can sort those out so how do you kind of identify what those things are for the family and then of course for the child it's a much um it's a question of them working with other professionals so we have um kind of social work psychologist uh type roles who help understand that you know some children have very particular triggers that might lead to um you know behaviors that challenge and how do we work with educators to identify um to identify what those are what practices do we put in place so that children can then kind of eventually make a successful transition. I think the other practical thing I would say Katie on this is it is extra resourcing it's extra labor hours so these children when they start can have up to 16 weeks of one extra educator working with them in the room that supports across all transitions but critically the role of that person is to be coaching all of the other professionals in that service so that they're not required there on an ongoing on an ongoing basis you know where children can then make that successful transition and that's just essential because certainly the schooling system here in Australia doesn't provide that level of intensive support so we need to help children and families and early childhood is the perfect place to do that because you've got you know kind of smaller rooms smaller services where you can then create a love of learning for children and for families that hopefully they hold with them through school and through life. Yeah yeah that's excellent yeah I know the infant early childhood mental health piece where you have a consultation that's something that that we talk about here in the U.S. and have piloted and are piloting here in Indiana but boy it's hard to get it to scale it's hard to find enough professionals that are doing that work. Can I share something then, Catherine? Sorry, Katie, not kind of on the ticket, but so we had that exact challenge. And what we have done, so we have one world-class infant mental health specialist at Good Start. And the reason why we've done that, and then we have a team of kind of other specialists, but who are a bit more generalized than her. But what that means is we can deploy her. We can literally put her on a plane and send her around the country because there actually aren't huge volumes of children who need that very, very, very intensive support, but we do have some. And so by having the national kind of network connected, she can both, in extreme cases, we can put her on a plane and we can send her to work on the ground. She can do video calls and conferences on a regular basis with those educators. And then she could also provide very targeted, you know, individual child level support to the professionals working with individual children in individual places um even if we wanted to your point even if we wanted to employ a hundred people like her we couldn't because they're just not out there so we've worked really hard to try and come up with a model that says this is not and this is the progressive universalism piece she's not needed everywhere all the time but when she is needed boy is she needed and so we need we had to try and come up with a way that we could get that really specialist skill where it's needed for children, but then also try and upskill all of the other professionals that are working with children that might have those particular types of needs. So I think it's something that us all as a sector, and it's fabulous that you guys are doing work on this, because if we truly want all children to have access to early learning, which is certainly the ambition here in Australia, we've got to come up with ways to solve for that kind of wicked challenge. Absolutely. I would say that behaviour is the top thing that we hear, certainly since COVID and really when I was an issue before, and I love what you're saying. Yes, you can't have experts everywhere, but how do we combine the expert intervention when needed with some really good professional development that's actually supportive. Yeah, we do professional development a lot. And I struggle with, you know, I can provide a webinar or training. But that's really just letting people know what the problem is. And I can, but you know, I mean, they need, we're going to talk about coaching in a little bit. But I mean, they, you know, there's some intensive professional development that that that we need. So yeah, yeah. Well, I just another question, because I know that we have educators, early childhood educators and interventionists listening to this podcast, do you have other thoughts about what they could be doing or what you support your teachers and staff to do to build that authentic partnership? We've talked a little bit about that, about, you know, making sure that you have a good way of figuring out what the needs are and then responding to them. Do you do that through set trainings with your team and staff or how do you approach that yeah so i think so we sort of it's sort of embedded in everything that we do at good start is um you know firstly taking a strengths-based approach um like and some of that mindset work um is really really important and we do make investments in professional learning for that and you know really i think when you're working with vulnerable cohorts what that is about is recognizing that some professionals need you know when you're working in a very challenging environment um you need support to recognize that the child is not to blame for the behaviors that they are um that that might be challenging and you can't skate over that that that is actually an investment that you need to make in professionals so that they have the the frameworks and the understanding and the professional knowledge to to hold that in their mind when they're in the moment of a particularly kind of challenging interaction with the child And then, you know, it really is that, as you said, authentic partnerships and relationships with families, family-centred practice is something that's really big for us here and relational pedagogy with children, but of course also with adults and with the families and recognising that families are our children's first teachers. And so certainly we have specific professional development programs in relation to that, but also I think just as early childhood professionals, you know, and people that choose to work at Goodstart, you know, we're looking for people who want to lean in on those families that might be having challenges. And so if that's not what you're into, if that's not what sets your professional fire, then Goodstart's probably not the place for you, to be honest. Yeah, that makes sense. I know that we've had conversations before where, you know, professionals say, you know, when I started, I thought I liked kids. That's why I got into this. And, and then they realized that, oh, no, this is really about, I mean, yes, this is about liking kids and working with kids, but this is a lot about knowing how to interact with a lot of different types of adults. and absolutely absolutely I mean that collaboration piece that teaming piece both with your own staff and colleagues and with the families that you're serving there's a lot of diverse perspectives that you have to learn how to work with yeah liking children is essential but not sufficient to be successful have a successful career in early childhood and that you know it is similar skills isn't it you know listening and having empathy and um you know I think early childhood professionals are some of the most critically reflective professionals that you will ever kind of work with and their ability to think about things from different perspectives is is really unique I think in the you know educational landscape and you know a strength that we have to build on when we're particularly working with families who might need a bit of extra help. Yeah I want to ask you a little bit about we're talking a little bit about how you support your your staff but I know that that you emphasize building the capacity of both families and and your educators um and we were talking about coaching before we we started this podcast and and I I do wonder what your thoughts are on on high quality coaching whether it's coaching educators or whether it's educators kind of coaching their families um in some in some ways you know what does that what does that look like for you yeah it's I was so yeah we we got a bit carried away at the start didn't we talking about coaching and what's what um how to do it well and so we do put a lot of emphasis on coaching to achieve children's outcomes and it's tied to the you know the whole conversation we were having before about you know you just we just can't have all the skilled professionals in all the places we'd ideally like to have them so the only way that we're going to achieve the outcomes well for children is by coaching and building the capability of the people that spend time with children every day and so that is our educators you know and of course families are children's first teachers and you know we know that there's a big difference between coaching your Hoosiers I think who are about to head off to the national championships you know that that coach has had I'm sure a huge amount of investment they would have specialist expertise in the game specialist expertise in you know how to get the most out of the young men playing the game um they'd have a huge staff around them i'm sure that are all focused on helping them achieve uh achieve those goals and there's a big difference between the investment that that's made in in someone like that and the person who's volunteering and coaching your local um little league team or or something like you know the kids sports teams and so the thing that we've really learned at good start is that for coaching to be effective it is effective the research shows it is effective but it has to be implemented with efficacy and what that actually means is it takes investment it takes an evidence-based approach and it takes an organisational commitment to quality coaching you can't take a group of people who have previously worked in a top-down hierarchical kind of way and say oh now you're a coach here's a whistle bring some enthusiasm to this you I mean you can do that but what we know is you're not actually going to get the outcomes for children. And so, you know, I think that idea that certainly what the approach we've tried to take at Good Start is that coaching itself, you know, is a discipline. You need to have your pedagogical discipline. You need to be a professional in your, what it is that you're trying to coach, whether that's football or whether that's early intervention or whether that's, you know, teaching practices for children with autism yes you need your content knowledge there but you also then need to be a professional and have the skills and expertise in in coaching what does the relationship dynamics look like how do you set realistic goals um how do you develop actions and strategies to meet those goals without telling the person what to do how do you build um and empower um and so yeah it's it's we could i could talk to you for hours and hours and hours about this so i'll stop talking but I think it is really important and then also really important to how we engage with families and how you avoid falling into a trap of doing the doing for families because ultimately we're only in families lives for a short period of time and there's a unique opportunity that we have to as as some of the first professionals that they will encounter with their little one and particularly a little one that might have developmental challenges or a disability this It's going to be the start of a long journey for that family. And so the opportunity to support them and empower them to be their child's advocate, to learn those skills early, to navigate what I think we would all say, no matter where you are in the world, is an incredibly complex system. And, you know, it's the whole teaching a person to fish as opposed to giving them a fish. And we have a unique opportunity in early childhood to make some headway for families that are going to have probably a pretty long journey. And every family is going to need something a little bit different too. It's what you were saying earlier. Yeah. I was talking with an early childhood professional this morning who supports families to find childcare and that's her job. And we were talking about the challenge of access for multilingual families or families where English is not their first language. And she was saying that often families ask her to call child cares for them because they're very worried about being on the phone. I mean, it's really hard to, English is not your first language to make a phone call because gosh, you don't get the verbal. I mean, you don't get the non-verbals. You don't get anything. Phone calls are rough. And she was saying, if I did that, I wouldn't have time to do anything else in my job. I really can't do that direct service support. And so we were talking about, you know, how, how can we scaffold support to what the family needs and how do we identify when a family's in crisis and just needs that literally a hand to reach out and pull them out versus when they're just feeling uncomfortable with something new and you know maybe they need a script or maybe they need just that little nudge or that connection with a peer or whatever it is so that um that understanding of what coaching is is um is so important both both as coaching professionals and coaching thinking about coaching families, because I think it takes a little bit of role release to coach a family. I know when we talk about coaching and early interventions, sometimes it feels a little odd to providers because they're like, I went to school for this. I'm a physical therapist. I know stretching. I know what this kiddo needs. I know what's happening inside their body. Why are you wanting mom to do that when I could, you know, and having them step back and think through that and then release enough to be willing to do the direct teaching and then model for mom and then give feedback and then make that action plan. I mean, those are all really important shifts in perspective. Yeah, 100%. And I think it is when you, you know, coming back to that mindset piece for educators, you know, it's worth if you're leading a team, I think, spending some time on that part at the start because you really need to you know what would ideal look like for a child would it look like that that therapist lives in their home and just does it like every every two hours is is that what ideal would look like like how feasible is that like not at all feasible but we're working towards a goal for for individual children and the people who are going to be with that child and their first teachers and their most important relationships are their family um and so yeah i think you're right it requires some of that professional release and um it can be challenging but that's why i think it is worth if you're moving towards this model or if you're identifying that you have a trend and we see this sometimes too in centers where in your attempt to support families you've found yourself doing more and more and that you know perhaps in that case the parent was like oh can you just can we just do it now let's just do it now while you're here and then you find yourself picking up tasks that you wouldn't ordinarily do. Sometimes you need a little bit of a, a little bit of a reset. Yeah. And, and have, I mean, that takes skill for professionals to identify that and kind of work out why it's happening. You know, is that absolute need? Is this family in crisis or, you know, versus is that, is that, is that the family getting a little bit dependent? Am I doing, you know, and that it's complicated. And Katie, the headspace, the headspace to go, why am I so burnt out? Oh, it's because I started doing all of these extra things that I actually didn't mean to set out to do you know that's I call those shower moments when sometimes and and then I get out of the shower and I forget about it so it is it yeah it's certainly a challenge and I think it's a challenge in our sector and for our professionals in particular because at our core we want to help that is that is that is the fundamental thing that we want to do and so yeah it's a it's a challenge for all of us I think Myra, I have a question that I didn't put on the list, but I hope you don't mind me asking. In Australia, the early intervention that, so like physical therapist, occupational therapist, speech therapist, is that built into Good Start? Or is that, is there a separate system that a family has a kiddo with a disability, they can get those services? And then do those services get provided in the childcare setting? Because that's how it is here. Like, you know, you take your kid to child care and then if you do qualify for the early intervention, the speech therapist might go to your house, but they might also go to the child care. Yep. So it's similar here. Yep. But at good start, you know, the wait. So in Australia and most in many of our communities where demand is really high. So, again, our progressive universalism thing, the wait list for that service is, you know, the children have left and gone to school by the time they would get up. And so we've employed our own team so that we can deploy them, but it's not available across all of our 671 centres. We've focused that, as I think happens in the US as well, like some communities do just have higher proportions of children that have these needs. And so we've really focused those support, those Good Start funded, our funded resources. And what's fabulous about that is we don't, if they're not eligible, but we still think they have a need, we can provide the service. Whereas as soon as you're accessing that other system, and it's similar to the conversation we're having on families, you know, families have to consent to the assessments. and so we've talked about families asking for support but the other big challenge we have is families who are not ready to acknowledge that something isn't that there's a concern and when you say oh could we do this assessment or could we get these other people involved they're just like absolutely not my child is fine and so you know we can't it's not about providing support or doing anything without family's consent but when you're accessing those government-funded services, there are a range of hoops that you have to jump through, whereas if we can sweep some of that to the side and just provide support and provide support for the educators that are working daily with those children. We also do a lot of group work with children, which is also really effective and important. So by having our own team, which we can really only do because of our size and scale and our unique not-for-profit mission, if we had to pay a dividend to shareholders, there's no way we could afford to employ that team because they are very skilled professionals. But because of who we are, we can have that team and it means we have the flexibility to, you know, really just try and give the children, the families and then of course the educators what they need to support the children that they're serving, yeah. Okay, well, Myra, we're going to wrap up, but I do have one final question for you. I know that you work at a system level in this very large organisation that you've been describing. From your perspective, what system level changes would have the biggest downstream impact on the daily experience of teachers, therapists and families? Yeah, it is such a great and hard question, Katie. I think the ideal that we need to work towards is like, what is our long-term goal? Like, what do we want for children? And so in Australia right now, we've just delivered the first plank of our universal early childhood system. And that means all children have access to three days of early learning, whereas in the past it was really only for children whose parents were working. But we know and, you know, our listeners know access isn't enough. Some children, including those with disabilities, need more. And while today that support's available to some, it's not available everywhere where it needs to be and some children have to wait too long. But ultimately solving those problems is all about investment. The money to fund those roles has to come from somewhere. It has to come from taxpayers, it has to come from governments, or it's got to come from parents. You know, philanthropy can play a tiny little role, but actually we want to solve this for all children. There's no other magic kind of source of investment. And so when I really reflected on this question, I think the single biggest system level change would be if we could get all citizens understanding the importance of the first five years in setting children up for success in school and life. you know overwhelmed the overwhelming majority of people we're never going to get everyone but actually if you could get the overwhelming majority of people understanding that and that this is the period when we can make the biggest positive difference for children and that that's in all of our interests we're all going to grow old in this society and it's the little people that we're looking after today that are going to look after us and so that advocacy is so important. And as educators and early childhood professionals, we are excellent advocates for children, but we're not always excellent advocates for our system. And if you think about banking or mining or big tech, they are excellent advocates for their system. So we need to take some lessons from them. And I think if we could, as a community of professionals, start paying a little bit more attention to how do we get that community level support that's how you get the government support it's how you get the political support and that would free up the investment that we know we know what needs doing it's we're investment constrained and so i think that could be the thing that would free up um that investment and that support and really secure the investment so we survive political cycles and we're not caught up in all of um you know the to's and fro's of of what's happening you know across the nation and then that would be the thing that would make the biggest sustainable kind of positive impact in teachers and therapists and we all as early childhood professionals have a have a role to play in that I think oh perfect way to end that was lovely and amazing that you that your experiences are so similar across the globe to what we're experiencing right here so um Myra thank you so much for your time today and for talking with me I really appreciate it no that was fabulous and i would just say um i did have one more thing to say to all your listeners i just want to just it's been such a pleasure talking to you katie and you know the work you do really matters you know the work that we do in early childhood really matters the research shows it is the thing that makes the difference and the individuals doing this work are the people who make a difference for a child and the difference in their learning journey and you know, I know it's not easy, but the rewards are huge. And so it was just such a privilege to get to talk to you. And I hope your listeners have found it interesting as well. I'm sure they did. Thank you so much. And we'll be back next week. Thanks for listening to the Early Childhood On The Go podcast from the Early Childhood Center team at Indiana University. Learn more at iidc.indiana.edu slash ECC.