Projects

Early Childhood Education and Care regulatory advice

Client.
NSW Department of Education
Services
Review, Policy

Reviewing regulatory design to align incentives with performance and reflect industry transformation.

01.
Client issue

The NSW Department of Education is the NSW regulator for the National Quality Framework for early childhood education and the administrator of the related National Partnership Framework.  These arrangements are subject to periodic review and the NSW Department wanted to review the implementation of the NQF from a NSW perspective to identify issues to be raised in the national discussions.

02.
Our approach

We reviewed the implementation of the NQF in NSW based on:

  • Desktop analysis of publicly available information
  • Review of NSW data compared to national performance, overall and by sub-sector
  • Interviews with key internal stakeholders
  • Review of submissions and position papers from sector stakeholders
  • Review of sector commercial performance and the impact of the growth of for-profit providers
  • Identified key issues for NSW based on significance, degree of concern and scope, including whether they were issues that could be considered in the national forum.

The output was a discussion paper for the NSW Office to consider, which informed the development of a national position paper.

03.
Result

The NSW Office indicated that the report provided genuine insight and a clear and crisp characterisation of issues in the early childhood centre in NSW.  This supported internal discussions about positioning in the national debate.

We were subsequently engaged to develop and facilitate discussions on national positioning particularly around regulatory framework design and alignment of incentives to support performance.

04.
Key learnings

  • The early childhood sector—like many industries in which there is a mix of government and non-government service providers—is going through a period of rapid change in multiple dimensions.
  • The framework was designed over ten years ago. A lack of refresh meant it no longer aligned with the characteristics of a rapidly changing sector, particularly the large, for-profit providers.
  • It is critical to continue to examine regulatory and other policy design to ensure design elements meet contemporary need rather than just historic need.

“Your work helped us define a clear position to take to national discussions. Your insightful characterisation of the issues will help to underpin productive change.”

Executive Director