Yam Island Little Children’s House nurtures seeds of success

High quality early childhood education and care is accessible for most Australians, but for many parents inhabiting islands scattered across 48,000 square kilometres in the Torres Strait, this has not always been the case.

For parents on Yam Island at least, that changed when the Iama Migi Kaziw Mudh (Yam Island Little Children’s House) opened in September last year.

Establishing centres like this is an important part of the Australian Government’s work to reach the first early childhood Closing the Gap target: ensuring all Indigenous four-year-olds living in remote communities have access to early childhood education within five years, or by 2013.

Iama Migi Kaziw Mudh is a 14-place long day care centre was built with Australian Government funding and is run by qualified early child care educators.

It was recently profiled in the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations’ Better Start in Life eZine.

Centre director Katie Denzin said establishing a government-approved child care service also meant parents could claim the Child Care Benefit and the Child Care Rebate to help with the costs of care.

The centre’s early learning program is based on the Montessori philosophy of early childhood education and embraces the Early Years Learning Framework: Belonging, Being and Becoming. This national curriculum for the early years supports and promotes children’s learning.

Rather than traditional childcare materials like plastic toys, staff provide children with materials and activities that better reflect life experiences in the community.

“You provide learning environments that relate directly to the environments that are around the kids. You don’t do dress ups of firemen and American policemen. Because that’s not – for a Yam Island two-year-old – what their reality is. But what we do have is an area of drums and learning island dance songs and that’s a really important part of the learning program,” Katie said.

Iama Migi Kaziw Mudh, located on the grounds of the primary school, is a site that Katie believes bodes well for Yam Island’s future.

“And what an amazing future when we know how important the early years are. If you look at the [Australian Early Development Index] AEDI data for three or four years ago you will see that the Torres Strait communities were at significant risk across not just literacy and numeracy but across independence and physical. The discrepancies we were seeing, in that cohort of four and a half year olds, was the gap we were actually seeing for 17 year olds.

 “That was our massive argument [for qualified early child care]. The gap doesn’t get any wider so what if we didn’t start with a gap? So this is possibly the first showcase community in the Torres Strait where we can say ‘hey, if you actually do deliver quality early years and we channel it, that in a few years’ time there won’t be a gap on Yam Island’,” Katie said.

Katie is optimistic about the children’s future because she knows the quality of their current care is the foundation for achievement in the schooling years ahead.

“It’s not just the kids that you’re helping by increasing the chance of finishing school. It can help later down the track avoiding teenage pregnancy and having longer lives, but you’re also directly impacting on the economic viability of the community and the health of the community in which they live.”