ECEC / The Profession

Minding, or educating: the word that costs us most

A public vocabulary that describes supervision cannot describe what this work actually involves.

The framing persists everywhere: minding the kids, childcare as a service that allows parents to work, the room as a place where children are kept safe until collection. Safety and care are genuinely part of it and nobody in the sector wants them downgraded. The problem is that the vocabulary stops there, and therefore so does the public imagination. Almost nothing that occupies an educator's professional attention is legible inside a word like minding. The judgement about when to intervene and when to wait is not minding. The decision to change the environment rather than the child is not minding.

The knowledge base is substantial and specific. How young children learn through the body before they learn through explanation. How language develops in interaction rather than instruction. How to read a group and predict where it is heading before it gets there. How to design a physical space that produces the behaviour you want without a single instruction being given. How to work with families whose expectations differ from your own without either capitulating or lecturing. Qualifications for this work are required, and the level and content of those requirements are set nationally and by state, with the current requirements the authority on what applies.

Language is not the whole problem but it is upstream of a lot of it. Work described as supervision gets funded as supervision, rostered as supervision and valued as supervision. Educators can shift some of this locally, in how the work is described to families, to students, to visitors and to each other. It is worth being deliberate about, particularly in the small moments when it would be easier to accept the casual phrase and move on.