A Queensland program is aiming to address the needs of children from families seeking asylum and refugee backgrounds, and to increase their engagement in early childhood education, Journalist Sara El Sayed writes.
Children facing challenges
Traumatic experiences, educational disruption and cultural and linguistic diversity characterise children from families seeking asylum and refugee backgrounds – posing distinct challenges to them when entering early childhood education in Australia.
The positive effects of engagement in early childhood education have been proven; however, a child’s exposure to loss, uncertainty, cultural dislocation, and violence makes managing their needs in a kindergarten context extremely complex.
According to academics such as Betancourt, Meyers-Ohki, Charrow and Tol (2013) appropriate interventions to properly support these children vary depending on the needs of the individual child, but can include:
• group interpersonal psychotherapy
• creative play
• school based cognitive behavioural therapy
• dance and movement therapy
• mind/body techniques (such as meditation and mindfulness based therapies)
• narrative therapies
• art therapy, and
• teacher led trauma psychotherapy.
But implementing such interventions is not straight forward.
These and similar interventions require a whole-of-community approach to tackling issues: with educators, parents, health professionals and community organisations working together to support the needs of children. Teachers and early childhood education staff cannot address these issues on their own, and need support to do this effectively.
Many early childhood education centres are often inadequately resourced to work with children and their families from refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds due to the complexity of the trauma that may have been experienced, differing levels of prior education and how this translates to the Australian kindergarten context, and the varying degrees of English language acquisition.
Pilot program to address issues
A new pilot program aims to help refugee and asylum seeker children engage in early childhood education in Queensland.
Queensland Education Minister Grace Grace said the program recognises the challenges faced by many refugee and asylum seeker children and their families.
“It provides families with the assistance they need to get their children into kindergarten, which is an important step to helping improve children’s readiness for school.”
According to Grace, in 2017 more than 50 refugee and asylum seeker children, of kindergarten age, settled in Queensland but very few accessed early childhood education.
So far in 2018, 42 vulnerable children have started or been waitlisted for kindergarten as part of the program, with more expected to enrol.
The enrolled children are from countries including Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Burundi, Bangladesh, Tanzania, Iraq, Somalia, Syria and Iran.
The program will see community hubs in primary schools in Logan, including early childhood education centres, accessing an early childhood teacher, as well as a teacher supporting English as an additional language and dialect, through the community organisation Access Community Services.
Multicultural Development Australia (MDA) will also provide support to kindergarten services enrolling refugee and asylum seeker children in Brisbane, Logan, Inala and Toowoomba.
Access Community Services pilot co-ordinator Grainne Taia said the community hubs in Logan and Ipswich are set in safe and welcoming spaces within primary schools where there are higher populations of people from refugee, migrant and asylum seeker backgrounds.
“We chose these schools because we are looking to build relationships with families that have children aged 0-5 years, and to see how their children are faring, how they are developing, and what preventative methods we can put in place to support child development and language development.”
Taia said the pilot offers a range of programs that build children’s social and emotional skills.
“We work with children and their parents so that when the children start formal schooling they have a positive relationship with the school.
“By linking these families with the support they need in their children’s early years, they are able to become confident and happy learners.
“Both the child and their parents must be worked with together.
“The leaders of these hubs look to build relationships with parents so that they are able to gain an understanding of what their goals, interests and struggles are.”
Greater access, greater opportunities
Taia said the program has a particular focus on linking community services with families that may be considered difficult to reach or who may not be engaging in other mainstream support services.
“We have lots of soft entry programs designed to attract families.
“Once they are engaged we are able to link them to support as needed, including kindergarten programs, health services, speech and occupational therapy services, as well as training and employment opportunities for parents.
“We are able to offer high quality early childhood education that focuses on engaging children from refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds.
“A large part of this approach is to build parent capacity so that families understand and can use strategies to support their children at home.
“Without programs such as ours there would be many children not accessing any early childhood support until they begin prep, which often times is too late and will have lifelong impact on their learning.
“Ours is a model that works to reach families at risk of becoming disengaged,” Taia said.
IEUA-QNT Assistant Secretary Paul Giles said programs that provide appropriate resources to education professionals are welcomed.
“Teachers and staff working in early childhood education centres observe the specific needs of vulnerable children – but without adequate support it is not feasible or within their current capacity to appropriately address those needs.
“The provision of these resources – through funding and employment of support staff – is integral to the learning, success and happiness of these children,” Giles said.
The Queensland Department of Education has allocated over $677,000 to specialist agencies to ensure the program reaches refugees and asylum seeker families in the targeted locations.
This funding has been provided under the National Partnership Agreement for Universal Access to Early Childhood Education and is part of the current Queensland Multicultural Action Plan.
Logan and Ipswich kindergarten centres participating in this pilot in our sector include select C&K sites.
The pilot program will run until the end of 2018. Funding is expected until 2020.