You may have seen the heart-warming ABC Television program Old People’s Home for 4 Year Olds recently. In this documentary miniseries, a group of scientists and gerontologists try a revolutionary experiment by bringing elderly people into a classroom of preschoolers.
In an Australian first, scientists have begun a pilot trial to assess the mutual health benefits of intergenerational activity, such as reducing frailty and depression.
The Intergenerational Integration Initiative will see older adults and young children engage in a structured series of investigative, artistic and educational activities together.
Evidence suggests these planned intergenerational activities might reduce frailty and improve mood and thinking skills in the older adults, and improve empathy and language development and reduce age stereotypes in the younger participants.
This study has been funded by the UNSW Ageing Futures Institute, with in-kind support from St Nicolas’ Church and Preschool and Anglicare. Results from the pilot trial are likely to be available in July.
Early childhood education bargaining updateCollective bargaining continues for IEU-QNT members employed at various individual community kindergartens across Queensland.
Negotiations with Creche and Kindergarten (C&K) Branch centres are commencing for a replacement agreement, with key employee claims including:
- additional release time and allowance for the nominated supervisor/director
- converting senior teacher allowance to a substantive salary
- experienced Teacher classification (similar to the state sector at the first pay-point)
- access to long service leave after seven years of continuous service (including on termination)
- paid domestic violence leave
- paid emergency and natural disaster leave
- paid pandemic leave, and
- recognising senior assistants/educators with an allowance.
IEU-QNT Senior Industrial Officer John Spriggs said the inclusion of additional salary steps was important to ensure early childhood education teachers received wages and benefits comparable with teachers in other sectors.
“Over the last decade, teachers in state schools and the non-government school sector have gained increased remuneration through the inclusion of additional incremental salary steps above the scale, otherwise applicable,” Spriggs said.
“In early childhood education, these additional salary steps are yet to become common.
“Without the addition of these additional steps, the comparability of early childhood education teachers’ wages with teachers in other sectors will become diluted and eventually lost,” he said.