Early childhood educators are key to delivering early childhood education and care (ECEC) for the benefit of children, their families and society alike. For the benefits of ECEC to be realised, however, the educators who deliver these services need to be well. Despite growing attention to attracting and retaining a high-quality early childhood…

Both the concept of well-being and the work of early childhood educators are complex. To date, research concerning educators' well-being has lacked a comprehensive conceptualisation that reflects these complexities. With increased research, policy and practice attention, a clearly articulated conceptualisation is now needed to guide empirical…

A child's right to high quality education not only relies on a competent and skilled workforce, but one in which educators are well. Supporting a well workforce requires governments, organisations and educators to attend to work environment quality. This attention needs be based on sound, relevant evidence. In this paper we contribute evidence of…

It could be suggested that persistent workforce problems in the early childhood (EC) field in Australia -- such as job satisfaction and turnover may be related to ineffective leadership practices, low pay and lack of professional acknowledgement. In this article we report on a small qualitative study completed in 2017, investigating 12 educators'…

Children's well-being has received extensive research attention and has a central role in early childhood policy and curricular guidelines. However, the well-being of early childhood educators has received fragmentary research attention and is unacknowledged in policy and curricular documents. Given the seemingly self-evident links between…

A considerable body of research suggests that knowledgeable and skilled educators are key to the quality of early childhood services. However, the skills and knowledge of educators is subject to being underestimated and contested. In response, the Exemplary Early Childhood Educators at Work Study has been designed to bring to light the distinctive…