Early Learning Matters Week is a moment for our nation to recognise what REAIE has long championed: that early childhood education is a rights-based, relational, and deeply human endeavour. In the spirit of the Reggio Emilia Educational Project, we affirm that children are not merely preparing for life—they are living it. They are citizens with present-day rights, agency, and a voice.
At REAIE, we uphold the image of the child as capable, curious, and full of potential. Children arrive in our early learning settings already in relationship with ideas, materials, place, and community. They come with theories already forming and questions already shaping their understanding of the world. Early Learning Matters Week invites Australia to recognise this and value the environments that honour children’s hundred languages—their many ways of expressing, creating, and making meaning.
This week also highlights the essential role of educators. The work of early childhood education is ethical, and political. It requires educators who listen deeply, document learning with intention, and stand beside children as co-researchers. REAIE continues to advocate for the conditions that allow this work to flourish: strong professional learning pathways, robust qualifications, improved ratios, and regulatory systems that uphold children’s rights rather than constrain them.
REAIE recognises that learning is shaped by relationships—with families, with community, with Country, and with each another. Early Learning environments become democratic spaces where children practise collaboration, empathy, negotiation, and imagination. These are not optional extras; they are the foundations of a just and thriving society.
As we celebrate Early Learning Matters Week, REAIE calls on policymakers, sector leaders, and communities to recognise early learning as a common good—an investment in the present and future wellbeing of our nation. When we trust children, value educators, and design environments that honour curiosity and creativity, we strengthen not only early learning, but the very fabric of our society.
Early learning matters because children matter—today, tomorrow, and always.
