Investigating Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care
CONTACT CSU
Our Members
Professor Jennifer Sumsion
BEc, MEd, Dip Ed, PhD (Sydney) 
Jennifer leads the Investigating Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care: A Multi-Perspectives Approach (IQECEC) research group. She has a sustained record of research and publication focusing on aspects of quality in early childhood education and care extending over the past 12 years. Her research focuses primarily on early childhood teachers' professional practice as a key contributor to quality and on the utilisation of diverse theoretical frames to understand the complexities of professional practice. Her 2004-06 ARC Linkage Project with Joy Goodfellow and Marianne Fenech investigated how the regulatory environment governing long day care provision enables and constrains the capacity of early childhood teachers to provide high quality care and education. With IQECEC colleagues, Linda Harrison, Frances Press, and Marianne Fenech, together with Jennifer Bowes (Macquarie University), and supported by an 2008-10 ARC Discovery grant, she is currently extending on that work by investigating what professional practice looks like in high quality long day care and how expert practitioners from 'lighthouse' centres might work with staff in other centres to support ongoing quality improvement.
Jennifer is also undertaking an ARC Linkage Project (2008-11) entitled "What is life like for babies and toddlers in childcare?" that brings together IQECEC colleagues from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, including psychology (Linda Harrison and Ben Bradley), early childhood policy (Fran Press), early childhood education (Joy Goodfellow) and speech pathology (Sharynne McLeod). The project is being conducted with Industry Partners, Family Day Care Australia and KU Children's Services.
In 2007, Jennifer co-guest edited with Frances Press two special issues of Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood focusing on policy and politics in early childhood education and care. She is currently co-guest editing, with Professor Helen Penn and Professor Peter Moss, a special issue of the Early Childhood Research Quarterly focusing on globalization and knowledge flows in early childhood policy and practice. Jennifer is a foundation member of the international advisory board of the International Centre for Research into the Mixed Economy of Child Care at the University of East London. She has been an Expert Witness in childcare related pay cases for the Liquor Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union (LHMU) and the NSW Independent Education Union, and is an invited member of the LHMU expert advisory panel on childcare.
For more about Jennifer, see Jennifer's staff profile.
Professor Sue Dockett
BEd(Hons), MEd(Hons), PhD (Sydney)
Sue's research agenda is focused on educational transitions to school and the expectations, experiences and perceptions of all involved. She has published widely, both nationally and internationally, particularly in the area of transition to school. Current projects in this area include investigating issues of supporting families at times of educational transition, working with Indigenous communities to facilitate children's transition to school, and road safety and transition and Sue is also involved in research of young children's play, particularly in connection with early numeracy development and thinking.
For more about Sue, see Sue's Staff profile.
Associate Professor Linda Harrison
BSc(Agr) (Hons) MSc McGill, DipT (EC) MCAE, MEd Syd, Phd Macq
Associate Professor Linda Harrison has significant research experience in infant/toddler child care. She has been a member of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) Consortium Advisory Group since the inception of this landmark study in 2002. Her role has been to advise on the design and implementation of the study, with a particular focus on infant child care and 4 to 5-year-old early education and care. This project is closely linked to her work as Principal Investigator with two other large longitudinal research programs - Child Care Choices, which is a 7-year study of the effects of child care arrangements for children from birth to three years of age on development and subsequent school achievement, and the Sydney Family Development Project, which is a 15-year study of families and their first-born infants' social, emotional and learning development through the toddler and preschool years, into the early and later years of primary school.
Linda is also collaborating with Dr Robyn Dolby and Associate Professor Judy Ungerer in an intervention study of child-caregiver relationships in infant/toddler and preschooler care. Relatedly, she is the expert advisor for the evaluation of the Partnerships in Early Childhood program, a child care based intervention to develop secure attachment relationships between children and their caregivers, funded under the Australian Governments' Invest to Grow Initiative.
Linda currently holds two ARC Discovery Grants ( "A multi-modal investigation of current and proposed structures and processes determining and sustaining quality in Australian centre-based child care" with Press, Sumsion, Bowes and Fenech;" Children with speech impairment: A population study of prevalence, severity, impact and service provision" with McLeod ) and an ARC Linkage Grant ( "What is life like for babies and toddlers in childcare?" with IQECEC colleagues).
For more about Linda, see Linda's Staff profile.
Associate Professor Sharynne McLeod
BAppSc(Sp Path), MAppSc(Sp Path), PhD
For the past nineteen years, Sharynne's primary area of research has addressed children's communication; both from the perspectives of typical development and impairment. She has developed methodologies for listening to and researching with children who have difficulties communicating as well as with very young children. Sharynne's research foregrounds the right of everyone (particularly children) to participate fully in society. She applies the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF, World Health Organization, 2001) to children who have difficulty communicating focussing on aspects of Body Structure, Body Function, Activites and Participation, Environmental and Personal Factors and sees the interrelationship of each of these areas of inquiry are essential for envisoning full participation of children. Sharynne holds an ARC Discovery grant titled: " Children with speech impairment: A population study of prevalence, severity, impact and service provision" that addresses each of these areas. With IQECEC colleagues, she is also a chief investigator on the "What is life like for babies and toddlers in childcare?" ARC Linkage Grant.
Recently, Sharynne was the only Australian named as a contributor in the World Health Organization's children and youth version of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health. She is an expert member of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare Advisory Committee on Australian and International Disability Data (ACCAID). Sharynne is vice president of the International Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics Association, a Fellow of Speech Pathology Australia and is editor of the International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology (www.informaworld.com/ijslp). Her recent books published in the USA are The international guide to speech acquisition (Thomson, 2007) and Speech sounds: A pictorial guide to typical and atypical speech (Plural, in press).
For more about Sharynne see Sharynne's Staff profile.
Associate Professor Bob Perry
BSc(Hons 1), DipEd, Phd (UNSW)
Bob has worked in teacher education in Australia for the last 35 years with specific foci on mathematics education, early childhood education, Indigenous education, and assessment in higher education. More recently, he has been able to bring these areas together in the development of community capacity, particularly in Indigenous communities.
Bob's current major areas of research include early childhood mathematics education, educational transitions, Indigenous mathematics education, and community capacity building in Indigenous communities. He has also undertaken numerous evaluation studies in these areas. All of this research and evaluation is informed by a strong sociocultural and social justice approach built on ecological theories of individual and community learning.
Currently, Bob is a chief researcher in a number of government funded projects investigating aspects of children's transition to school, the impact of families on transition to school, the practice in mathematics education of preschool educators, as well as undertaking evaluations of government projects in transition to school, Indigenous education and numeracy and literacy programs.
For more about Bob, see Bob's staff profile page.
Ms Frances Press
Ma Int. Disc. (Women's Studies) UNSW
Frances is recognised as an authority on early childhood education and care policy in Australia. She has been co-director and primary contributor to state, national and international reviews of early childhood policy, including the OECD's Thematic Review of Early Childhood Education and Care: Australian Background Report (2000); reviews of early childhood education both in the ACT and NSW for those respective Governments (2001, 2002); the NSW Department of Community Services for its children's services regulatory review (2003); and the National Childcare Accreditation Council's review of Accreditation Standards (2007). Frances has worked as a consultant with the Centre for Community Child Health for the whole-of-government NSW Initiative for the First Three Years of Childhood (2001). In 2006 she was commissioned by the National Investment for the Early Years (NIFTeY) and the Commissions for Children and Young People in NSW and Queensland to research and write a major report on national early childhood education and care systems in Australia: What about the kids? Policy directions for improving the experiences of infants and young children in a changing world (2006). In 2006 was invited to address the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia Roundtable on Childcare. In 2007 Frances co-edited, with Jennifer Sumsion, two special childcare policy editions of the international journal Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood.
Frances is a Chief Investigator on an ARC Discovery Grant funded research project A multi-modal investigation of current and proposed structures and processes determining and sustaining quality in Australian centre-based child care. She is also a Chief Investigator on an ARC Linkage Project "What is life like for babies and toddlers in childcare? Understanding the lived experience of infants through innovative mosaic methodology". In 2008 she completed a comprehensive literature review canvassing policy developments in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden and the United Kingdom for an international workshop funded by the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth (ARACY): Building an International Collaboration in Early Childhood Education and Care, hosted by the Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW.
For more about Frances, see Fran Press's staff profile page.
Professor Ben Bradley
BA, MA), PhD (Edinburgh)
Ben's PhD "A Study of Young Infants as Social Beings" held two influential findings: 1) that maternal baby-talk could be used to assess the health of the infant-mother relationship in the first few weeks of life – this was immediately taken up by Lynne Murray as a method of assessing the consequences if post-natal depression; 2) that developmental psychologists were in thrall to romantic assumptions about infancy, idealizing the infant's capacities and everyday lives so as to gloss over primitive anxieties and negativities. This led to the publication of his book Visions of Infancy: A Critical Introduction to Child Psychology (Polity Press, 1989) which was translated into Spanish, French & Italian, a summarizing article "Infancy as Paradise" also being translated into Polish. The idea that the psychology of infants was a cultural phenomenon as much as a scientific one has remained influential. In the late 1990s Dr Jane Selby and Prof Bradley developed a new paradigm for the study of infant sociability; the "Babies in Groups" (BiG) paradigm. This was the first time babies had been studied in all-infant groups and has provided evidence of a capacity for supra-dyadic relations by 9 months of age that cannot be theorised under the aegis of attachment theory (which deals only with dyadic relations). At the instigation of Prof Tony Manstead (Cardiff University) our methodological article introducing BiG (Selby & Bradley, 2003) was used as an exemplary text for the British Psychological Society's funded seminar series "Dialoguing across Differences in UK Social Psychology (DaD)" that ran for the year of 2004), the main 'difference' being the qualitative/quantitative divide (which our work straddles). BiG is now being used by researchers in the UK, Israel, USA and Australia.
Ben has been on the editorial boards of Theory & Psychology and The International Journal for Critical Psychology since their inception. In 1994 he won the Rodney G Dennis Fellowship for the Study of Manuscripts in an international competition at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. (U$1,500: Harvard University Competitive International Fellowship) for his project on "The Meeting of Mind with Life in William James". In 2007, he was awarded a Visiting Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Durham University for his work on Darwin & Psychology and he has been invited to organise the section on Infancy at Cambridge University's "Darwin Celebration 2009". His work on infants led to him being appointed Visiting Professor at the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance, Open University, UK (for 2007) and to being invited as a keynote speaker at a variety of therapeutic and scholarly conferences and workshops, including Oslo University College's workshop on "Professional Practice and the Participation of Children" (December, 2007).
Dr Michelle Ortlipp
DipT(IECD), BEd(Melb), PhD (Melb)
Michelle's research interests focus on professional experience in early childhood settings. Her PhD research explored how tertiary supervisors understand and practise assessment of the early childhood practicum. Her thesis won the Early Childhood Australia Doctoral Thesis award in 2005. Michelle has published reports of her doctoral study in the Asia Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, the Australian Journal of Early Childhood, and the Journal of Australian Research in Early Childhood Education.
Dr Elizabeth Murray
BEd(EC)Hons, PhD CSU 
Elizabeth’s (Libbey) research interests include social and emotional adjustment to kindergarten, transition to formal schooling, child stress and anxiety, children’s coping, quality teaching and quality learning environments Her recently completed PhD project was entitled Children’s perspectives on the first year of school: Adjusting to the personal, interpersonal and institutional aspects of school. Libbey has published reports of her PhD project in the European Early Childhood Education Research Journal (2005) and AARE post-conference proceedings, http://aare.edu.au/04pap/mur04985.pdf (2004). Libbey has been granted a CSU Writing Up Award in 2008 and plans to publish at least two more articles from her thesis. The first will explore children’s perspectives of the personal, interpersonal and institutional aspects of the first year of school. The second will examine the ecology of the kindergarten classroom by looking at associations between social climate in the classroom and child and teacher perspectives on student-teacher relationships.
Belinda Downey
BEd(EC)Hons 
Belinda's research interests focus on social justice issues in early childhood education and care. Her Honours thesis was entitled Can I have the keys to the storeroom? Unlocking the closet for GLBT educators. A report of her project was published in Education in Rural Australia. Belinda plans to commence her PhD in 2008. She is interested in investigating the beliefs and values that underpin families' decisions about early childhood education and care. Throughout 2007-2008, Belinda has been a member of a research team working on an internally funded project, Bringing Professional Experience to the rural university classroom through playgroups and parenting sessions: Authentic learning and engagement with communities.
Postdoctoral Fellow - Marianne Fenech
PhD (Early Childhood),MMgt(Community), BSW (Hons)
Marianne is an adjunct Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Charles Sturt University and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Children and Families Research Centre, Institute of Early Childhood, Macquarie University. Her current research is a multi-modal investigation of current and proposed structures and processes determining and sustaining quality in long day care. Marianne completed her PhD in 2006, the focus of her thesis being early childhood teachers’ perceptions of the impact of the regulatory environment on quality and professional practice in long day care. Marianne’s research interests are in early childhood policy, the regulation of early childhood services, quality early childhood education and care, advocacy, and the industrial context within which early childhood teachers’ work. Marianne is an active member of the Social Justice in Early Childhood group.
PHD Student - Catherine Kaplun
BEd(ECE)(Hons) 
Cathy obtained her BEd(ECE)(Hons) at Macquarie University. She is presently studying for her PhD at CSU. Her research involves exploring the experiences of transition to school for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. This study is part of a longitudinal project assessing the impact of home-visiting on the growth and development of children and families from low socioeconomic areas. The transition to school is recognised as a critical point for all children for both school and later success in life. Cathy's study is focused on gaining the children's perspective of their trasitional experiences. Parent and teacher information will supplement the information contributed by children. It is hoped the study will improve understanding of the transitional experiences of children from disadvantaged backgrounds and highlight factors that may enhance their experience of the transition to school. Cathy is working with Sue Dockett and Bob Perry as her supervisors.
Adjunct - Dr Joy Goodfellow
PhD (University of Sydney), MEd (University of Sydney), BA (Macquarie University), Diploma Sydney Kindergarten Training College
Joy has held significant professional early childhood positions in the private, not-for-profit and public/government sectors. She has published extensively in both national and international journals. Her research interests encompass practitioner inquiry; the impact of the regulatory environment on EC teachers' professional decision making; approaches to the care of infants and the inclusion of 'at risk' families in mainstream early childhood services. She brings both phenomenological and narrative inquiry research approaches to her work in addition to her expansive practice knowledge.