Erica Stanford
speaker
849 appearances
18 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 20 Sep
Erica Stanford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 18 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 4.
Appearances
I said in my speech yesterday, not a lot.
We just want to be consistent across the country in all of the different ECE settings, whether that's home-based, kindergarten, private or charitable setups.
We want to make sure that there is a clear understanding of parents as well, that screen time in under fives is not best practice.
This is actually more about
primary schools, especially lower primary, setting clear restrictions on device use because we know that handwriting and using paper and having interactions are so much more important and that is where all of the evidence is showing we need to set our kids up for success.
It's a bit of both.
There has been people who brought it to me as a concern, especially parents who are seeing more and more device use in primary and especially lower primary at the expense of things like handwriting and those interactions, which are so important.
And all of the international evidence is pointing in that direction.
As we increase edutech, the international evidence is going in the opposite way.
And you see Australia now
Sweden, Norway, other countries around the world, all removing those devices out of classrooms and going back to analog handwriting because we know that that's so much better for brain development.
Well, there's a couple of things in this.
Firstly, there are genuine reasons why children may be struggling and we've just put
three quarters of a billion dollars in our learning support budget into especially those early years, ECE and year one, to help pick up some of those issues and get children seen by specialists earlier.
And that's risen by 30% this year, which is good to see.
But then there is also the other part, which is just this general understanding and expectation that we need to have an ECE and with parents in the school sector, what are the key foundational skills that children need to be able to transition successfully?
Good oral language, being able to open their lunchbox, be able to hold a conversation, being able to toilet themselves, which is becoming more and more of an issue.
You talk to any primary school, they will tell you more children are turning up than nappies who do not have additional learning needs.
So that
ECEs are working towards those and that parents at home are supporting them in those goals to make sure that we're getting kids at school ready to learn.
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