 What I'm going to do today is talk about the continuity of learning from a provincial, national, and global perspective, and I'm doing that all in 40 minutes or something, so it'll be around the world in 40 minutes. Much of what I'm going to say has been raised earlier today in various comments, so I will be reinforcing some of the ideas that are coming forward, and I might poke a bit and provoke you a bit to think about some aspects of those things as we go along. So what we know, and much of this has been covered today, we know that kids' children benefit from early learning programs before entry to kindergarten at age five. There's an avalanche of evidence from 60 years about that. Good quality programs support children benefit, and we know that disadvantaged and vulnerable kids benefit the most, but in Canada, they are the least likely to attend, and that is something we share across our provincial and territorial boundaries, and that was raised earlier today. Craig said, can you imagine if we had, you know, took away public funding and was every parent for themselves to pay for it, et cetera, et cetera. So even in Quebec, which has the highest amount of early childhood education and care offered to children, vulnerable kids are least likely to be able to attend. So that's something to think about. Early learning benefits can be leveraged or diminished by the primary school experiences. When primary school is able to build on the benefits of early learning by the curriculum approach and interactions with kids, those benefits, as Craig said, compound. But if it's a distinctly different approach to learning in the school system, you don't see the benefits come forward. And poor primary schools can actually wipe out many of the benefits if not all of the benefits. So it is about the continuum going along. We do know that the investment in early learning pays triple dividends, and Craig made that obvious today. There is the economic immediate return on labor force participation. There is the longer-term return on investment, on reducing needs for extra efforts in the school system, and skills that children acquired, that they build on going forward, graduation from high school, et cetera, et cetera. The third benefit are those social equity benefits. And I think those are really important. And tie into the child's right to this. Why do some kids get excellent programs and other kids get nothing or poor quality? When we provide it to all kids at a reasonable, equitable level, there are social benefits. And in my opinion, that is the most important rationale for going forward. So I want to talk about not transitions to school, not transitions during the school day to other programs. I want to flip that and talk about a continuity of learning. And I'm not the only one who's talked about it. We've heard it from several of the speakers today. But rather than get kids ready for school or schools ready for children, let's think about continuous learning pathways and shared practices so that there is no need for a transition. It's seamless. It goes forward. And the same across the school day. When we reduce harsh transitions from point A to point B, Jen talked eloquently about the challenge of that and the anxieties that come from that. Can't we do better than that? Can't we make it easy for a child to have a seamless kind of day in many ways? Now there's challenges. There's differing legislation, regulation, funding, employers, collective agreements. The public school system is a public system. Licensed childcare is market delivery. Very little of it in this country is delivered in a public platform. So those are very different things. And we've touched on this today, and I think it's important to note. We have a very different culture in education from early childhood education. Our professional learning, our in-service is very different, okay? Doesn't mean we can't find ways to bridge across it, but I think we have to acknowledge early childhood educators see the curriculum as everything that happens throughout the time a child derives until they leave. It's as much about getting ready to go outside as it is about any kinds of learning experiences. By and large, teachers are prepared through the degree Bachelor of Education programs to cover a curriculum, right? To take the learning expectation standards, whatever the province is calling them, and think about how to cover those and assess children against those. It's not, we can find ways to bridge and talk together, but I think we have to acknowledge we're starting from very different cultures. And that's just one of them. We'll get into some of the other aspects of that as I go through and pay attention to time. But I think the starting point for that is in early childhood education, and that includes licensed childcare, that includes other types of programs, we need to make the shift to see that is the education in the broadest sense of the word, it is the education of young children that should lead, not the childcare that those programs provide. Your primary school system provides, is a childcare system. If it shuts, well no, tomorrow, Saturday, if it shuts down next week for labour negotiations or something like that, what is the number one concern for kids up to 10 or 12? Childcare. That almost happened three weeks ago in Ontario, I guess a very few days before the federal election, our provincial government was up against it and our clever QP negotiators for the province-wide educational assistance, a whole bunch of different, including the ECEs who work in many school boards, was in negotiation and they were going to pull their members and walk out on Monday morning. Our big school boards said, we'll have to close down, it's not safe to operate. They negotiated all weekend and settled at 10 o'clock Sunday night, something like that. Myself and my colleagues who all have backgrounds in early childhood education did not get calls from our adult children about our grandchildren saying, Mom, come help us with early learning for blah, blah, child. They did call and say, Mom, what are you doing this week? There's not going to any school. Can you come? You can bring your computer and work, you know. She can watch Netflix all day. They were not worrying about the early learning of their five-year-old, right? They were worrying about childcare. So let's recognize that the school system provides childcare for the school day, okay? And early childhood education programs provide education. And we should lead with that. And of course that means entry to early childhood education, including funding format, should not be based on what parents do, whether they're working 20 hours or 40 hours or not at all. But it should be based on the child. The child's needs, the child's age, like the education system is. So I think if we're going to make the transition, we have to keep those things in mind. So in talking about continuity of learning, I'm going to talk about three aspects, curricular continuity, before and after school programs, aka school-aged childcare. I don't want to get too caught up in language, but extending the school day and leadership. So curriculum continuity. This is something that's under discussion around in many, many places. The organization for economic and cooperative development and their work in early childhood education and care and into the primary school system is definitely concerned about this and is doing, has put out papers and studies on it. This one that I have up here is curriculum alignment and progression between early childhood education and primary schools. They identified things to think about or had to be taken into account. The education system organization and educator policies need to accommodate this. Regional and local authorities or providers need to be on board. We need to bring that together. It's not about a school takeover. The impact of the differing goals in primary education and ECEC, the ways we look at children's learning and what's important, we need to think about those differences and think about how to bridge them. And the alignment of broad level of goals or strands of education that promote learning. These were all things that they identified as essential if we want to talk about alignment. Another OECD study did, looked at across the OECD countries, the higher income countries, many European countries, North America, Australia, about ECEC, early childhood education and primary, and identified ones where the curriculum was fully integrated. That would be one curriculum, okay, that would be in this province, you'd have the core competencies for up to grade three and the early learning framework and you would bring them together and you'd have one document for everybody. That's integration. 54% are aligned and that's where I'd say British Columbia is. It's pretty clear your early learning framework is talking to your core competencies, right? It's right in there and it's aligned. And we have that example in a few other provinces. Ontario has a zero to eight approach that bridges over, et cetera, et cetera. And 54% of the member OECD countries do as well. 24% are not aligned at all. And that number seems to be growing and coming along. So that's where we're at. In BC, we have the BC core competencies for thinking, for personal and social competencies and communication. And they're broken down into sub competencies, excuse me. And we have the, and that's how it's organized, okay? That's the organizing frame for the new BC core curriculum core competencies. Then we have the BC early learning framework, which everybody got a copy of. And it's really organized around four living inquiries. Well-being and belonging, engagement with others, materials in the world, communication and literacies, identity, social responsibilities and diversity. It's not hard to see some cross walking here, right? There might be different language when you drill down. But you can see where we're in the same general sphere. And there is definite alignment. The BC early learning framework, which I really wanna take a moment and give credit to that framework and to some of the, to the author, Kim, who's here and others who worked so hard on it. It does a really good job, in my opinion, it being concrete about some of the bigger ideas. It does not say, go forth and reflect. Leaving the first year EC student to wonder, what's that? It spells it out. It talks about traces of learning, fabulous concept, love it. But it really breaks it down and makes it more accessible. So I think done a really good job on that. And it, of course, talks about living inquiries. What we've just talked about is big organizing frame. Then it talks about pathways. And pathways is deliberately used to be not linear, to be non-linear, to recognize multiple ways of learning, multiple languages. And then, instead of outcomes for children, it talks about or it leads on to critically reflective questions for the educators to think about when they're reflecting on the children's learning. The BC new curriculum starts with those core competencies. Then in separate disciplines, it is discipline organized from K to 12, in some cases, et cetera, et cetera. It breaks it down and within the disciplines are some big ideas. And then learning standards with curriculum competencies and content and ideas what to expect. It is not a prescriptive child will be able to count to 100, child will have 20 sight words and things like that. It's broader than that. It's more open-ended. But it is, there are learning standards. Just one of them, I had a glance at, in communication and literacies, and the pathways in the BC framework talked about vocabulary, symbolic language, et cetera. And then moved on into the critically reflective questions about thinking about symbol representations and meaning making marks or making marks have meanings and where's the child's understanding of that is, okay? So it leads you to think about, leads you to critically reflect on. Over in the BC curriculum, communication in language arts, that's the discipline for kindergarten, has big ideas, play with language and help us discover, helps discover how language works. And in the curricular competencies, explore foundation concepts of print, oral, and visual symbols. Pedagogical strategies for play-based learning. This is something that is a direct lift out of, thank you Kira for doing this for me today. From Play Today, that is a document I worked on with people in Kira and her team in the Ministry of Education. And I bring this to you because this is a tool, I think, that helps ECEs and primary teachers collaborate together. It is not an early learning framework. It is not a curriculum document. But it's a tool, I think, this notion of the play-based learning different, going across child-directed, educator-directed, educator and all the way in between, that helps us understand each other. And it was developed in Ontario for that very purpose, in those full-day kindergartens with the ECE and the teacher, and a mandate to go forth with the play-based learning curriculum and also meet some learning outcomes. What was happening is a real fear about hijacking the children's play. So let them play and stay out of it. Oh, yes. But we have to do some teaching. So bring them together and drill and kill for a little bit of time. Do a really prescriptive large group time or small group time to make sure they had letter recognition or something or other, right? And some of the evaluators that always came up with this is a way to help people talk to each other and see that there was a range of strategies and that you could use multiple strategies and you could recognize the benefits of multiple strategies. That free play is definitely an incredible opportunity to observe what children know and can do, who they are. It's amazing time. It is not time to have a cup of coffee and check out. There's an amazing time there. And we can do lots of things to disrupt it or not by how we facilitate the space, the temporal time, how we use time and space. Then inquiry play. This is an emergent curriculum of approaches where we're extending children's thinking and their ideas through explorations, provocations, et cetera. Collaborative play where we use opportunities to enter their play and incorporate target, might be incorporating target skills. The notion of entering, if there's a disruption in the dramatic play, sometimes entering in and modeling some effective social-emotional kind of skills that David was talking about might be something that happens. Then sometimes we actually do plan something more intentional, building out of children's interest, building out of their play narrative. And finally, learning games, which are more prescriptive but are not ever intended, in my view, to be done with the whole group. But children individually, short, judicious, to see where kids are at in specific areas of their learning. And we can appreciate that across these different strategies without saying it all has to be this way and that way. And we can really learn from each other. So I think this is a tool to think about as a tool that can help practitioners talk to each other and understand and appreciate each other's skills and backgrounds. I'm going to move on to before and after-school programs, which we've talked a lot about today. As we're talking about extending the school day through before and after schools. And when we talk about as extending the school day, we're already putting it into a different frame, a different understanding. An extended day has multiple possibilities for children. There's multiple ways to do it. Shared space is critical. And you've already heard it from different people today. The opportunities. If you have a school for 120 children from 8.30 to 2.30 in the morning, you have space for children after school. But it might mean shared space. And that's a big thing. But you've got space. You can use it. And then there's shared practices. If we're sharing space, we need to have some shared practices. I was in this great playground once. And it was this fabulous program where, before and after school, it was licensed child care, came in at 3.30. The kindergarten, four and five year old, and grade one teachers brought their children outside for the last 20 minutes or so. And then those children would be picked up, go home, would go home. And the new staff would come in. There'd be chit chat between the educators, the school-based educators. And then the early childhood folks would be left with the children who were staying for the after school. That day, there had been a parent who was caught in traffic who wasn't registered in the after school program. But that was no problem. They had a chat. The educators had a chat with each other. There was a pass-over of message books. I'm thinking, this is wonderful. I'm standing beside a little guy, Benjamin. And all of a sudden, Benjamin goes, oh my god. So I said, oh my goodness, what is it, Benjamin? I think I'd reframe the language. Oh my god. I said, what is it, Benjamin? Well, Johnny and Sally are on the climber. I said, yeah, they're on the climber. Yeah, but look, Miss Bell has left. Sally's here. I said, yes? Well, you can't be on the climber when Sally's here. And I said, why not? Well, when Miss Bell's here, the climber is safe and we can be on it. When Sally's here, the climber is not safe and we're not allowed to be on it. Now, on one hand, you've got to give the child credit, right? He's got this figured out. And he can't believe that Johnny can't figure it out. But on the other hand, really? We're asking five-year-olds to figure that one out instead of figuring out something about licensing and insurance, et cetera, et cetera. So thinking about shared practices I think is important. If we're going to share space, we have to have shared practices. And by the way, that's how you manage to share the blocks and the et cetera, et cetera. You've got to have some agreement on that. There are opportunities for overlapping staffing. You may not be going the whole distance that we heard about from Beth, that full integration. But there may be opportunities for educational assistance, particularly if they have a background in early childhood, to also be some of the before and after school staffing and make more of a complete day and avoid the shift work, et cetera, et cetera. And we maximize public investments in people and spaces. And that's important. The extended day will increase. If you had universal extended day availability across this province, you would see maternal labor force participation for women with children, six to whatever we count up to 12 or 16, you would see it go up. A whole lot of them are working part-time to accommodate their kids or not working at all. And you would see, and it might not, as Craig said, be as dramatic, but it would have an impact on that. So that's one consider what the school day is. And this extended day has the opportunity to bring back the third space of childhood. There's home, there's school for school-aged kids. There used to be a third space where you played outside until somebody called you in, right? That used to be very, very common. I know I'm going back a few decades to my own childhood and that is ancient history. But nevertheless, we have this third space and it's been lost. There's been a lot of emphasis on very structured after-school activities, which is fine. There's room for that and particular sports and things like that. But the opportunity for kids to direct their own time and their own play with each other outside is dramatically diminishing. And we could think about how to bring that back. We could also do a whole lot more with outdoor play. Kids are not spending an overall, do not spend enough time outdoors, do not spend enough time in nature. I could go on until the early evening on that. I won't. But I think we need to think about the opportunities that before and after school offer. So some examples of what's happening across Canada. Quebec, when they brought in their $5 a day child care and their whole plan in the late 90s, also brought in universal before and after school as part of the school system. The staff are employed by the school boards, et cetera, et cetera. Is it all fabulous? No, but some of it is and it's evolved over the years and that's just part of what is on offer. There is a cost, but it's a flat rate. It's very affordable. Ontario, I've already talked about that the schools must provide some sort of before and after school, some sort of extended day program. It might be licensed school aged child care. It might be directly operated by the school board and then they don't have to get licensed because they've moved the requirements over to the education regulations and act so they don't go through licensing for something else anymore. Or it might be third party delivery for a licensed child care program or a recognized recreation program. Nova Scotia is brought in pre-primary for four-year-olds and by next September, it'll be across the whole province. It's been a five-year scale in and they're bringing in before and after programs that will be for those four-year-olds but also the five-year-olds, grade one and two. Many of them are recreation-based and the emphasis is on outdoor play for those programs. So those are just some highlights of what's happening across Canada. So I want to talk now about leadership. I'm moving on to talk about the third component of what we need to take into account. In order to move this file forward, in order to bring these fabulous demonstrations that are happening here in British Columbia and not scale each one up but scale up some of the big ideas, bring them into policies, we need leadership. And one way of leadership is what happened in Ontario. Started off with this little tiny demonstration, not that different than what we heard from Bev today called Toronto First Duty. It was actually in five schools. And they all looked a little different, right? They were all trying things out to bring the notion bringing kindergarten together with childcare together with family support programs, et cetera, et cetera. And they were very small initiatives and oh yeah, the province didn't like them. They weren't any part of it. That particular political regime had nothing to do with it. But the big school board did, the municipality city of Toronto did and foundations funded it. Started small but was thinking big and it led to in less than ten years our best future in mind was the blueprint to bring in full day kindergarten and to reorganize the governance for all early learning programs. Okay, so it was a big shift. It's a big province. It did that. It was successful in doing that because it always, Toronto First Duty always thought big and always thought about how communicating it was always thinking about so what does that mean for what we need for public policy? It was a, and what we've always communicated about it. Told everybody about it. Told the media about it. And that was, kept it alive instead of being a good idea that came for three years and went home. Not many of these things haven't happened before. Some of them 30 and 40 years ago. When an ECE had a program, preschool program beside a kindergarten class, the two educators got together and did incredible things by sharing, by actually sharing kids space. But then somebody got pregnant or somebody retired or the principal changed and it disappeared. That wasn't going to happen here because we were too noisy about it. We talked about it. We lifted it up. So that's one thing I want to suggest here is important to do. In the local context and thinking about it, it's disruptive. It's disruptive to many, can be disruptive to the ECE community. It can be disruptive. I saw some of you think about, you mean your teachers have to share their space. That's a biggie. It's disruptive. But you can manage that. And yeah, to make changes, you're going to be disruptive. So I don't think disruption should be, you know, something that's a showstopper. You can maximize local assets, which we heard about from the examples today and always recognize the schools were built with public money. They are public space and place. We own them. There are places. So keeping that in mind, front and center, and I know I'm speaking to a room of converted here because you're excited about this and you're here, but we've got to remember that even when the going gets tough. But you do need to go forward to think about public infrastructure and you've got to start thinking about it early in the game. You need to find short-term workarounds, my last point. And I heard some of them today. I heard Jeff say, yeah, it's illegal, but we're doing it anyway. That's one approach. And so forth. And then working through the nitty-gritty of getting things licensed. Somewhere down the line, you stop the licensing and you have to reorganize how you do education to that. But that's all part of it and thinking about designing public policies, that make working relationships, relationships are central. But you have to have policies so that you don't need extraordinary people like you heard today to make this work. Some of the rest of us ordinary people can do it if we have the policy backup. And you've got to resource the public teacher, you've got to resource the public school principals, right? Because school principals are central, you've got to have them on board and design ways of doing it that doesn't make it impossible. So moving forward, you have 47 changing results for young children. You have 12 transition to kindergarten initiatives. You have the three initiatives we heard about today. You've got something to work with and to build up and to learn from and making that learning centralizing in some ways. As I said, the public schools belong to the public. They're a universal platform. And the benefit about basing things in public schools is they don't have a stigma. Everybody goes to them. And thinking about what can you do? What can you take home and do to share your space more with the partners you do have in your schools? What can you do to bridge those cultural divides? What conversations can you have? Strong Start 5 came out in 2017 with a focus on transitions to primary school. That was the focus. They were promoting this. It's essential and it's a good document. But they pulled together people from Australia. They pulled together people from European countries, from North America to talk about that. And that group came up with five themes at the end. And one of them was, let's not talk about transitions. Let's talk about a continuum. And let's talk about the policy practices we make. We need to base them on data. Let's find ways to have a common way of looking at quality. Let's require... If we want to make this serious, we have to have a public policy platform and funding. We need to make it universal, ECE for all. And it got to be playification, play a thing up, not schoolification playing down. So the Congress actually went further than the OECD did. Essential to going forward in this province, in my humble opinion, is you have to pay attention to only one in four children between two and four years right now participate in an early childhood education program in preschools or licensed childcare. You're not going to be able to have continuity of learning into primary schools if there's nothing for them to continue from. So thinking about that is the lowest in Canada. So that's something to think about. And it must be quality and that requires infrastructure and funding and the schools can play a role in that. And access requires, as I said before, based on the child's age, not parent's activity. If we want to get serious about doing it from the child's right. And I want to close with what's coming up from our foundation. Our foundation is publishing early years study four. Four isn't there, but it is on... There's some cards there. And you can go to the study website. It'll be out in the early new year. It'll expand some of these ideas and others. It's the fourth one. Margaret McCain is the author of it. And if you want to sign up to hear updates, you go to the website and sign up. So on that note, I'll leave you with that, is something to take away. And I am finished. I see you. So I think my time is up. Yeah.