The children, parents and teachers at Muswellbrook Pre School have received a wonderful Christmas present.
ACECQA, the Australian Children's Education and Care Quality Authority, has assessed their school as top-tier among the nation's 16,000 pre-schools and child care centres.
Muswellbrook Pre School, says ACECQA, exceeds national standards in five of the seven assessment categories: education program, physical conditions, staffing arrangements, relationships with children, and partnerships with parents and the community.
The Muswellbrook Pre School community has rare boasting rights.
The story of Muswellbrook Pre School tells a lot about early childhood education and care in Australia.
The pre-school was Muswellbrook's first early childhood centre.
It started in 1965 as demand for child care rose from a growing workforce in the coal and electricity sector.
The pre-school had a humble beginning as a not-for-profit venture in a Methodist church hall with one teacher and a teacher's aide.
Attendance fees covered meagre wages, raffles paid for equipment, and volunteers rolled up their sleeves to clean classrooms and maintain rudimentary facilities.
Working bees and generous local benefactors enabled the survival of the pre-school for the next two decades.
More fundraising secured a new building in the late 1980s, but only for 20 students, so rising demand for pre-school places over the next two decades had to be met by makeshift arrangements on a shoestring budget.
Then in 2013 manna fell from heaven when the operator of the local Mt Arthur coal mine, the global corporation BHP Billiton - the girl with the little curl right in the middle of her forehead* - donated $1.1 million for the construction of brand new, purpose-built premises.
Today, Muswellbrook Pre School caters daily for 120 kids aged 3 to 5 years, providing services to more than 250 families every week.
Proudly, the pre-school is judged as equal to any in Australia.
Good premises obviously contribute to Muswellbrook Pre School's excellence.
But, as is always the case with good schools, excellent outcomes come from quality staff and attention to quality working conditions.
So it is not surprising to see this statement on the Muswellbrook Pre School web site: "Today the Pre School has 8 university trained teachers, including the Director, 17 educators, and 4 cleaners on permanent contracts and a number of casual staff."
A big issue in early childhood education is not simply the overall ratio of staff to children but the ratio of trained teachers (those with degrees) to other staff (called "educators").
Muswellbrook Pre School invests heavily in fully-trained teachers - well above minimum legal requirements - ensuring its kids have a comprehensive learning curriculum delivered by trained professionals.
A critical mass of qualified teachers also means there are sufficient staff to secure, collectively, a registered enterprise agreement, with staff represented by the Independent Education Union.
It's a powerful package: the presence of qualified staff, trained in early childhood education, with the knowledge and skills to install a rich curriculum - not just babysitting - every hour, every day; and the guarantee of a professional salary, so that teachers' efforts are justly rewarded, even in a non-metropolitan labour market like the upper Hunter where the competition for jobs is intense.
But the package is also very frail.
If you are a teacher in NSW in a primary or secondary school or a university you are part of a regulated profession with high qualifications standards and guaranteed professional wages and conditions.
In the early childhood sector, with its growing number of profit-seekers, many providers supply the bare minimum level of qualified teachers, preferring to engage lowly-paid staff holding only certificate III TAFE qualifications.
Moreover, right across the sector, qualified teachers are typically paid 25 per cent below what teachers earn across the road in primary and secondary schools.
Early childhood education in this nation is a mess. Muswellbrook Pre School is a rare example of a centre that has assembled the essential ingredients of quality education and care for children in a regional area.
Yet the education and care of children in their most formative years shouldn't be dependent on the philanthropy of a global corporation and on discretionary decisions about professional staffing levels.
* When she was good, she was very good indeed, but when she was bad she was horrid.
