''How do families know what makes a great bush kinder?'': understanding the provision of nature-based early childhood education programs in Victoria, Australia

Bush kinders, one example of a nature-based approach to early childhood education, is rapidly becoming a staple of Australian providers’ programs. Since the early 2010s, the Australian state of Victoria has been a place where these nature-based programs have been on the rise. With increasing bush kinder numbers due to government initiatives and a deeper community understanding of the benefits of young children spending time in nature, we began to investigate the factors, such as location, session frequency and age grouping of sessions (e.g. 3 or 4 year old children), would allow families to have a deeper understanding of the provision of these nature-based approaches to early childhood education and care. We probed the importance of socioeconomic factors and quality assessment processes in kindergartens to understand whether these factors determine the bush kinder program provision. We also sought to understand the publicly available resources that inform families and educators about bush kinder provision. This paper is informed by a longitudinal ethnographic study of bush kinders. It applies Naidoo’s stocktake approach to gather qualitative data drawn from a desktop review of web-based, publicly available secondary sources including academic publications, government reports, books, and electronic databases. Focusing on Victoria where bush kinders are proliferating partly due to state government initiatives, in this paper we ask, what measures exist to understand the provision of Australian nature-based early childhood education programs? The study finds that a detailed database of Australian bush kinders is needed for families to make informed decisions about services who offer nature-based programs as part of their ECEC. Location, socio-economic and quality assurance ratings data that allow us to understand characteristics of Australian nature-based early childhood education settings are of value for families to understand the bush kinder programs available to their children.