As a Director, Room Leader or nominated Supervisor, you’re usually the one deciding where your professional learning budget goes. The wrong choice wastes time and money, while the right one shifts everyday practice across your whole team.
State funding streams like School Readiness Funding, Kindy Uplift and Start Strong help to remove the cost barrier but come with delivery expectations – so the question shifts away from whether to invest, to how to invest well. With more in-person and online courses available than ever, figuring out what’s going to meet everyone’s expectations can feel like a stab in the dark.
That’s why we have put together this 4-step guide for evaluating the most suitable online professional development for ECEC leaders and for your team. Full disclosure – Essential Resources create courses designed specifically for ECEC teams, but this guide is more about finding the right course for you, rather than joining one of ours!
Use it to keep the focus on outcomes for children, alignment to your quality goals and building educator capability that lasts beyond a single training day.
What should ECEC leaders look for in online professional development courses?
Step 1: Start with the impact you want, rather than the most interesting topic.
A strong course states the practice it intends to improve and connects it to children’s learning, not just a certificate of completion. When looking at early childhood professional development courses, ask three questions.
- Is it grounded in a recognised framework?
- Does it move educators from awareness to application?
- Can the whole team engage with it, rather than just one person who then needs to cascade it to the team?
Framework alignment matters most in the ECEC context. Look for explicit links to the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF V2.0) or Victoria Early Years Learning and Development Framework (VEYLDF), and the National Quality Standard. EYLF or VEYLDF professional learning that connects directly to a framework’s principles, practices and learning outcomes gives your team a shared language and demonstrates that the provider has focused on delivering those outcomes when creating the course.
The best courses also translate theory into examples educators recognise from their own rooms. Essential Resources’ Building Social and Emotional Skills and Wellbeing course is a useful example of what “good” might look like in this regard. It pairs video modules and reflection worksheets with practical strategies, and there is a published case study available from a current ECEC Leader who has gone through the training.
How do I align online professional development to our Quality Improvement Plan?
Step 2: Professional learning for educators that isn’t tied to your QIP tends to evaporate.
Before you enrol anyone:
- map the course against your identified goals
- any NQS quality improvement priorities you’re already working on.
If your Assessment and Rating cycle flagged strengthening inclusive practice, choose PD that speaks directly to that.
This alignment also matters financially. If you’re using SRF funded professional development in Victoria, Kindy Uplift professional development in Queensland, or Start Strong professional development funding in New South Wales, all the funding bodies expect a clear line between the learning you choose and the outcomes you’re targeting.
Essential Resources’ School Readiness Funding, Kindy Uplift and Start Strong pages try to make this easier for you by spelling out how our courses can be matched to funded priority areas, such as communication and language, wellbeing, and access and inclusion. You can simply copy and paste the relevant information so your PD plan and your quality documentation can tell the same story.
What does evidence-based online professional development look like in early years education courses?
Step 3: “Evidence-based” is easy to claim and harder to demonstrate.
In practice, it means:
- the course content reflects current research on child development and pedagogy
- the delivery itself follows the latest pedagogy for how adults
Australia’s Education Research Organisation (AERO) recommends that professional learning is sustained, collaborative and focused on practice. Follow this approach and your team efforts to train will be far more effective than one-off workshops.
So, when a provider says their course supports evidence-based teaching practice, look for the markers.
- Reflective tasks that ask educators to trial something and review it.
- Opportunities for team discussion.
- Content that builds over several sessions rather than front-loading everything into a single sitting.
This is something we have intentionally built into courses like Foundations of Communication, Language and Literacy. Structured across topics with reflective questions and supporting texts, the self-led pace allows teams to control their own timeframe and allow for team exploration and discussion. The ultimate goal is increased capability that stays in the room long after the course is completed.
What should ECEC leaders look for when choosing an online professional development provider?
Step 4: Choosing professional development is partly about the course and partly about the fit with your team.
Flexible online learning for educators is now essential. Self-paced modules let staff learn around rosters and ratios rather than losing a day off the floor. Team subscriptions mean everyone engages with the same content instead of relying on second-hand summaries.
Four practical questions you can ask any provider.
- Can the whole team access it, and for how long?
- Is it genuine online PD built for early childhood educators, or a schools product repackaged?
- Does it map to EYLF principles and practices, VEYLDF or NQS?
- Is it recognised by the funding programs you use?
A provider that can answer these clearly and point to real experiences in ECEC settings is worth shortlisting.
Choose online professional development that keeps working after the course ends
The strongest professional learning decisions are deliberate ones. Before your next enrolment, pull out your QIP, identify the single practice you most want to strengthen, and evaluate your options against framework alignment, evidence base, team access and funding fit. If you still aren’t quite sure what to prioritise, try talking to your team about what capability you most want to grow over the coming 12 months.
If you’d like a starting point for your search, feel free to browse Essential Resources’ early childhood care and education courses to see examples of how good quality, framework-aligned online PD for early childhood educators should be presented, to help you find your match.