Lost in translation: Barriers and opportunities for early childhood educators to enact child protection research recommendations

Background: Currently early childhood educators, such as the participants in the research, submit only 2% of overall child protection reports made (AIHW, 2024), despite this age group being the most likely to be harmed or abused, suggesting a gap between knowledge and practice. Early childhood educators have a key role in fostering children’s safety and well-being as they have the greatest potential for identifying child maltreatment and intervening due to the daily interactions they have with children. However, despite child protection knowledge being available from research, scholarly and grey literature, information on how to access and enact this crucial knowledge is limited.
Aims: To explore the findings and implications of a recent early childhood child protection research project that used a strengths-based methodology and conceptual framework. The project aimed to understand from a small sample of educators in one Early Childhood Education service how child protection research was enacted in their ser