How to Build Collaborative Educator Confidence: The Key to Embedding Sustainability in ECEC

Project Sustainability Collective's 2025 Snapshot surveyed 300+ early childhood education and care (ECEC) services across Australia. The data reveals something crucial: many services are not held back by a lack of care or creativity, but by a lack of confidence. Confidence to plan, to experiment, to lead. Confidence to see sustainability not only in gardens and recycling bins, but in relationships, equity, culture, and community.

This article explores what the Snapshot data reveals about educator confidence, why it's foundational to embedding sustainability under EYLF 2.0, and how collaborative approaches to building and sharing knowledge and skills create transformative change across services.

1. What Does the Snapshot Data Reveal About Educator Confidence?

The Sustainability Snapshot 2025 highlights patterns that educators recognise immediately:

• 94% of educators acknowledge limitations, inconsistencies, or missing elements in their sustainability practice

• Only 6% of services describe themselves as very confident, with systematic approaches and strong outcomes

• Most educators associate sustainability primarily with environmental actions, gardening, recycling, and reducing waste, and feel less confident about addressing social, cultural, and economic domains

The data tells a clear story: confidence is foundational. When educators feel sure of their understanding, they're more likely to take initiative, lead sustained investigations, engage families and communities, and integrate sustainability across curriculum and leadership practice. Without it, even committed teams hesitate.

2. Why Is Educator Confidence Essential for Sustainability Implementation?

Confidence does more than make educators feel better. It's the bridge between understanding and action.

Confidence Connects Understanding to Embedded Practice Many educators understand sustainability conceptually but hesitate to translate it into consistent practice. Confidence expands perspective, helping educators recognise sustainability across all domains: environmental, social, cultural, and economic. It shifts focus from isolated "green" activities to ongoing inquiry, integration, and reflection.

Confidence Enables EYLF 2.0 Implementation The EYLF 2.0 Sustainability Principle calls for holistic approaches connecting sustainability to every dimension of learning and service operation. Without confident educators, attention often remains limited to environmental efforts, leaving principles of fairness, inclusion, and community wellbeing underdeveloped.

Confidence Builds Consistency Across Your Service Confidence is contagious, especially when it's built collaboratively. When leadership invests in building capability across all educators, not just a few champions, the result is shared language, coherence, and collective ownership. When knowledge and skills are shared openly, educators feel less alone in the complexity of sustainability integration. Team-level confidence means consistency across rooms, smoother curriculum integration, and stronger service culture where everyone contributes.

Confidence Improves Quality and Outcomes Confident educators plan and document learning showing systems thinking, how children notice connections between people, places, and resources. These practices strengthen learning outcomes and support alignment with the National Quality Standards and EYLF Learning Outcomes.

3. How Can You Build Educator Confidence in Sustainability?

Building confidence requires deliberate strategy. Here are practical approaches that work:

Tailored Professional Learning: Support your team to build capacity focused on holistic sustainability aligned with EYLF 2.0. Understand where educators are now and design learning that grows from there. This isn't generic training, it's contextual, ongoing, and connected to your service's unique strengths and challenges.

Peer Learning and Mentoring: Create Professional Learning Teams (PLTs) to share the research and planning. Or pair educators with more experience with those building capability. Encourage observation and storytelling between rooms and services. When educators witness peers successfully navigating sustainability challenges, and when knowledge is shared openly rather than held by individuals, confidence spreads. Showcase examples of integrated sustainability practice from real ECEC settings, not theoretical ideals, but what's actually working. This collaborative sharing normalises the learning journey and builds collective capability.

Visible Leadership and Role Modelling: Educational leaders, directors, and sustainability champions should model learning in action, sharing progress, reflections, and missteps openly. When leaders admit what they don't know and invite collaborative problem-solving, it gives permission to the entire team. Visibility normalises that sustainability is a journey, builds trust, and shows educators that confidence grows through collective learning, not individual mastery.

Celebrate Small Wins: Acknowledge milestones, a new project, deeper family engagement, or integration across domains. Recognition isn't just nice, it reinforces confidence and builds momentum across the team.

Provide Practical Resources and Frameworks: Offer tools that reduce overwhelm: planning templates, reflection guides, project frameworks that embed inquiry and systems thinking. Use examples drawn from your own service context so educators can see themselves in the practice.

Allocate Time for Reflection: Dedicate time specifically for sustainability planning and reflection. Treat it as pedagogical work, not an extra task squeezed in. This signals that sustainability is core to your practice.

4. What Does Growing Confidence Look Like in Your Service?

Confidence growth shows up in observable ways. Watch for:

• More educators initiating sustainability projects and investigations without prompting

• Sustainability integrated naturally into programs, not added as separate activities

• Documentation showing children's thinking and decision-making about sustainable choices

• Families and community members actively engaged in projects

• Regular discussions of sustainability in planning and reflection meetings

• Educators expressing greater clarity: "We know how to respond" instead of "We're not sure where to start"

These signs indicate that confidence is shifting from individual to collective, a signal that systemic change is underway.

5. Free Tools to Support Building Educator Confidence

Access the Full Sustainability Snapshot Compare your service with others across Australia. The Snapshot provides data-backed insights into confidence levels, implementation barriers, and what services at different stages of development are actually doing. See where your strengths lie and what opportunities exist.

Download the EYLF Principle Decoder This practical decoder breaks down the EYLF 2.0 Sustainability Principle into observable practices across the three domains. It helps your team see exactly what embedding sustainability looks like in your unique context and where you already have strengths.

6. How to Design a Confidence-Building Plan for Your Service

Confidence doesn't appear overnight. It grows through intentional strategy aligned to your context, your team's needs, and your service's starting point.

Book a strategy call with Project Sustainability Collective. We will help you:

• Assess your team's current confidence levels and understanding

• Identify the barriers holding your service back (is it conceptual clarity, practical skills, time, or support?)

• Design a realistic professional learning pathway tailored to your service

• Create achievable next steps that build momentum without overwhelming your team

• Connect confidence-building to your Quality Improvement Plan and EYLF 2.0 implementation

8. Turning Confidence Into Collective Action

Confidence is not optional, it is the hidden key to embedding sustainability across Australian ECEC. It determines whether the EYLF 2.0 Sustainability Principle becomes lived practice or remains a statement on paper.

As you reflect with your team this term, consider:

• Which educators feel most confident about sustainability? How can you leverage their confidence?

• What small wins could you celebrate to build momentum?

• What single professional learning opportunity would make the biggest difference for your team?

• How can you create time and space for reflection without adding to workload?

These questions are the start of building confidence at scale, from individual educators to team culture to whole-service practice.

Lil and Bron

About the Authors

Bronwyn Cron is a sustainability and STEM specialist with over a decade of experience supporting ECEC services to embed sustainability through strengths-based, whole-of-service practice. Her approach centres on making sustainability accessible and integrated rather than burdensome.

Lili-Ann Kriegler is an educational consultant, author, and Reggio Emilia specialist known for her work in conceptual learning, creative inquiry, and curriculum design. She brings deep expertise in how children learn and how educators can support meaningful, integrated practice.

Together at Project Sustainability Collective, they offer a rare blend of educational insight, systems thinking, and practical implementation support, delivered with warmth, clarity, and humour. Based in Melbourne, they work with services in person and online to transform sustainability from an add-on activity into a core educational approach.