Nurturing the spiritual child: Recognising, addressing and nurturing spirituality in early years’ classrooms through a dispositional framework

© 2018 selection and editorial matter, Marian de Souza and Anna Halafoff; individual chapters, the contributors. Until recently, Australia has made little provision in legislation for the inclusion of the spiritual in education. The Education Act of 1872 made clear that state education was to be free, compulsory and secular. Terence Lovat (2010) argues that documents which followed the Education Act in the 1880s and 1890s made reference to religion (and, by implication, spirituality because of its then close association with religion), permitting volunteers from church denominations to provide, with parental permission, religious instruction to students. However, most state school students received little in the way of religious or spiritual education. The free, compulsory and secular tenets of education in Australia have remained virtually intact to the present day, with relatively little provision in legislation for the inclusion of religion or spirituality within the formal curriculum.