Autumn 2007

Early childhood education & care

Looking to the future

Alison Elliott understands that building early childhood centres that blend the best care and education traditions requires a well-articulated commitment to children and their futures and should be a community, state and national priority.

Internationally, Australia is known for its quality early childhood education and the expertise of our early childhood educators. Our Quality Improvement and Accreditation System is a world leader in quality assurance processes for child care but more broadly there are major concerns about availability, access, cost and quality. Our best early childhood programs are world class. Our worst, while probably better than those in largely unregulated environments like the USA, leave a lot to be desired.

Perhaps the biggest problem though is that tens of thousands of Australian children miss out on early education in the critical years before school and many more are underserviced. Many families can’t access any early education. In 2005, 83 per cent of four year olds, 63 per cent of three year olds and 41 per cent of two year olds participated in formal early childhood care and education, most for under ten hours per week. Child care fees where centres exist rival those of the most elite independent schools. Preschool fees vary dramatically depending on the state and the extent to which preschools are linked to the school system.

A major change in the early childhood landscape that has caught many people by surprise, even within the sector, is its transformation from a predominantly publicly provided and operated community sector to one that is largely business focused and market driven. Today over 70 per cent of child care centres are commercially owned and operated and this proportion is growing. Nearly 90 per cent of Queensland’s child care centres are commercial concerns.

Despite pro-public education lobby groups’ outcry about independent schools—which are non-profit concerns run by parent led boards—there is barely a whisper about the shift from a community-based, non-profit early childhood education sector to private, for-profit, tax-payer subsidised sector. Typically, child care centres get about 60 per cent of their revenue from government subsidies in the form of the Child Care Benefit—a voucher-like child care subsidy scheme. Early childhood care and education is now big business. At least two child care chains are listed on the stock exchange, and profits, market capitalisation, and share prices have skyrocketed.

Early childhood education is at a critical juncture. And no one denies the seriousness and complexity of the situation. How we value, nurture and educate young children is central to who we are as a community and a nation. Careful thought and the right decisions now will result in high quality care and education for all young children. The wrong ones mean long-term problems, especially for the most fragile and vulnerable children and families. So the community costs are high all round.

Clearly, the early childhood landscape has grown and improved to reflect changes to workforce composition and participation, and knowledge about the long-term social, cognitive and educational importance of the early years.

Today’s early childhood services sector has its origins in long-standing historical and territorial traditions that saw child care as a welfare concern and preschool or kindergarten ‘education’ as a middle-class family service. These have been compounded by policy and funding environments that enabled large scale, generally unplanned and uncoordinated growth in child care and the dramatic expansion of private, for-profit operators.

The resulting patchwork of services and variations in quality is worrying. For a start, ‘child care’ is federally funded and preschool or kindergarten ‘education’ is state funded. While most child care services operate within the letter and spirit of state-based regulations and the federally operated Quality Improvement and Accreditation System, the licensing and quality assurance provisions are most concerned with basic care and safety standards, rather than top-of-the-range developmental and educational experiences. There is no quality assurance scheme for preschools and kindergartens operating outside the school system, no accreditation system for early childhood courses, no registration scheme for early childhood practitioners and no measures or monitoring of outcomes for children.

For example, research shows that staff quality and qualifications are the key to quality early development and learning environments, yet few child care centres have a full complement of qualified early childhood staff. About half the staff in child care have no formal early childhood qualifications.

Achieving quality experiences and outcomes for children requires educators who have good training, credentials, and on-going mentoring, support and professional development. But even if there were enough qualified staff available to work, the high cost of employing them is prohibitive. Already, the costs of child care and preschool are beyond the reach of many families.

One of the areas that needs most careful review over the next few years is Family Day Care. Family Day Care works on the basis of home-based carers who operate within ‘schemes’ typically run by local government or community-based organisations. Carers are typically mothers (or grandmothers) who care for up to five young children including their own. They are generally supported with home visits, playgroups, resources and short training courses.

While there are many excellent Family Day Care homes, and many families prefer this more ‘intimate’ and ‘personalised’ care, quality varies dramatically depending on the scheme, geographic region, socio-economic status of the community and individual variation within homes and schemes. Carers have support from scheme coordinators and child development officers, and more recently a national quality assurance process, but the level and quality of support varies.

Family Day Care can be a very successful alternative to formal child care centres for babies and toddlers. But although many carers are wonderfully warm and nurturing, they tend not to have formal early childhood qualifications and this compromises their ability to provide stimulating developmental environments for small groups of children. Older children, especially in the year or two before school, require rich early childhood programs with qualified early childhood educators.

All children need access to developmentally and educationally significant early childhood programs. Anything less ignores the strong evidence of the positive impact of quality early childhood experiences on longer term educational outcomes—not to mention peace of mind for working parents.

Careful planning is required to ensure that new and existing child care places end up where there is demand. Strategic thinking in conjunction with local government is needed to target areas of high and likely demand. A vacant child care place in western Sydney is not much use to a family in north-west Melbourne.

Training capacity and funded places must be boosted to ensure an adequate supply of early childhood educators for now and in the longer term. But capacity building is slow, and even with appropriate funding and support there will be ongoing difficulties in attracting students to early childhood education courses and then enticing them to jobs in the field. Degree qualified staff generally prefer the school sector where salaries and working conditions are better than in child care.

The key issue in early childhood care and education is not so much lack of places but where they are located, their quality and how much they cost. Child care places must be linked to family and community needs. Getting the match right isn’t easy. Some families prefer a child care centre or preschool close to home so that children remain in their neighbourhood and then move on to school with peers. Some prefer early education and care at the site where their child will go to school. Others want centres close to their work place. Still others prefer child care in their own home.

Whatever the needs for children and families, quality early childhood services are expensive to establish and run. Clearly, the greatest capital expenses are in cities with high land and building costs. At the operational level, salaries are the biggest expense. Obviously, salary levels are linked to qualifications and experience so the best qualified staff are the most expensive. Given high staffing costs it is not surprising that many centres stick to a mix of trained and untrained staff despite evidence linking better qualifications and staff–child ratios to better outcomes for children.

The goodwill surrounding care and early education has never been stronger. There is no better time to set aside ideologies, market forces, turf wars, and partisan party politics for children’s and families’ futures. But action must be swift and decisive or the already complicated and unwieldy early childhood sector will become more difficult to navigate and to fix.

Good early understandings, skills and knowledge hold the key to later educational success. The greatest promise lies in school-based or school-linked services that provide integrated child care and education and then facilitate seamless transitions to school. With names like ‘Early Learning Centres’, ‘joined up services’ or ‘integrated’ services these have the potential to provide quality child-centred early experiences that are a social investment in the present and in the future.

Reference

A detailed discussion of these issues, references and further readings is provided in Elliott, A (2006). ‘Early Childhood Education: Pathways to quality and equity for all children’, Australian Education Review, No. 50. Whole issue: www.acer.edu.au

Alison Elliott is director of Early Childhood Education Research at the Australian Council for Educational Research.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au