Caring for kids - a community concern?

As the saying goes, it takes a community to raise a child, and increasingly in today's society we need to think about child care as a community concern. According to Macquarie University early childhood experts, a consistent national approach is needed to ensure our communities are guaranteed of quality in child care.

The Institute for Early Childhood's Associate Professor Manjula Waniganayake believes that if you want to address quality in child care you also have to address the issue of family support.

"More women are now having children at a later stage in life and due to the age of their own parents, may not be able to call on them for support," Waniganayake says.

This statement is supported by research conducted in 2004 by Macquarie University's Dr Catherine McMahon and Dr Frances Gibson who looked at the social and psychological impacts of women delaying childbearing. They found that older women had fewer people they could call on for practical and emotional support.

Head of the Institute of Early Childhood Professor Jennifer Bowes and child psychologist Associate Professor Judy Ungerer are lead researchers on the Child Care Choices Project, a longitudinal study into the child care choices of Australian families.

Bowes explains that their study has shown that by far the strongest predictor of outcomes for children in child care is the families they come from - not their child care experience.

"Parents are far more influential on their child than the staff at a child care centre," she says. "What seems to have the greatest link to a child's development is the nature of the family situation and the level of support the primary caregiver has outside the family, rather than anything relating to their child care arrangements."

For those of us who have children in child care, centre staff often form part of the community that provides us with that valuable support. Waniganayake recalls that when her own children were in child care, the staff - who her kids adored - were like an extension of her family.

Waniganayake is a former moderator of the Quality Improvement and Accreditation System (QIAS) for long day care centres and has looked at how the child care system works from a policy perspective.

"There is no doubt that accreditation has improved the overall quality of child care services in Australia," she says. "When the QIAS was set up it made a huge difference in raising community awareness about quality, and when you have an informed public looking for services for children there is a likelihood that these services will improve."

Waniganayake explains that according to the research, three criteria are required to ensure quality in early childhood programs. These are the employment of qualified staff (especially university educated early childhood teachers), staffing above the current regulatory child/staff ratios to allow for nurturing engagement rather than controlling management of children, and small group sizes to facilitate learning and to allow for the development of secure and caring relationships.

These criteria are based on extensive research and are widely accepted as the benchmark for quality. However, the problem lies in the fact that there are variable regulations around Australia to enforce the standard to which these criteria must be met.

"Some states are better than others at setting the standards," she says.

Federal Minister for Families, Community and Indigenous Affairs the Hon Mal Brough recently announced that the National Childcare Accreditation Council (NCAC) would introduce random spot visits to child care services across Australia within the next 12 months.

The IEC's Associate Professor Alma Fleet recently wrote to the Minister on behalf of the Institute of Early Childhood Working Party expressing concern that these spot checks, while welcome, should not be seen as the answer to ensuring quality. The letter called for the Government to introduce national regulatory requirements to ensure that centres around Australia comply with the same high standards for ensuring quality.

Of even more concern are the largely unregulated and rapidly growing areas of outside school hours care and family day care. Waniganayake explains that the NCAC has developed national accreditation standards for these two areas as well. However, because it is relatively new, it is difficult to assess the impact of accreditation in terms of quality improvement.

"If nothing else, we need university qualified teachers so that we can take it for granted that our children, when not with their families, are being handled during early childhood by someone who has been appropriately trained."

The research conducted by Bowes and Ungerer confirms that the qualifications of staff are directly related to the quality of interactions between child and carer.

"Better qualified people give quality care, but at the moment there is a huge shortage of university qualified early childhood teachers," Bowes says.

It is little wonder considering the poor salaries they are paid (according to The Sydney Morning Herald some child care workers in NSW are paid so poorly they qualify for pensions), but despite that Bowes says there is always unmet demand for Macquarie University’s early childhood teaching program from people who are clearly not in it for the money.

“In an ideal world the salaries of early childhood teachers would be the same as primary school teachers,” says Bowes. “The early years are very important as children develop so much during that period and early childhood teachers are required to have a lot of knowledge about child development.”

However, the funding of child care is a major issue, with the Government opting for a user-pays model, meaning that parents in some major metropolitan areas are paying up to $100 a day per child. And while early childhood staff should surely be paid more money, under the current arrangements any salary increases would need to be funded by parents, which is just not possible for already financially stretched families.

There are variable regulations around Australia to enforce the standard to which the criteria [for ensuring quality in child care] must be met.

Waniganayake believes that the Government needs to take on a more active role in supporting families with young children, including the funding of community based not-for-profit child care services, introducing maternity leave provisions, and family leave to support parents when children are unwell.

Bowes, Ungerer and Waniganayake all agree that the child care industry should not be a profit-making industry and that it is the non-profit centres that have set the high standards to begin with.

“This is one area where all money should be ploughed back into the centre, not for private gain,” Ungerer says.

“These days child care costs are as much as sending a child to a private school,” Waniganayake says. “Private schools get government subsidies but this type of funding doesn’t extend to child care or preschools. Early childhood education should also be one of the Government’s funding priorities.”

Families today have to consider the costs of child care from birth till their children leave primary school at age 12.

“Overall, we need to look at the adequacy of support currently available to communities to cater for the health, education and wellbeing of children under the age of 12. Until that time there needs to be systemic support involving Government assistance to families with young children,” says Waniganayake.