Call for action on preschool blackspot

Mission Heights School principal Veena Vohra (left) and Auckland Kindergarten Association manager Tanya Harvey at the site of the long-planned kindergarten. Photo / Dean Purcell

Education Minister Anne Tolley has asked Manukau community leaders to draw up an urgent plan to meet a desperate need for early childhood education in South Auckland.

Mrs Tolley met school principals, the Manukau City Council and the City of Manukau Education Trust (Comet) on the eve of the Job Summit in Manukau last week to seek advice on how to boost preschool education rates in the city, which are among the country's lowest.

She has asked for a report back from the community in time to earmark spending in the May 28 Budget.

The initiative could provide much-needed work for builders who have suffered a 41 per cent plunge in building permits for new houses in South Auckland last year, the steepest fall in the country.

It will also be welcome news for families in new housing areas such as Flat Bush, where a kindergarten has been planned for five years on the site of the Mission Heights primary and junior high schools, which opened last month.

Auckland Kindergarten Association manager Tanya Harvey said the association had lobbied for five years and spent $60,000 on plans for the site, but was turned down for a $1 million building grant from the Ministry of Education last October because its application was three days late.

She appealed to Mrs Tolley in January to release urgent funds for the project, but Mrs Tolley said yesterday that it would not be fair to treat any applicant differently from others.

Mrs Harvey said the association would have to apply again in the ministry's normal funding round next month.

"We may not know if we've been successful until June or July, which means opening in mid-2010," she said.

Mission Heights Primary School principal Veena Vohra said she had told parents last year that she hoped the early childhood centre would be ready to open at the same time as the schools last month. More recently she had told them she hoped it would open later this year.

"We can't wait for them to get stuck in," she said. "We have no kindergarten in the community here."

Comet chief executive Bernardine Vester said there were only 11,500 places in licensed preschool centres for Manukau's 28,000 children under the age of 5.

"It is a scandal that there has been very poor investment in early childhood services in high-need communities over recent years," she said.

The previous Labour Government announced before the November election that it would spend $9 million over two years to build preschool education centres at nine Manukau schools: Greenmeadows Intermediate, Homai Primary, James Cook High, Mangere Bridge, Mangere East, Mansell Senior, Sir Douglas Bader Intermediate, Weymouth and Manurewa West schools.

But Mrs Tolley said she had frozen that plan because it was based on an unrealistic expectation of "build something and they will come".

A community meeting on Manukau early childhood education will be held at Nga Tapuwae Community Centre, Mangere, from 3-5pm on March 19.