Editorial: Changing priorities for kindies

Kindergarten teachers do not normally march in the streets, at least not over something as apparently trifling as an extra hour of teaching every day. The Ministry of Education and kindergarten associations want the teachers to be with the children for 35 hours a week in full-day kindergartens; the teachers want to do no more than 30 hours of "contact" a week. They also want to be guaranteed the same holidays as primary schools while their employers want "flexibility" in holiday entitlements to better meet the needs of working parents.

That summary sounds like a fairly standard industrial dispute, not enough surely to have kindy teachers marching and chanting and stopping traffic in 22 towns and cities last week and threatening more of the same this week. But behind the issues of contact hours and holidays this seems to be a dispute about the future of kindergartens in an age of working parents.

The free kindergarten movement was the pioneer of preschool education in this country. It offered children a few hours a day of professionally supervised activities that were intended to prepare them educationally and socially for compulsory schooling. A half-day of stimulating activity was said to be all that could be expected of infants, but today's working parents need and expect full day child care. Something has to give. Will it be the educational values of the traditional kindergarten that must give way to the child-minding priorities of working couples? The kindy teachers are saying no, which is one reason their banners and chants are about the quality of their work rather than their pay and conditions.

But the teachers are often working parents themselves and they will be sympathetic to the demand for full day care. They need to explain, to parents and the public whose support they seek on the streets, how kindergartens are supposed to provide a full service with teachers who will do only 30 contact hours a week. Who can be hired to do the extra 10 hours of child minding and who pays?

Already kindergartens are compromising their character to compete in the booming new industry of child care. Some are introducing compulsory fees, ending a 100-year tradition of free kindergarten, to cope with reduced rolls, fewer volunteers and full day services. But that will change the year after next when the Government intends to begin funding 20 hours of free early-childhood education for all breeds of child care that meet a certain standard of staff training and qualifications. Kindergartens are steadily losing their distinction and that is regrettable if, as the striking teachers claim, they are also giving away some of their educational quality.

Not all couples with children put them in day care from infancy. Those who sacrifice some income to look after a child at home would value the traditional sessional kindergarten which is geared to educational activity rather than day-long care. Possibly there are too few stay-home parents now to sustain sessional kindergartens but, if so, the country has lost something precious.

It would be good to believe that, with the right balance of teachers' contact and preparation hours, infants who spend all day at a kindergarten could gain as much educational value as they used to in a more concentrated span, but it seems unlikely. Children who attend care centres all day every day come sometimes in a condition that would cause a non-working parent to keep the child at home.

The teachers might hope to be employed on the same terms as primary school teachers but they are being drawn remorselessly into the day-care industry. That is sad for them, and for preschool education.