Sandie Dodds: Childcare funding move denies choice to parents

COMMENT

It was with amazement on Budget day that I read of the Minister of Education's plan to provide 20 hours a week of free early childhood education but only to children who attended community-owned centres.

In our town there are two popular all day private preschool and education centres. There are no community-owned centres. The nearest community-owned centre is in a city about an hour's drive away.

Does the minister plan to buy us out and turn us into community-owned centres so families can access his funding? Does he plan to provide daily buses to the city for all the families who would like to take advantage of his free funding offer? It seems unlikely.

The plan as it stands discriminates against our parents by taking away their choice and telling them how and where they should educate their children.

And surely it must do the same for low-income parents around the country who will be desperate for the financial relief that the funding brings but whose children's education will be restricted to the centres to which the Government gives the funding.

The minister's overall plans for a funding structure that incorporates quality early-childhood education and trained and registered teachers are good ones. In line with this, wouldn't funding for free preschool education be better spent if it was based around whether a centre met certain childcare and education standards? It would ensure that children were going to centres that did a good job.

Before opening my centre 10 years ago there was no all-day education and care centre in our town and I surveyed parents to see what they wanted.

One thing that emerged was that they were more than happy to pay reasonable rates for a privately run, quality service (it meant they didn't have to spend hours fundraising and mowing lawns and doing all those things that can take up so much of parents' time at community centres) with opportunities to be involved if they wished.

One of the biggest issues my teachers can see with the policy is quality of education. Twenty hours for free is a good offer and parents will want to take advantage of that.

If there was a community-owned centre in this town we envisage parents having no choice but to put their child into it.

The community-owned centre would then be running a waiting list with parents using our private centre for the interim. With children attending our centre for a short time we know all sorts of problems can arise.

Children do not settle easily and it takes a long time to obtain their trust so they are ready to learn.

Planning for a child's individual care and education is also compromised by the uncertainty of a short-term stay and learning is limited when that happens. Just as a child settles down, a place will come up at the community-owned centre and the child will have to go through those changes again, setting him or her back in their development.

Many of our children start with us at six months and stay until they start school and they form strong bonds with our teaching staff. If the town was to get a community-owned centre, with the high child turnover we expect under the proposed system, I know my teachers would not be able to deliver the level of service they would want to.

And for private owners of centres, one of the main incentives for being in this business - delivering quality education to the best of their ability - would also disappear.

The commitment private operators make to early childhood education is immense. When we started our centre 10 years ago, we put up my house and my business partner's farm to guarantee the loans we needed to renovate an unused hospital wing. We have since bought land and established a purpose-built centre.

It's a lifetime's investment and it was made because of the belief that the town needed quality early childcare and education. If our town now also had a community-owned centre, the decision from Wellington would stop us dead, as it surely will other private operators.

As it stands, all it will do is alienate parents who want to be with us but who see the Government offering money if they patronise a centre the Government wants them to use. If the amount of funding available is the issue for Trevor Mallard then surely giving, say, 10 free hours to every child would be more equitable than limiting the 20 hours funding to particular centres.

Mr Mallard has sent us three large parcels of pamphlets to distribute to our families advertising his scheme. He wants us to advertise that he thinks parents have made the wrong choice by coming to our centre. Mr Mallard can expect three large parcels by return mail any day now.

* Sandie Dodds is the co-owner of Big River Educare, a private early childhood care and education centre in Balclutha, Otago, which is licensed for 59 children.