Ian McLean Green candidate for Tauranga

It is one thing to throw out the family jewels – as this government proposes to do with profit-making enterprises such as energy companies. It is something else again to throw out the family itself.

Currently up for submissions is a government-funded report on early childhood education – the ECE. Cleverly presented and listing large numbers of references, the report is a thinly-disguised exercise – designed to force parents back to work so they can afford to pay more for child care.

That is an ideological win-win; parents are working; trained childcare educators are also working; the employment rate goes up.

Unfortunately, it is also a practical lose-lose. The list of losers is too long to give here, but includes choice of childcare service, certain ECE providers, the communities who suffer the long-term effects of this social engineering, the parents who are forced to give up the early years with their children and the children themselves.

A very clever smokescreen was developed by the authors of the report. Define 'quality” ECE as that which is provided by trained teachers – according to Essay 1, quality means 'well educated and adequately paid”. Show that children benefit from 'high quality” ECE. Recommend that ECE systems using trained teachers are the only types of ECE to be given quality government funding.

Shock-horror. It seems that we have been funding apparently 'low quality” ECE systems for decades. We better cease and desist pronto.

Our government has also recently reduced funding rates to ECE centres, arguing that only 80 per cent of the staff need to be trained. This policy change has, in effect, punished those centres for achieving the outcome recommended by the report.

It is an unfortunate reality for this report that the literature on quality and quantity of ECE for children is complex and contradictory and does not reliably show that quality of ECE is key to creating quality adults. Some studies show that quantity is more important than quality, with both too little and too much childcare having negative long-term effects.

Any decent researcher knows how to cherry-pick published results to support a desired conclusion. Certainly, that was done here.

Particularly important for positive long-term outcomes are low teacher:student ratios and caring and supportive learning environments. The report says so, but then seems to forget this advice. These criteria should be central to any definition of 'high quality” ECE. But they apply best to exactly those ECE providers that are cast aside as low quality in the report – kohanga reo, playcentre and home-based care.

'Training”, as in a tertiary course or diploma in ECE, does not adequately represent these criteria and is far too narrowly framed to encapsulate the life experience and training brought to ECE centres by parents and caregivers.

More important is that the 'research” done on ECE systems in New Zealand that should form the primary resource for this extremely important analysis, has apparently not been done. This report therefore uses a second smokescreen of 'submissions” from the New Zealand community as its primary database. Such a source is low quality, poorly controlled, unlikely to be representative and does not address the key issues in a structured – scientific – way.

I am gob-smacked. The developmental roots of our community are under attack here. Principles and practice that have been developed over decades are about to be tossed out like garbage. Why? Well, ideology and budgetary nit-picking appear to be the driving forces, with child and community well-being coming a distant second.
Want to know more? Visit www.taskforce.ece.govt.nz