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AUSTRALIA

Quality childcare an investment in the future

  • 17 October 2014

Childhood looks different for each generation. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are lining toy shelves all over again, yet the daily patterns of life look very different for today’s children than they did for their parents. 

While the majority of children growing up in the 1980s were cared for full-time by a parent, those eighties children who are parents today are likely to be combining paid employment and parenting demands.

The majority of children under the age of twelve in Australia now participate in some type of regular childcare. A large swathe of formal early education and care has become commercialised, generating about $10 billion annually.

The workforce has changed and so has family life, but funding and policies relating to childcare have some catching up to do. Parents in urban centres are putting their unborn children down on dozens of waiting lists in the hope that space will be available in a childcare facility months or years later when it is needed. The system is undoubtedly in need of improvement, and the Productivity Commission has been tasked with identifying how that could be done.

The Productivity Commission’s Inquiry has been asked to achieve twin goals that tend to tug in opposite directions. On one hand there is a desire to make childcare and early learning services as affordable and flexible as possible. Where children are seen as a barrier to workforce participation, childcare is presumed to be a solution to that obstacle. If workforce participation is your goal, it makes sense to keep costs low and remove barriers, to incentivise paid employment.

But the other priority, which is perhaps easier to ignore, has to do with the quality of care and learning offered. The Commission has been asked to address not only parents’ needs in relation to their participation in the paid workforce, but also the learning and development needs of children. In a tug of war between these competing goals, it is the needs of children that should be given priority. The early years of a child’s life set their course for the decades that follow.

Childcare centres may have begun as a pragmatic solution to a labour market problem, but they are more than a babysitting service. They are now one of the primary contexts in which our children are growing up. We need to ensure the services are the best they can be.

In recent years, the National Quality Framework and National Quality
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