Few educational advantages in long daycare

Childcare is a business, not an arm of the education system. Does it really help education standards or assuage parental guilt and encourage taxpayer-funded customers?

Children during crafting activities at Lyons Early Childhood School in Canberra. (AAP Image/Lukas Coch)

The federal government is planning to extend the subsidies for childcare to people earning up to $530,000 a year to encourage more mothers into the paid workforce.

This is touted as the panacea for inflation and the cost-of-living crisis through better productivity. Never mind about the productive unpaid work mothers have to do.

The economic geniuses who thought this up have ignored the fact that, in the past, huge lifts in productivity from women’s workforce participation have not occurred in Australia.

That is because, despite ever-growing childcare subsidies, Australian women have been rather stubborn in their preferences and patterns of attachment, and non-attachment, to work. The decision to work is governed by two things: the domestic sphere, such as the baby, and punishing rates of taxation. Consequently, most Australian mothers work part time and return to full-time work only when their youngest child is at school. That has been the pattern for a generation.

So, putting up the childcare subsidy threshold seems like a classic case of churn, and a lot of money might be spent for not much proved result.

Professionals and semi-professional women might benefit from this huge expansion in what used to be called middle-class welfare, an epithet formerly aimed at stay-at-home mothers on relatively meagre incomes who didn’t expect state subsidies for their children’s care.

There have been many longitudinal studies in the US, Canada, New Zealand and in this country that have expressed the view that long daycare for infants under two is not good. It has been reinforced by research on stress-related cortisol studies of infants in long daycare. It is not until after the age of two that children become social beings. So short periods of childcare over two is OK for most kids.

However, lately there has been a lot of commentary about childcare’s so-called educational advantages, especially since 2005 when institutional care was magically turned into education and care and childcare workers were turned into educators.

This resulted in the push to set up more preschool programs in childcare centres – a move particularly attractive to ambitious parents of the sort the government wants to encourage back into the workforce and that assuages guilt by selling it as part of children’s education.

In the past there was little educational advantage in childcare for three and four-year-olds. However, this latest push for the education advantage in childcare is confusing. Is it really just for the children or is it designed as a positive reinforcement for insecure parents? You Work, We Educate is the message, an agenda that real­ly appeals to young semi-professionals and tradies.

But remember, childcare is a business, not an arm of the education system. Will it raise our woeful educational standards or simply raise the profile of the business and encourage taxpayer-funded customers? How valid is the education and care mantra?

To raise the standard of education, preschool curriculums have been introduced in many centres for three and four-year-olds. However, there is a huge difference between preschool and childcare.

The quality of the preschool curriculum in childcare centres is variable, to say the least. Terms such as educators applied to all and sundry actually cover up the fact that the workers are not teachers, and there is a lot of tension between the so-called educators and real preschool teachers.

There are really three levels of qualification for early childhood education in the ACT and NSW. There is a basic diploma in early childhood. Many people teaching the preschool programs at long daycare centres only have that.

However, only a real preschool teacher with a bachelor degree in early childhood can teach preschool. This is a true teaching degree that allows teaching in a designated preschool and they can teach from pre-year 2.

In some childcare centres with preschool programs some of the educators have bachelor degrees, though many don’t.

Even if they have a bachelor degree, if they happen to work in a childcare centre some teachers have to put up with the conditions of a childcare worker.

What is more, long daycare is lucrative. So, some early learning centres for three to five-year-olds have changed to basically long daycare because there is more money to be made.

This mishmash is overseen by the Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority, which a lot of disgruntled teachers have told me has a lot of authority, not much quality.

The best preschool system in the country and the one state governments should be emulating is probably in the ACT, where almost all the children attend preschool when aged four.

All teachers in ACT preschools have a bachelor degree in early childhood education. Preschools in Canberra are now attached to the primary schools and are really part of children’s school education. They are not childcare centres.

So, parents have to make up their minds if they want daycare or preschool. Having both in the same setting is difficult, but not impossible.

However, it doesn’t do parents and children any service for journalists, politicians and stakeholders in the childcare industry to deliberately blur the distinction between education and care to further a questionable policy that is economically optimistic at best, inequitable and unfair at worst.