Kids count – better early childhood education and care in australia
Book launch by
Elizabeth Broderick
Sex Discrimination
Commissioner
Human Rights and Equal Opportunity
Commission
12 November 2007
It gives me great pleasure to be here today to launch “Kids Count – Better Early childhood education and care in Australia”.
This book brings together a range of leading academics to create the vision for a much needed universal, early childhood education and care system. It follows a national workshop on Childcare: A Better Policy Framework for Australia held in July 2006.
Child care and early education has been on the agenda for a number of years now thanks largely to the efforts of many people in the room today. It is an issue that is dear to every working parent’s heart. However, it is also a very complex area of policy which I why I think it is taking us so long to get it right. I know in my role as Sex Discrimination Commissioner people often ask me about childcare. And having only had time to scratch the surface, I give the standard response about the need for care to be – affordable, accessible and high quality. It gives me great confidence when I read the work of Elizabeth Hill, Barbara Pocock and Alison Elliott and the many other contributors to this book that we have the research base, the quality academics and importantly, a will to articulate what that system should look like.
There has been much debate over the last few years as to whether child care has a positive or negative impact on a child’s growth. Many parents carry guilt about whether the care option they select is the best option for their children. As a working mother of 2 small children it is an issue that prior to the birth of my children I hadn’t really considered. But as soon as the babies came, it became my major preoccupation. And it continues to tease my brain as I wrestle with the issues of before and after school care and vacation care and ...the rest.
Over the years I have worked with many working parents who have each tried a range of different care and early education options and sworn by their individual choice. So I think being able to choose what style of care and early education suits your child is important. But there is one unifying and over-riding theme –the quality of the options must be high. There is a strong link between quality and positive outcomes for children. How we ensure quality is an important topic for discussion which is picked up in this book.
That is not to say that affordability and accessibility are not also vitally important but quality is paramount. I have yet to see a mother who is happy in the workplace when she is very unhappy about the quality of care for her children. Ensuring and maintaining quality is a complex issue and I was delighted to see that the book addresses this question and sets out 10 policy principles to deliver a better early childhood and care regime in Australia.
The other issues of course are accessibility and cost. I am soon to embark on a nation wide listening tour to speak to women and men, particularly those with caring responsibilities about how we can best support people to balance work and family responsibilities over the life cycle. This will include in remote, regional and metropolitan Australia, and one of the recurring themes that I anticipate is the availability and affordability of childcare. Or perhaps I should say, the lack of availability and affordability.
As more women have moved into the paid workforce the role of informal and formal child care in assisting families to raise their children has increased. For families, especially those in which parents are hoping to share the unpaid responsibilities of family life and for sole parents, formal childcare is critical to the capacity of women, and men, to participate in the paid work force.
The workforce participation rate of women with two or more children in Australia is mid to low by western standards- only 43% are in any kind of paid work, including part time, compared with over eighty percent in Scandinavian countries and well over sixty percent in the UK and the US. It is often said that this reflects Australia’s greater prosperity and commitment to family-life. However, not only are there not any noticeably better family outcomes in Australia compared with other countries (there are many who would argue that in fact our high divorce rate and record levels of childhood obesity and diabetes might suggest no better at all) but it might just be that this lower participation rate reflects a poor availability of child care and an inability to balance work and family rather than an unwillingness to work.
A national study conducted by the New South Wales Equal Opportunity Practitioners Association found that one in four workers with caring responsibilities have reduced their hours of work due to the high cost of care. Obviously this doesn’t include people who have dropped out of work altogether, which is certainly likely to be at least as big a group. Certainly single mothers will tell you that finding affordable, quality child care that fits with part time or non-standard working hours is extremely difficult.
The high cost of quality childcare is always in the mind of parents and has been something that has been emphasised to me in my short time as Sex Discrimination Commissioner. Childcare fees in some areas can cost up to one hundred dollars a day, but unlike many other measures of cost-of-living, much of regional and even rural Australia is not far behind.
Widely available, affordable and quality childcare is a critical plank in allowing parents, especially mothers to participate in the paid work force.
But as this book points out, the overall guiding principle of early childhood education and care should not be solely to facilitate the return to work of parents but rather to promote the well being of all children. We need to have in place a universal, high quality system of care and early education that supports children’s development and educational needs.
What gives me confidence is that, as this book demonstrates, there is a growing body of research underpinned by leading academics, many of whom are here today, which can assist policy makers design a system in Australia which enhances the well being of the next generation of Australians and ultimately the well being of our society.
- Related Link - Kids count. Sydney University Press.
