Investing in Children? Privatisation and Early Childhood Education and Care in Aotearoa New Zealand
UPDATE: The authors have also used their report here to inform a peer-reviewed paper: Challenging the old normal: Privatisation in Aotearoa’s early childhood care and education sector. by Caitlin Neuwelt-Kearns and Jenny Ritchie. Early Education Journal 66 (2020): 61-68
Access to quality early childhood education (ECE) is crucial for children, families, and society at large. ECE services can provide foundational learning experiences for children, but also provide emotional and parenting support for families. In particular, the gains from attending quality ECE services are greatest among children from low-income households. For this reason, ECE has the potential to act as an ‘equaliser’, and a vehicle for mitigating child poverty in Aotearoa. However, attendance at an ECE service is not universally beneficial for all children. It is imperative that the sector is providing good quality and culturally appropriate services, particularly as children are spending increasingly more time in care. Poor quality ECE can have a detrimental impact on a child’s wellbeing, and in some cases may be worse than attending no early learning service at all. Reports of bad treatment from other children, or from teachers themselves, including physical and verbal abuse, have made headlines in recent years and illustrate a sector under significant stress.
In this report, we highlight some of the challenges within the sector at present, arguing that Covid-19 has presented an opportunity for long-needed reform. With occupancy rates expected to decrease in the face of an economic downturn and rising unemployment, now is a prime opportunity for reconsidering the trajectory of the sector prior to Covid-19, and its future.