Last night I hosted a public meeting in Upper Hutt on early childhood education. It was very well attended by parents, teachers and concerned members of the public. This is a bit of a sleeper issue that’s going to come back to bite the National government. Around the country early childhood centres are grapling with an impossible choice – do they cut quality or increase fees to parents, thus compromising access? The crunch is still a few months away. A lot of parents aren’t even aware it’s coming yet.
Kindergartens are being clobbered really hard. They’ve already decided they want to stick with having 100% qualified staff, and they don’t charge fees, so they’re going to find it really hard. Where will they find the money? Cuts to teacher professional development, property maintenance, and equipment budgets will be high on the list no doubt. Who loses out? The kids.
If we’re serious about catching up with Australia, if we’re serious about reducing the prison population, if we’re serious about providing security in retirement, we need to take a long-term view. That starts with giving kids the best possible start in life. Kids who attend quality early childhood education do better at school, better at work, better in life. These cuts are just so short-sighted and we’ll all pay in the long run.
Agreed
A moderate and well balanced summary.
Catching Aust is not a worthwhile goal but all the others really are.
Having National standards for political reasons yet giving scant support for where education foundations are laid, shows little will to act effectively on the Education system by NACT.
ECE is a long term strategy and I believe should be a right for our kids just as compulsory education is.
Home values have been broken down with increasing need for both parents working and Mums being pretty worn out with that situation in many cases.
I think the move to requiring full training for child care in creches was a big mistake as the increased cost to hire such staff has had its toll. Many excellent child care staff have not taken up the rigours of further academic training but were very effective and well regarded in their job. A loss to child care and the country. There is now a shortage of staff for many of these institutions and the staff qualifies under the old rules are having to work privately in homes or as Nannies.
It used to be that the further down the chain an institution was from University then the poorer the funding support. The importance of education in fostering capable adults depends on the early years of child rearing and ECE is playing an increasing part in that.
NACT supporters may have the money to go private with their education but neglect of those who don’t have the money to buy such ECE will reflect in more problems, less positive outcomes for the economy and society.
To get anywhere with this, you have to demonstrate convincingly that child care centres with only 80% of staff holding an academic qualification in ECE offer lower-quality care than centres with 100% of staff holding qualifications.
You won’t be able to demonstrate it because it’s simply not the case. As John W points out above, child care centres have long had some excellent staff who were very good with children but not well suited to tertiary study – Labour’s message to those workers is that they constitute “lower quality,” which is often clearly untrue. If anything, Labour driving these workers out of the industry will have lowered the quality of child care centres.
Wrong way around, when Labour increased these requirements it was based on a long period of policy deliberation including consideration of research evidence.
NACT – forget about the policy deliberation or the evidence.
Just cut it and spin a story to go with it.
Full of it.
Motivated quality workers would have gone on to get their quals like thousands of others in ECE.
My wee girl doesn’t need a fully trained teacher to change her nappies and this was the point ECE centres were trying to make when the rules were originally changed and they tried to fight them.
It is the same situation in schools. As baby boomers leave the teaching service we are going to have to train people to do non-teaching jobs and conserve our precious teachers for actual teaching and learning. In the UK I was impressed by the people, mainly women, who were building worthwhile if low-paid careers as classroom assistants with training and quals commensurate with the tasks they were doing.
JD early childhood education is not babysitting, changing nappies is.
Loota can write a sentence like “Motivated quality workers would have gone on to get their quals like thousands of others in ECE” and yet accuse others of being “full of it?” Jesus wept.
…early childhood education is not babysitting…
And a childcare centre is not just about early childhood education. Some of what it does actually is just babysitting, or at least providing a safe environment for kids to play in. No expensive university education required for that, which is why the “100% qualified” policy was bullshit. There was no problem at all with 80%, which is why it’s sensible to go back there and save ourselves a lot of money and pointless over-educating of people who don’t need it to do their jobs.
My second child is going through ECE now, and I have to agree with Jane that I find it unnecessary to have 100% qualified staff. Personally I think 50% would be fine, and that each fully qualified teacher could be paired with an unqualified teacher with no downside for the children. This might depend on the circumstances at individual centres, at ours the children are separated into under-twos and over-twos, and the teachers are invariably in pairs with groups of children.
It might differ in other centres, but I strongly believe 100% of daycare centres don’t require 100% of teachers to be qualified.
Also, if we’re going to consider the research, I found this to be particularly worrying.
http://www.parentingscience.com/daycare-centers.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100514074919.htm
Basically the more time you have your kids in daycare the higher their cortisol levels (a stress hormone).
So should we really be encouraging more use of ECE?
The only child care centres insisting on keeping 100% and choosing to sting parents financially are Labour stalwarts misguidingly trying to cause parents financial pain as a political game to blame National. Pathetic and petty.
National is ploughing millions of dollars into ECE centres because it agrees that ECE is crucial and only blinkered leftist idealogues claim that only a graduate can provide appropriate care for 3 year olds.
You cannot fool parents. This is not a debate about the value of ECE. It is simply about whether having 4 out of 5 teachers with a certificate is disastrous and thet only 5 out of 5 is acceptable no matter how much that costs in difficult times
We aren’t talking uni graduates here Fisiani – we are talking about people vetted and trained to work with young children. We are talking about the quality of ECE. And low quality ECE can be very dangerous. And your tone is offensive if you want to continue to be offensive stay on your party supported site.
@ Tracey – even educated two-year-olds need their nappies changed, and one doesn’t have to be ECE degree or diploma qualified to do that. There’s no reason why ECE centres cannot continue to provide high-quality services with a blend of trained teachers and slightly less trained support staff.
fisiani.. i think you have inadvertently come to the wrong site. this blog is for the facility of intelligent, thoughtful discourse on important issues that ordinary people, who make up the bulk of society face every day. if you want to contribute some intelligent input you would be welcome to.
Categorising childcare workers on qualifications is fine but not indicative of better outcomes for kids necessarily.
The personal qualities of any teacher or child care worker are very much independent of qualifications.
A warm and intuitively responsive Mum is not necessarily a product of study and one can observe such Mums who have little academic background.
Childcare workers who have good positive relationships and engender warmth and emotional growth in children need encouragement not culling out with an academic qualification regime.
Loota I find the response suggesting lack of dedication is indicated by an experienced senior child care worker being who does not want to spend another three years in training, may be a little wide of the mark.
Motherhood and experience with bringing up children does not count as training.
The system is wasteful and many workers well regarded have dropped out under the new requirements.
I think they have got it wrong.
lab.rat said:
Yes this is a consistent finding.
So let’s create a situation where children can be looked after by their parents if that is what the parents would prefer.
John W fair enough comment, I take your points.
If 80% is fine for ECE – is it ok for Primary Teaching in say years 1-3?
Fabregas
The teachers role changes as the child grows to face new developmental tasks. Education assumes slightly more formality through the school years which is entirely appropriate for most.
The personal qualities a teacher brings are still very important but as child grows the shift to aquisition of formal skills in numeracy and literacy are complex and teacher training is necessary.
The need for a degree to be a teacher is another qualification demand that has little to do with judging as teachers skill or effectiveness.
Many teachers Aides become skilled at assisting with learning programmes with supervision. Mothers often are used to help also.
The warmth, contact, love and affection young children need to develop into healthy people is paramount in the early years.
Loota/LabRat,
All ECE is not the same, and the reported stress levels of children in ECE depends upon the sort of center they are in. For example, a recent US study found:
“[A]bout 40 percent of the children showed elevations in cortisol that were large enough to indicate that their bodies were stressed. It also found that cortisol increases over the day were larger in settings where care providers were intrusive or overcontrolling. In such settings, children moved frequently between activities, were given relatively little time for free play, and spent long periods of time in structured activities led by the providers. While many of these structured activities seemed designed to help the preschoolers learn letters, numbers, and colors, the activities weren’t carried out in a way that allowed the children to learn actively through play, but rather in a rote fashion that required the little ones to sit quietly and respond when called on.”
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-05/sfri-fcc050610.php
Furthermore, against the rise in cortisol levels in some children in ECE are the benefits that accrue to a child in their later schooling from having good quality ECE – see, for instance, this report: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64D0LT20100514 … or this one: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/business/economy/28leonhardt.html?src=me&ref=business
As for the “you don’t need a certificate to change nappies” claim – this doesn’t recognise how good quality ECE operates. It isn’t an assembly line process, where the child goes to a “teacher carer” for educative time, then gets handed off to a “carer carer” for things like nappy changes/feeding. The bond between the child and their carer needs built up over all the activities of the day – trying to break it up into “learning” and “non-learning” time with different people involved in each part of the day makes no sense to a young child and defeats the purpose of having them in an ECE environment (unless you think it is all just glorified babysitting, of course – which then requires you to ignore the different apparent benefits of good quality vs poor quality ECE in later life indicators).
And as for all those experienced, high quality ECE workers allegedly forced out of the sector because they didn’t want to spend three years getting a degree qualification … was there a reason they didn’t have their prior learning recognised under the RPL scheme (http://www.lead.ece.govt.nz/ManagementInformation/Staffing/RecognitionOfPriorLearning/RecognitionOfPriorLearningFAQs.aspx)? Or is that just one of those “I heard it from someone, so it must be true” type stories?
A.G. thanks for your detailed response and for describing some of the intracacies of the field.
Andrew
The cases referred to where prior learning and qualification did not count sufficiently as a paper qualification to avoid having to retrain, was through first hand experience and advocacy to the Union. Their hands were tied and perhaps the it was not coincidental that the Unions new jurisdiction was one of the motivating reasons for their compliance with the changes. They made membership out of it.
The first two reports you have linked have summary conclusions that really cannot be applied without a lot more detailed information from the studies. They may both be reports on the same study.
The third is a statistical analysis of data yet refers to conclusions from earlier studies without references or sources. As it states peer review has not been reported.
These reports of studies based in the US and appear to have been withdrawn from our Ministry’s website.
A range of material commented on covering some studies I am very familiar with, but certainly not connected with ECE research.
Caution in viewing such reports is advised. I notice the report is looking at economic outcomes based on statistic held.
No serious data on specific behavioural analysis of either teachers or children referred to in the study.
I would be very wary drawing any conclusion from this and applying it to a foreign setting in NZ.
I agree with an earlier post that child care should not be encourages as an alternative to home care. The bonding and growth for both mother and child does suffer with broken time for the mother, separation and stress for the child as long term studies have made clear.
Things are not the same and the economic pressure to compromise is a measure of societies priorities.
John W,
Just curious – in every one of your posts on this topic you’ve stated how important the bonding of Mother and child are. No arguments here. But do we fathers get a look in too? I ask simply because I’m an equal time caregiver, and am concerned that this time spent away from the child’s mother may be harming her development and causing her stress …
Less sarcastically, the fact is that most NZ households no longer exist in the sort of extended family web/community structure that human beings have raised children in for most of our history. Nor is the “Dad goes to work/Mum raises the kids” model of family tenable in (and I question whether it is even that desirable … second wave feminism had a lot to say about its downsides.)
So society needs to find some way to try and replicate the support structures and wider learning environments that used to be in place for most of our history as a species (”It takes a village to raise a child”). The best such structure is high quality ECE, wherein the centers are not just stress-inducing warehouses to park kids in while the parents work, but rather environments where children can bond with their caregiver and be educated (in the sense of encouraged to develop their full range of capacities and skills). Such environments require skilled educators who, of course, have warm, loving and caring natures.
Now, credentialing is an inexact guarantee of skills – there will be some ECE teachers with degrees who are bad at the job, and some ECE teachers who have not studied formally who are naturally gifted at it (but, I reiterate, such teachers can have their prior learning experiences counted towards getting formal qualifications, even if it isn’t treated as a complete alternative to them). However, most of the time, on the whole, across the board ECE teachers who have been trained in how to best encourage learning in young children will be better at it than those who haven’t been. Which is how policy works – you try to adopt the approach that will most of the time, on the whole, across the board have better outcomes.
Andrew
Thanks for the reply.
One has to wonder what is the political agenda behind ECE. Child development at a preschool level could be somewhat ineptly managed if attempts are made to shift the school curriculum downwards. Some children are not maturationally well equipped to begin learning to read at 5 let alone at preschool. Policies demanded by ERO constrain ECE facilities to all sorts of educational outcomes that were not a part of previous Kindergarten and Playcenre programmes. There is real pressure on the teachers to meet goals and justify where their programmes are at.
Bonding is a somewhat loose term that appears to cover a range of developments for the child that appear to be a part of early close mothering. So much is learned in the early months of life that becomes a foundation for the child’s growth and later interaction with the widening horizons that naturally become a part of his/her world over time.
Separation of a baby and mother in that early relationship interferes with the process but numerous studies show that successful paths do not have to follow a strict model and mother substitution can be effective with reservations. Cultures vary as do the assumption of adult roles in the early parenting.
The village or wider family in some cases also provides some guidance to parents as well as social outlets. Stressed parents particularly can gain a lot from such support.
What stresses one child may be stimulating for another.
Avoidance of stress may not always be very useful.
Management of stress for young children is best monitored in new environment. A child’s reaction is a good guide to appropriate levels of stimulation.
Periods of time in demanding situations are often made to be too long. The aim is to foster learning and engagement in the tasks. Excessive stress can produce an avoidance reaction which is entirely counter productive. Games , humour and fun can provide valuable learning and should not be overlooked.
Self regulation of stress with a play approach is not the only way as some structure can help a child with new experiences. Time for play and use of imagination seems to be beneficial in child relaxation.
Peer conformity changes through the toddler years but generally it is more benign than school years. Copying others is a way of learning that is common. The culture of “how you do it” is very co-operative in that regard. Rote learning in various settings is a natural process. Reasoning skills and questioning also are best not laboured.
Competition is stressful to many as can be the fear of losing or missing out. Daily rituals are very important and change best well managed with lots of warning or preparation.
Signals picked up by children from adults with them, can also be the cause of stress as can activities similar to ones that are associated with feelings of stress elsewhere in their lives.
How a teacher manages learning with cues, prompts and in some cases correction, has a bearing on stress and perceived failure at the learning task. These feelings can generalise to the teacher becoming the stressor.
When a study uses a finding of stress indicators as significant then a lot more detail is really needed before validity of conclusions can be examined.
The task of data collection would require many complex behavioral observations and appropriate recording with experienced well trained observers.
A balance of a strong bonding relationship and appropriate cognitive stimulation is a largely a matter of intuition usually. The text book in hand approach to doing it “correctly” does not appear to be very useful.
From my reading over years and personal experience it certainly supports a strong bonding being a good start early in life but parents sharing roles and time in parenting through childhood doesn’t cut across that.
Kids need time with Mum ( if she is available ) or a substitute that is consistent and interacts in a way that meets the child’s needs.
It can be harder for a Dad to bring up very young children alone although what might be missing can be somewhat intangible.
Little boys and girls seem to cope with only one parent available but all things being equal a substitute Mum or Dad for whoever is missing, can help the development of important learning and interaction that assists with a child’s later regard for both sexes and their own roles.
Absolute measures probably will never exist and people vary as do children and circumstances. Successful patterns within cultures are often good guides.
I have notices that is is common for a healthy child with one parent to seek out available adults of the “missing” sex to relate to and often very enthusiastically.
The missing male presence in many children’s lives is well recognised and the child without a Mum figure is perhaps rarer but ECE and schools can provide a little help.
Parents all struggle to do their best and some families seem to flow effortlessly while others have more uncertainty. The best of luck to all parents.
Raising kids is the most worthwhile role available.
My comments on new qualifications required displacing some existing teachers was not intended to examine standards but point out inflexibility based on regulation without a “grandfathering” consideration.
Formal qualifications have been ramped up with the hope that better outcomes will occur. That is a fair expectation but may not help some communities where such staff are not attracted.
Pretty gut wrenching for a dedicated well regarded existing ECE staff who can’t afford the time out and cost for retraining though.
The economic impact on families where both parents earning is becoming common must have an effect on the whole of future society. It is a major shift with many ramifications yet still the wealth inequity rises.
The economic structure has adjusted accordingly to depress the one income family further. In many neigbourhoods the “village is empty through the day and too busy to interact after working hours.
Further substitution required here also.
It is about time the economic structure changes to suit the growing generation, rather than the wealth collectors of today.
John W,
This might interest you …
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/aug/01/babies-dont-suffer-working-mothers
Andrew
My post in reply has been lost. Apologies for the delay.
Thanks for the link reference.
I am familiar with the Society promoting the report. They do seem to get invovled with somewhat popularist “findings”.
Although a not for profit organisation based in Canada but having subscribers from all over, it is difficult to get good information about their methods without payment. Business and other sponsors are not clearly declared and reputable peer review difficult to find.
You might also look at the language in the report and exactly what is said. The emotive hard sell of this article is fairly obvious as is the lack of information on study design, data collection etc.
Access to information of various parts of the study you pay for. There are schemes like this which are revenue streams.
A lot of stuff around like this can promote an idea one day and the opposite a while after. Caution in sorting serious well based and academically stringent research from the rest is a help to any one who wants to know rather than just believe what ever they come across.
A bit of common sense with looking after a child’s health and well being can be undermined with confusing claims from a variety of sources.
The claims for the Guardian “news” report is like many that come and go this way and that.
I think if people choose to have children then one parents needs to stay at home to care for that child, nappies and development, that’s the social contract you make when you make a baby. When you have a child you choose to put another being first, so your own desire for a career, stimulation, money, stuff, travel is secondary.
It’s a win-win for us all. Children get nurtured by those who they love and love them, we don’t have to pay money from the tax coffers for ECE or childcare.
@Tracey: it reminds me of the wider debate on motherhood vs careerism, and how different countries have dealt with the issue (or not).
- Japan
- Germany
- Norway
- France
Interesting links DeepR
“”It’s sometimes hard to convince male workaholics that the family has priority on weekends. I’ll now start a job where I get paid less and which is hopefully less demanding timewise.”
And what about attitudes to women in the workplace?
HAVE YOUR SAY
The decline in birth rates parallels the decline in the traditional family
Mike, Liverpool, UK
Send us your comments
“More employers have understood that if they don’t want to do without a qualified female workforce, then they have to create the options for women to work part-time. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that you can count on a lot of sympathy as a working mum,” says Elisabeth.
She concedes that the government does offer financial incentives for women to have children, but questions whether they are the right ones.
“Why do you have to pay for your kindergarten but not for schools or universities [in most German states]? What kind of signal does this give for women who want to go quickly back to their job?” she says. ”
It would be interesting to see a comparative study between women and men, or mothers and fathers over the last 4 decades. I suspect, don;’t know, that we will see huge changes for and by women, and less for men, in terms of career, attitude toward them for their choices and so on.
I suspect two problems for women who have children, husband and career are
Attitudes toward women and mothers by men have not shifted significantly enough to make a difference to those in this particular role (this may change as today s 30’s become bosses)
Men, predominantly can choose to be more active fathers (compared to 30 years ago) and still retain their foot in the career camp.
Agreed Tracy.
Many employers have not changes the shape of jobs offered at all in the last generation. Rigid rules surrounding hours of work and flexible time often remain where they are not necessary.
Hours of work for many salaried workers have increased as a part of the competitive culture and demands placed on workers in the hope of increase productivity without paying more wages.
Nact’s move to lock out Unions from the workplace will only make this worse.
What is society about if its not family.
Both higher income and education tend to be associated with a fertility drop, later children and family size being below replacement level.
It may be said that these two groups have less investment in the future.
The figures are hard to find as well laid out as this study from 1996 census.
http://www.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/people_and_communities/women/socio-economic-factors-and-fertility-of-nz-women.aspx