Early Childhood Education

Education is always a topical election issue. Tertiary policy in particular is a big one, because people starting tertiary education are also starting to vote – and student voters are highly prized by most political parties. However, there is a lot more to education policy than just student allowances, student loans and free education for the masses. Education is too big a topic to cover all in one go, so we are going to look at the various areas of education over the next few weeks, starting with early childhood education and working our way up.

So, to begin, early childhood education.

In New Zealand early childhood education (younger than 5 years old) is not compulsory. Parents can choose to send their children to an early childhood education centre, or they can choose not to. Some primary schools require an early childhood education before they allow entrance into their own school, but most do not have this requirement.

Labour do not have their 2008 policies up on their website yet. In prior policy they have placed a huge amount of importance on education, including early childhood education, so it is a fair assumption that they will again.

One of their biggest early childhood achievements of the last term has been implementing the 20 Hours Free scheme. This scheme gives 20 hours of free teacher-led early childhood education to all qualifying children, per week. It seems relatively easy for a child to qualify – they just have to be between the ages of 3 and 4 years old and attending a teacher-led early childhood education centre. It is worth mentioning that parents may still be asked to make voluntary donations to the early childhood education centre. The donations are strictly voluntary – the centre cannot demand extra payment (although I’m sure some put a huge amount of pressure on).

Here is what Labour have achieved so far for early childhood education (taken from their website). It basically breaks down to:

• Increased government funding for early childhood education by 140% since 1999.
• Set the requirement for all early childhood education centres that offer teacher-led services to have at least one qualified teacher on staff.
• Provided grants to encourage more people to train as early childhood educators.
• Identified the areas around the country where more early childhood education centres are needed.
• Created the 20 Hours Free scheme.

I will update with Labour’s 2008 policy once it is announced.

National care about education, including early childhood education, and have made it a big priority in their 2008 policy. They want to retain everything Labour have put in place over the last few years, and to build on and improve that foundation.

A National-led Government will (from their website):

• Improve the choice and quality of early childhood education (although they don’t mention how they are going to do this)
• Retain Labour’s 20 Hours Free scheme
• Make the 20 Hours Free scheme more flexible and improve its availability by including playcentres and kohanga reo as eligible early education centres, removing the 6-hours a day limit and including 5 year olds as eligible
• Maintain all other current early childhood subsidies and fee controls
• Increase the adult/child ratio in early childhood education centres from 1:5 to 1:4
• By 2012 they will require that at least 50% of teachers in each teacher-led early childhood education centres for children under 2 years old, are qualified teachers
• Allow English-speaking foreign teachers to become qualified in New Zealand after completing a 6-week course
• Allow Montessori, Steiner and Playcentre qualifications count towards the early childhood education degree

Like National and Labour, New Zealand First consider early childhood education to be very important. They have thrown a lot of acronyms around, but don’t explain exactly what the services these acronyms stand for will be. (My favourite is HIPPY – it’s about homeschooling children - which makes me wonder, are New Zealand First trying to tell us something, or is it just a coincidence?)

Their early childhood education policies are (straight from their website):

• initiate Family Start Programmes across the country aimed at those children at greatest risk of less than optimal development
• make available "Home Instructional Programme for Pre-schoolers and Youngsters" (HIPPY) programmes to all families with low levels of educational capital
• develop Parents as First Teacher (PAFT) programmes across the country
• extend the 0800 advice line services
• combine all parent-caregiver support programmes under the umbrella of a single agency
• increase the discretionary grants available to communities for building or upgrading early childhood facilities in order to increase participation rates
• explore the possibilities of enabling early childhood centres to be funded more than six hours per day and for weekend sessions
• develop a set of principles defining which languages will be supported and to what degree

While they don’t mention Labour’s 20 Hours Free scheme directly, they do say that they want to look at the idea of more than six hours per day of funding per child which I assume means improving on the current scheme, which provides 6 free hours per day. They leave themselves a nice get-out-of-jail-free card by saying ‘explore the possibility’.

I really like that New Zealand First are promising to increase the discretionary grants for building and upgrading early childhood facilities. There are some communities that would really benefit from that increased funding.

The Greens consider education a top priority. Unfortunately they seem to be so focussed on tertiary education that they don’t have very many policies on anything before that.

They do want to improve resources for not-for-profit early childhood centres. And they want pay-parity for early childhood teachers, primary teachers and secondary teachers.

Other than that nothing is mentioned.

The Maori party have no mention of early childhood education in their policy. I will update this when I find out more.

United Future heavily emphasises parental involvement in a child's early childhood education. They want to encourage parent-led centres and to include these in the 20-hours free scheme. United Future agree with the other major Parties that New Zealand needs more qualified early childhood teachers, but they do not agree with the proposed requirement that all adults in teacher-led centres be qualified early childhood teachers. They prefer the idea that support staff, not actively involved in teaching, do not have to be qualified teachers.

United Future are the only party to propose an increase in funding to identify children with special needs at this level. Currently learning disabilities are not generally recognised in children until they fail to keep up with their peers later on. If these needs were recognised in more children sooner they would be able to get the help they need before entering the primary school system.

Act don’t have anything about early childhood education in their policy. Looking through some old press releases and reports from them, they were in favour of the 20 Hours Free scheme. They also want to implement scholarships for every child, so that they can go to whatever school they want – regardless of cost. I’m a bit confused as to what exactly they mean by this. If they are providing this for every child, the essentially they are actually just fully-funding education in New Zealand. I’m not sure why they call it a scholarship. Anyway, I assume they include early childhood education in this – although it doesn’t specifically say.