Minister's statistics don't tell the real early childhood story

The Minister of Education's claims that privately-owned early childhood services receive on average nearly three times the funding of community-owned services is a misleading distortion, the Early Childhood Council says.

Minister of Education Trevor Mallard has said Budget-announced early childhood policy changes would give each community centre $50,000 more than it currently receives and that private centres would benefit by $140,000 each on average.

Chief executive Sue Thorne said funding increases were welcome as they were much-needed in the sector, but the Minister's claims of large increases to private centres were nonsense.

More than half the services the Minister included in his 'average' for community services were minimally-funded unlicensed playgroups and voluntary parent-led groups.

"To compare these with services that are fully licensed and staffed by paid professionals and provide all-day education and care is nonsense and the Minister knows it," said Mrs Thorne.

Currently private and community services which provide the same level of service, for the same number of children, for the same length of time, receive the same funding, with the exception of kindergartens whose hourly funding rate was at least 30 percent higher than all other services.

Mrs Thorne said the Minister's claims were nothing but a desperate attempt to deflect unwanted attention from his discriminatory new 'free' early childhood education funding policy, which excludes 60 percent of children attending all-day early childhood services.

The issue was not the current funding level - it was the Budget announcement that, in the future, families who had chosen private services would not be funded to the same level as those who chose community centres, Mrs Thorne said.

"Unfortunately for the Minister no amount of fudging the figures alters the fact that parents who choose privately owned services will miss out on the Minister's much-touted 20 hours per week of free early childhood education.

"Nothing short of ensuring that all children in New Zealand had access to the same level of funding will repair the damage caused by allowing anti-business bias to steer policy, rather than what is good for New Zealand families."

Public consultation over the government's early childhood proposals ends on 23 July.

In a media statement, Mr Mallard said: "We've got the money there and we know that it will be spent on lifting teacher quality, improving adult to child ratios and other quality standards. But we're now turning to the sector to tie down the detail so we can be sure we are getting the best quality improvements that work effectively for every child."

The consultation will seek feedback on matters such as:

• What the improved adult/child ratios will be
• How teacher registration targets will be regulated
• Progressively improving adult:child ratios and reducing group size
• Legislating Te Whariki as the curriculum for all early childhood education services.