Rethinking the Welfare State: The prospects for ... - e-Library

Rethinking the selfare state 128
Clearly, lack of accessibility poses an obstacle to reaping the private and public goods
generated by early childhood education and care. The central importance of child care to
future success 55 suggests that ensuring a universally accessible basic level of child care to
all may be the most effective and minimally intrusive means of promoting equality of
opportunity.
Quality
There are competing understandings of quality in the delivery of early childhood
education and care. At its most basic level, quality refers to the caliber and “character of
interactions that occur in the classroom.” 56 A variety of measures of quality have been
developed and tested by trained observers, including the Early Childhood Environments
Rating Scale (ECERS); the Infant-Toddler Environments Rating Scale (ITERS); and the
Family Day Care Rating Scale (FDCRS). 57 There is very little consistency in quality
across child care programs. For instance, many at-home providers are unlicensed and
have no formal child care training. Furthermore, providers have incentives to take on too
many children because of the low remuneration available for child care, which often
leads to a child to care-giver ratio that is too high for children to reap much benefit
developmentally. At the other end of the quality continuum, there are many formal,
tightly regulated programs that are highly child-centred, have low child/caregiver ratios
and explicitly focus on early childhood education and development.
The quality of child care in the OECD is mixed. In Canada, a small minority of
jurisdictions provide “good” care according to FDCRS measures, but most provide only
“minimal” quality. 58 The lowest scores in the FDCRS study are typically in “learning
activities” associated with the principal gains of early childhood development and staff
training in this area is generally inadequate. 59 In the United States, “Only 14 percent of
centres and 13 percent of family child care homes are estimated to be of good quality” 60
In Finland, the government lacks a comprehensive regulatory or monitoring system,
unable to afford such a key government function while maintaining a guarantee of
universal access to public child care. 61 This is despite the fact that Finland spends almost
twice as much on early childhood education as Canada. 62 In general, child development
experts believe that much child care is of poor developmental quality because of low
wages, high staff turnover, poor regulation, and untrained providers. 63
In contrast, Sweden, Portugal and Denmark all maintain public programs with strict
staffing and training requirements. 64 However, in each of these jurisdictions high levels
of spending are necessary to maintain this level of quality, particularly in Denmark, and
accessibility problems remain. Moreover, the Finnish experience (high levels of spending
and low-quality public care) demonstrates that despite a signiflcant commitment of
government funding, exclusive reliance on public delivery can create quality concerns
that might be ameliorated by competition. A multiplicity of providers in a competitive
market might better address the need for quality child care, particularly given that many
countries may be reluctant to fund early childhood education at the same high levels as
the Danish. Demand-side subsidies and competition may be a more realistic delivery
mechanism, but system design to date has been poor and support for voucher systems
half-hearted.