A Strategic Assessment of the Children's Services Industry

STRATEGIC ASSESSMENT OF THE CHILDREN’S SERVICES INDUSTRYThe result is that, for many countries, the ECEC sector is comprised of a number of differentservice types that are subject to an often diffuse set of policies from a range of governmentdepartments. This has been identified as problematic for Australia, Canada and the UK(Department for Education and Skills (DfES), 2004; OECD, 2003; Press and Hayes, 2000).Canadian ECEC was described by its OECD Country Note as ‘a patchwork of uneconomic,fragmented services’ (2003 p.6). The OECD Country Note for Australia referred to the ‘adhoc nature’ of Australian early childhood policy and noted that the interests of children ranthe risk of being subsumed by ‘the needs of parents, the workplace, and the economy’ (2001p.37). England's Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners (2004) has sought to addressexisting splits between child care and education.Fragmentation is characteristically found along a number of dimensions including:• The diversity of services provided, which is often accompanied by divisions ofresponsibility between different government portfolios.• The various levels of government (local/municipal; state/provincial; and national) thathave a direct policy impact on ECEC (particularly in Australia and Canada).• Discontinuities between ECEC and compulsory schooling.• Discontinuities between ECEC and other areas of family policy, such as parentalleave, and welfare to work regimes.• The mix of providers – government, not-for-profit non-government organisations, andfor-profit businesses and corporations.• Differing standards (regulations, curricula, accreditation) according to jurisdiction and/or type of early childhood service.• Differing staffing requirements according to jurisdiction and/or type of earlychildhood service.In its Thematic Review of Early Childhood Education and Care Policy the OECD adopted theterm ‘early childhood education and care’ in order to reinforce the need for a coherentapproach to children’s early development and learning (2001). The juxtaposition of‘education’ and ‘care’ highlights the intimate interrelationship of the care and education ofyoung children (UNESCO, March 2002). According to the OECD (2001), in countries whereearly childhood policy is based upon a foundational understanding that children are competentlearners from birth, divisions between ‘care’ and ‘education’ become meaningless. This riseof the terminology of 'care and education' has, to some extent, changed the discourse thatsurrounds the provision of early childhood services and associated policy. For instance, NewZealand has renamed its child care centres ‘education and care centres’ (May, 2007); the NewSouth Wales (NSW) Curriculum Framework for Children's Services states that the interwovennature of care and education make it ‘inappropriate to label some services, or even parts of theday in a programme, as educational and others as care’ (undated, p. 16); Sweden uses theterm förskola (preschool) to encompass its full-time centre based services for children agedbetween 1 and 6 years; and the UK has adopted the term ‘educare’ to describe ‘joined up’education and child care to children in the year before school (DfES, 2004). Notwithstandingthe adoption of more inclusive terminology, for many jurisdictions the provision of child careand early education remains divided and thus discrepancies in funding and staffing remain.16