A Strategic Assessment of the Children's Services Industry

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STRATEGIC ASSESSMENT OF THE CHILDREN’S SERVICES INDUSTRYExecutive SummaryIn the last decade, early childhood education and care (ECEC) has experienced ‘a surge ofpolicy attention’ from governments around the world. A considerable body of researchconfirms that early childhood is the foundation for later development and that experiences inthe early years have lifelong consequences for health, education and wellbeing. In addition,there is growing evidence of the economic returns from investment in high quality earlyeducation. Such research, combined with information about the stresses and challenges facingmodern families, has propelled ECEC to a prominent place in the policy agenda of manycountries. Governments and international organisations increasingly recognise the longlastingimpact of children’s early years and seek to develop programmes and policies that willhave beneficial impacts upon children’s future development, including their health,educational and social development. ECEC policy is also connected with a range of otherpolicy arenas and goals, from increasing women’s labour force participation to povertyalleviation.The Australian government has placed early childhood education and care (ECEC) at thecentre of an exciting and challenging agenda. ECEC is, for the first time, being seen both asvaluable in itself and as a tool to be utilised in the nation’s long-term social and economicstrategies – including productivity, labour force participation, skills formation, socialinclusion and the ‘education revolution’. It is an important element of ‘closing the gap’between Indigenous and non-Indigenous children.States and Territories have also strengthened their focus on ECEC, increasing investment andinnovation and exploring new services and supports that more closely match the needs ofcontemporary Australian families.The emerging agenda around early education and care is exciting and challenging. It includesuniversal access to preschool education in the year before school and the development ofparent and child centres which will act as service hubs, bringing together health, educationand child care and providing targeted services for particular groups.The implementation of this new agenda will require new ways of thinking about the needs ofchildren, families and communities, new structures, and new relationships between theCommonwealth and State/Territory governments and other stakeholders. It will requiremoving beyond notions such as the separation of ‘education’ and ‘care’ to thinking in moreholistic ways about the needs of children, families and communities. Already there are manyexcellent examples of such services in operation across Australia. The challenge is to developa systematic, nationwide approach while recognising and respecting local needs andaspirations.The achievement of Australia’s ambitious goals in relation to ECEC is made more complexby the nature of the market in children’s services. Almost three-quarters of Australian longday care is provided by the private, for-profit sector – a similar proportion to the UK, buthigher than the USA. Reliance upon the private sector to deliver children’s services iscommon across the English-speaking liberal welfare states. Australia is unique, however, inits level of market concentration: a single commercial provider owns approximately one-thirdof the long day care places in the country - a situation unparalleled in the rest of the world.(By comparison, the top 40 providers together own about 10 per cent of the market in the UK,while in the USA national chains collectively own 13 per cent of all centres.)Private providers play an important role in many areas of Australian social policy includinghealth, aged care and the delivery of welfare services. The private sector has contributed to aiii
STRATEGIC ASSESSMENT OF THE CHILDREN’S SERVICES INDUSTRYrapid expansion of long day care places since the early 1990s. The mixed market is a centralfeature of the Australian children’s services industry and will remain so for the foreseeablefuture. The nature of the market reinforces the importance of policies geared to theenhancement and monitoring of service quality. This, in turn, requires accurate andcontinuous information about standards and quality in all publicly funded settings. This isparticularly so given the broad public policy goals being linked to Australia’s early childhoodservices agenda. The existence of a mixed market introduces some new issues into strategicthinking. For example, international literature and a small number of Australian researchstudies show a trend for the highest quality care to be associated with non-profit andindependent private providers, and the poorest quality care with corporate chains. Australia’scommitment to evidence-informed policy requires further research to test the relevance ofthese findings in Australia and to develop strategies to ensure that high quality is beingdelivered in all settings.The international focus on ECEC and the policy initiatives and research it has generated,provide a valuable knowledge base for Australian policy makers. New Zealand, the UnitedKingdom, Sweden and parts of Canada have all embarked on policy agendas that focus on theneeds of children in their early years, that move beyond separate spheres of education andcare and that seek more integrated, holistic service provision. New Zealand began thisprocess earlier than most, uniting education and care services in a single department in 1986.The UK has similarly brought together policy responsibility for education and care. Inaddition, the UK has built hubs for the delivery of integrated services; these ‘Children’sCentres’ to be located in every neighbourhood, provide education, care, health and familysupport. The experience of all these countries shows that integration involves more thanreorganising policy responsibility or the delivery of a range of services for children from asingle site. Child-focused integration extends beyond the policy arenas of early education andcare. So in the UK, integration has been designed to address poverty alleviation and maternalemployment goals. In Sweden, integration has occurred between preschool (1-6 years) andprimary school curricula, in which each influenced the other.Comprehensive approaches to early childhood service provision require close attention to thestaff who work in ECEC services, their qualifications, pay and conditions and careerprospects. New qualifications and career paths have been developed in the UK, New Zealandand Sweden specifically for early teachers. New mechanisms have been developed torecognise the experience of staff already engaged in providing education and care. In NewZealand, pay parity has been achieved between early years teachers and primary schoolteachers. New funding mechanisms were implemented in Quebec so that parents pay $7 for afull day of ECEC, in this way overriding the education and care split between operationalsubsidies for education and fee subsidies to enable parents to purchase care. The differentneeds of parents and children have been addressed, so that in Quebec, parents can, if theywish, place their children in a single high quality service for up to 10 hours per day whichboth meets the needs of employed parents and of children for quality education and care.Australia is on the threshold of an exciting era in the development of early childhoodeducation and care. Collaboration, goodwill and sustained innovation in policy and fundingapproaches are essential to move forward on the agenda now in play. The principles andstrategies outlined below will help move Australia closer towards this goal.iv
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