Opinion & Commentary
There is more to quality child care than UNICEF’s arbitrary standards
Working parents already panicked by the collapse of childcare giant ABC Learning and its smaller rival CFK woke on Friday to more doom and gloom. Newspaper headlines screamed that Australia’s system of early childhood education and care was the third worst among industrialised countries. Australia earned its place near the bottom of the table by only scoring two out of ten, narrowly beating the Canadians and Irish who both came in at a paltry one.
So, is our woeful performance cause for a complete policy overhaul? Or is this just another bureaucratic exercise which causes consternation but not much else?
There is a lot of conflicting research about childcare. The most we can confidently say is that it is good in some situations but bad in others. As a rule of thumb, long hours care for very young babies can have a negative effect, while part-time, high quality centre-based care for toddlers might be beneficial.
The benefits of childcare are most apparent for very disadvantaged kids, such as those with drug addicted or mentally ill parents, because it can counteract the poor quality of care they get at home.
Armed with this data, the UNICEF benchmarks appear on the surface to be a good thing. They allow policy makers to easily compare Australia with other countries and evaluate which policies work and which ones don’t.
But a ‘one size fits all’ list of arbitrarily-set benchmarks is simplistic and ignores the different social, economic, and political realities of each country.
What the UNICEF report really does is advocate a social-democratic system of publicly-provided, universal interventions in early childhood. Predictably, a doubling of taxpayer spending is the prescription for most countries.
Sweden, the only country to score a perfect ten, is known for its ‘cradle to the grave’ welfare state. It is able to provide extensive (and expensive) services to families through very high taxation.
Tax revenue is equal to just under half of GDP in Sweden, compared to a figure of about 30% in Australia. Providing the same degree of universal social welfare services as Sweden would require a significant increase in our tax take.
Instead, we support families at a relatively low cost by tightly targeting benefits at low income earners. This system is not without its problems — heavily means tested payments result in big disincentives for recipients to increase their income through work. But it does mean that the most disadvantaged families derive the largest benefit. In practice, we are able to achieve similar levels of poverty reduction as the Scandinavian countries with a much lower tax burden.
In early childhood policy, this targeting makes sense. We know from empirical studies that the best ‘return on investment’ is achieved when spending such as childcare subsidies is targeted at disadvantaged children.
But because Australia takes this targeted, family-based approach we fail to meet the UNICEF benchmarks of universal provision of services and high levels of spending.
Also contributing to Australia’s poor score is a big thumbs-down on child health and child poverty, even though these measures tell us little about the availability and quality of childcare and early childhood education. Wealthy countries such as Denmark and France also fail to meet UNICEF’s arbitrary child health benchmark, despite having extensive high quality provision of childcare and preschool.
Australia also fails UNICEF’s child poverty test because more than ten percent of children live in families with less than half the median family income. However, all this really tells us is that we have a wider distribution of income than the redistributionist Scandinavian countries. A recent OECD report shows that while Australia’s poverty rate appears to have risen over the past decade, the real incomes of the poorest people have also risen. Meeting UNICEF’s benchmark would require a lowering of income inequality, but it won’t necessarily improve the actual living standards of the poorest kids.
Supporters of the UNICEF approach have argued that in a wealthy country such as Australia, there is no excuse not to meet every benchmark which is set for us. Most would agree that setting high standards for children’s education and cognitive development is a good thing.
However, meeting ill-defined and arbitrary benchmarks set on the other side of the world will not help achieve this. Rather than swallow political advocacy dressed up as international research, Australia would be better advised to concentrate on the strengths of its current approach which targets help to those who need it the most.
Jessica Brown is a Policy Analyst at the Centre for Independent Studies.
