Quality of early childhood education lagging; Canada ties for last place with Ireland
Vancouver Sun - Canwest News Service
December 11, 2008
By: Tiffany Crawford

When it comes to the quality of early child education and care in the world's most affluent countries, Canada is tied for last place with Ireland, according to a first-of-its-kind global UNICEF report card released Wednesday.

The report, by the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre in Florence, Italy, found that Canada met only one of 10 benchmarks setting minimum standards for protecting the rights of children….

The study compared 25 members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Martha Friendly, director of Canada's Childcare Resource and Research, said she wasn't surprised to see Canada in last place.

"The child transition, as it is being called, is being driven by public policies in most countries, but in Canada this has been left to be a private family responsibility," she said.

"It takes years and years to develop a mature system and we haven't even started."

For example, Canada did not meet a child-poverty rate of less than 10 per cent, nor one-year parental leave at 50 per cent of salary.

According to UNICEF, Canada joins five other countries that do not have a national child-care plan with priority for poor children.

Canada also fails to subsidize early education services for at least 80 per cent of four-year-olds, unlike 15 other countries on the list.

The sole benchmark that both Canada and Ireland met was that 50 per cent of their early-education staff is educated with relevant qualifications.

… Don Giesbrecht, president of the Canadian Child Care Federation, says the problem is there is no unifying national child-care program.

He says that while there are two million Canadian kids under six who require daycare, only 800,000 are enrolled in regulated programs.

"Canada has no national standards, no national accountability as to how things are paid and so, as a result, we have a huge component of our economic culture where there is no structure, no criminal-record checks," he said.

"We have, at best, a patchwork of services province to province."

The data also suggest that stress levels in early years could have a major impact on a child's learning abilities, says Marta Santos Pais, director of the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre.

"High-quality, early-childhood education and care has a huge potential to enhance children's cognitive, linguistic, emotional and social development," she said, adding that care should be "a public good and not a family question."

According to UNICEF data collected from all the countries, 80 per cent of three-to-six-year-olds are now in some form of early education, while about 25 per cent of children under three in countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development receive care outside of the home….