Letters

Childcare is not a consumer product

A textbook example of a broken market

Sat Feb 17 2024 - 00:09

Sir, – Last Saturday’s article “Childcare places are in short supply, so why aren’t there creches in all new housing developments?” (February 10th) reminded readers of the ongoing difficulties parents face when seeking a child-place in a local Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) service. The focus of the article was on developer-built creche units in new housing estates, and the prohibitive costs to a private provider of taking on and kitting out such a space. Once again questions arise related the ongoing and pernicious challenges created by our reliance on the private marketplace to provide an essential educational service. Perhaps instead we should be asking fundamental questions about why we rely on the private, for-profit arena, and how we can shift to public provision of a public service.

The fee-freeze established through core funding in 2022, and the increasing fee subsidies through the National Childcare Scheme (NCS) have intensified pressure for child-places, as ECEC becomes more affordable. Rising demand should have been foreseen by the Government, as we have witnessed this elsewhere. For example, when the Canadian province of Quebec initiated its $10 a day ECEC scheme in the 1990s to improve maternal employment rates, demand far exceeded their forecasting. Initially intending to subsidise places only through public ECEC services, the scheme was expanded to private services, and eventually, the unregulated sector, to meet needs. As remaining provinces and territories participate in the recent Canada-wide ELCC scheme, replicating the Quebec phenomenon nationally, creating new child-places has been prioritised in tandem with reducing costs to families. In a context, like Ireland, that was highly market reliant, public provision is now being privileged.

Audits of public infrastructure – schools, libraries, hospitals, municipal offices – are providing possibilities to open new public ECEC services in State-owned properties. Funded voluntary conversions, through buyouts of existing for-profit services, are creating new social enterprises.

Unfortunately for families here, the Irish State failed to increase places as fees fell, continuing to rely on the supply/demand cycle of the market; however, as US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yelland recently stated, “Childcare is a textbook example of a broken market . . . The free market works well in many different sectors, but childcare is not one of them”.

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As was recently highlighted in a report by the Chartered Accountants of Ireland (Business, February 14th) having a market-based approach to ECEC negatively effects the economy. Citing the barrier to parental employment, resultant labour shortages and a reduced tax base, Chartered Accountants of Ireland representatives called for “bolder interventions” on the part of the Irish State to address long-standing issues in ECEC.

Today, no one would suggest undoing Donogh O’Malley’s funding of free secondary school education in 1967, nor the removal of university tuition fees in the 1980s, by Niamh Bhreathnach.

I suggest that the “bolder intervention” now needed is for the State to shift from public funding of for-profit ECEC to establishing a truly public system.

When considering the bigger question of the place of “for-profit” in early education, we would be wise to reflect on Unicef’s view, that this “is not a consumer product but a child’s once in-a-lifetime opportunity to pass successfully through critical stages of cognitive, emotional, and social development”.

Is it really acceptable for there to be profit in this space? – Yours, etc,

Dr SHEILA GARRITY,

Lecturer in Early Childhood Studies,

School of Education,

Senior Researcher,

Unesco Child & Family Research Centre,

University of Galway.

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