Reimagining child care for an effective, equitable and resilient economic recovery

During the economic slow-down during the pandemic, the childhood education and care (ECEC) sector has been at the receiving end of highly uneven policy approaches, making it difficult to understand how the sector will remain viable and ready to ‘snap back.’ In today’s analysis, Romy Listo (@RomyListo) and Helen Dalley-Fisher, both of Equality Rights Alliance (@ERAAustralia), summarise ERA’s policy position paper on reimagining childcare.

If there’s one thing the pandemic has made abundantly clear, it’s the critical service that early education provides to children and families – provided by a workforce overwhelmingly made up of women.

During the pandemic, access to early childhood education and care (ECEC), often known as child care, has been critical to responding to COVID-19. Even during the Stage 4 Lockdown in Victoria, ECEC has remained opened for the children of a select group of permitted workers who are providing essential services so that parents can continue to work while their children benefit from early education.

But ECEC is not only essential social infrastructure during the crisis: it will be critical in our economic recovery.

Firstly, ECEC has benefits for child development, and early intervention through quality early education can save significant investments in services over the life course.

Secondly, ECEC is fundamentally intertwined with gender equality. It is understood that ECEC is crucial to the workforce participation of women. Accessible ECEC reduces the disproportionate unpaid care work that women in cis-heteronormative partnerships do as a result of rigid gender roles, and by extension, the barriers unpaid care work creates for women’s career progression and long-term economic security.

Imagining better childcare post-pandemic, that increases women’s workforce participation, improves sector conditions and supports children’s holistic development. Photo by Bermix Studio on Unsplash

ECEC itself is an important employer for women who make up between 95 – 98% of the workforce, many of whom are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and migrant women. Losing ECEC social infrastructure would make the gendered impacts of COVID-19 even more extreme, including for many women who experience intersecting forms of employment discrimination.

Not only is ECEC important for women’s workforce participation, but women’s workforce participation is critical for the economic and recovery. There is now plenty of evidence behind the business case for gender equality, and its important contribution to GDP. Given that women have lost more employment and hours than men during the crisis, ECEC has never been more important to the economic security of our society. Investing in social infrastructure such as ECEC has also been shown to create more employment than similar investments in hard infrastructure, and makes a more significant contribution to GDP.

Beyond the economics, ensuring that gender inequality, as well as other structures of discrimination such as colonisation, visa status, ableism or ageism, doesn’t exclude and disadvantage particular groups of people in economic recovery is important for rebuilding the kind of just, inclusive and fair society we can be proud of. It’s a matter of human rights.

Yet right now, our ECEC system is not fit for this purpose.

Even before the pandemic, ECEC was inaccessible and expensive for many parents, with a workforce disincentive rate that discourages secondary earners (mostly women in cis-heteronormative partnerships) from taking up additional days of work. There’s no guarantee of quality services for all geographic areas, or those that need them most. Moreover, ECEC workers remain some of the lowest paid, to the extent that early educators themselves cannot always afford the service they provide.

This week, Equality Rights Alliance have released our position statement on Reimagining Child Care. Our recommendations have three stages: short-term, medium-term and longer-term measures. Each of the stages are necessary to support ECEC through the lockdown and crisis period of the pandemic, as well as ensure that ECEC snaps forward to an equitable and inclusive future.

In the short term, we recommend providing a wage guarantee for early educators, and continuing transition support payments through the crisis. There’s no clear reason why ECEC was singled out for an early withdrawal of JobKeeper, and academics and educators alike have speculated that the decision reflects gendered biases. Expanding a wage guarantee to include people on temporary visas would also support the sector.

In addition, continuing to relax the activity test to allow parents who have lost employment or hours as a result of COVID-19 to qualify for the Child Care Subsidy will help support parents back into the workforce. Continuing to relax eligibility for the Additional Child Care Subsidy, which supports parents who are experiencing marginalisation, is also important for this reason, as well as making sure that children continue to reap the developmental benefits of early learning.

In the medium term, we recommend a transition period based on the existing subsidy system, but which also allows for enough support for the ECEC social infrastructure to remain viable. During this period, Government should investigate a reimagined ECEC, including reforms to the Child Care Subsidy which increase the available rate and address the workforce disincentive rate, options for planning services to fill gaps in need, and investigating new forms of child care which suit COVID-19-related changes to work patterns.

We recommend that the quality of services and the working and pay conditions for early educators are also reviewed. This could follow New Zealand’s He taonga te tamaiti, Every Child a taonga: Early Learning Action Plan 2019-2029, which aims to incentivise for 100% and regulate for 80% qualified teachers by 2029, to increase educator-to-child ratios and investigate a mechanism to improve work and pay conditions in the sector.

The longer term would be the implementation phase, when these changes will come to fruition in a snap forward to a more equitable and effective economy recovery that centres the needs of women to remain engaged in the workforce while addressing systemic barriers to achieving advances in gender equality.

This post is part of the Women's Policy Action Tank initiative to analyse government policy using a gendered lens. View our other policy analysis pieces here.

Posted by @SusanMaury