For We Are Young and Free: How Free Childcare Will Keep Australia’s Economy On Top

 Australia needs an education system that starts at birth.

Our schooling system starts far too late. But, like many parents, I find the idea of my son starting ‘school’ earlier is terrifying. Free childcare for all children is the answer.

My son Leo has just turned two years old. He knows when I have forgotten my keys, understands how FaceTime works on the iPhone and can count to 10. He also has rhythm that would make Ringo Starr jealous.

By the time Leo has enrolled in primary school, some 90 per cent of his brain development will be complete.

Many parents (like me) already use long day care where education curriculums help social and brain development. But access to this is determined by income and is closed off for many parents who do not work.

Providing a free, universally accessible childcare for all children would be a significant shift. Placing the child’s needs at the centre of policy development would also help us avoid the never-ending increases in out-of-pocket fees, which have gone up some 28 per cent in just the past five years despite record government investment.

According to recent statistics from the University of Melbourne, on average, childcare costs amount to 27 per cent of household income for Australian families. Australian childcare costs for families are among the highest across OECD countries.

Australia’s government spend on childcare is below the OECD average. Our chronic underspend has contributed to low rates of childcare enrolment: only 40 per cent of Australian children under the age of six are enrolled in formal childcare.

Despite the clear link between developmental outcomes and early childhood education, the problem persists. Moreover, consequences extend beyond developmental outcomes. For the many Australian families where full-time childcare is not accessible due to cost, parents feel forced to work part-time. Accordingly, Australia’s part-time employment rate is the fourth-highest in the OECD.

There is a strong correlation between labour market participation for mothers and the enrolment of children in childcare. In countries such as Portugal and Slovenia, where children are in childcare for an average of more than 35 hours per week, the part-time employment rate for women is below 10 per cent.

Making our childcare system more like our primary school system is a huge reform that will put Australia on top both economically and in terms of our productivity.

A universally accessible system will also form part of the new social wage necessary to handle the huge economic disruption of the fourth industrial revolution.

To be competitive in the knowledge economy, we need to provide an education system that truly delivers lifelong learning.

The world is seeing the decline in manufacturing jobs and the greater automation of many physical labour roles. CEDA research says this could be some 40 per cent of current Australian jobs or some five million jobs. That is 5,000,000 people across Australia – or the entire population of Western Australia, twice over! Such a reform will also keep Australia internationally competitive. Knowledge economies are heading in this direction. Sweden’s ‘Educare’ model is practically free, Korea has a free option for parents and Berlin is the first German city phasing out early childhood education fees.

But, like so many social reforms, Australia was first. Prime Minister John Curtin was the first to deliver federal funding for crèche services for children. This assisted hundreds of thousands of women to join the war effort by entering the workforce. In a very real sense, free childcare services helped save our nation.

Investing in what we now know as early childhood education and care is one of the great economic levellers. New research from the Telethon Kids Institute shows that children in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas are more than four times more likely to be developmentally vulnerable than children from the least disadvantaged areas.

In Western Australia, more than one in five children has been identified as developmentally vulnerable. Further research shows that children from these disadvantaged groups stand to gain the most benefit the most from a high-quality early childhood education.

This is not something we can do quickly. Whenever I raise this need, the traditional small-picture arguments come back – it costs too much, it is hard to deliver on scale, and inevitably, arguments return to the need to to invest in the traditional education sectors of schooling and tertiary education.

So we need to start with baby steps towards this long-term goal. Right now that means providing permanent funding for free preschool for three- and four-year-olds. It means expanding the Government’s ‘Unique Student Identifier’ to childcare so we can truly acknowledge lifelong learning, and it means continuing to find ways to professionalise the pay and training of early childhood educators.

Until we have a true national vision, we will continue to see fragmentation on how states approach early childhood. Victoria has gone it alone in a $1 billion plan for free preschool for three-year-olds. In Western Australia, free preschool is mostly delivered through state schools and not though childcare centres.

This requires a radical change in the services that the market has developed for early childhood education and care.

The Telethon Kids Institute has rung the alarm on how the architecture of a child’s brain is weakened when exposed to poverty or neglect without access to positive relationships. One of the simplest ways to act upon this is to ensure vulnerable children have access to qualified early childhood professionals.

The Keating Government was the first Australian government to fund childcare infrastructure, and later the Howard and Rudd governments expanded the childcare subsidy scheme.

These initiatives have gone a long way. However, we are now at a point where either our early childhood system becomes a for-profit service for working parents, or alternatively it becomes more like our schooling system – free and accessible for all.

I know that the strongest investment the federal Parliament can make is in our next generation and education for zero- to four-year-olds. It will deliver on our national mission for gender equality and economic growth. And it is one of my missions as the Labor Member for Perth.

How exactly will it work? That is what we need to work on, together, over the next 10 years. If we want the best minds working on the challenges we as a country will face in the future, from national security, to aged care and climate change, we need to start investing in those minds now.

Patrick Gorman is the Federal Member for Perth.

Article is taken from the University of Western Australia’s “Let Every Stage Advance: Policy Ideas for the Fiftieth Parliament” publication. An excerpt ran in The West Australian.