Toddlers in group care 'damaged'

A generation of children has been "disenfranchised" by being put in preschool group care, an early-childhood education leader says.

Controversy erupted in the early-childhood education sector yesterday after The Press revealed Children's Commissioner John Angus was investigating childcare for under-threes.

PORSE managing director Jenny Yule, who has worked in the sector for 30 years, said group-based care for toddlers caused long-term damage.

PORSE is an in-home childcare service with about 3000 children enrolled nationally.

Yule said international and New Zealand research showed that babies needed one-on-one attachment and an environment that was not big and busy.

"The last 20 years has funded a group-based model, which is great for three and four-year-olds, but the trouble is we've sucked in all of the babies," she said.

"We have to challenge the people who are making the decisions in early-childhood education because it's a huge movement ... It was very much that feminist movement because they didn't want women tied to the home.

"But it's really missed the point of what about the babies? The home is best, and if the home isn't coping, let's put the resources into the homes."

Yule said "a whole generation" had been disenfranchised by group care, leading children to later problems with aggression and violence.

"A lot of that cohort have just been institutionalised from the day they were born."

She said a call by the Early Childhood Council to review the curriculum was "an excuse" to avoid addressing the real problem of the under-threes in group centres.

"Instead of looking at the model of under-two-year-olds in large group settings, they are now looking at blaming the curriculum," Yule said.

Early Childhood Council chief executive Sarah Farquhar said she was "concerned at the level of unfair flak" that infant-toddler care was getting.

"There is no evidence that the state of infant-toddler care is in a mess. In fact, it's in better shape than other services, such as kindergartens and playcentres, according to the Education Review Office [ERO]," she said.

While the ERO had concerns about compliance in half of the 74 surveyed infant-toddler centres, they were "of an administrative, check-list nature". "These concerns are ones that do not justify a national panic about the quality of care for infants and toddlers," she said.

Farquhar said she wanted Angus to "come with me to visit some centres" where he would find standards of care to be high.

"While the minimum legal standard is one teacher not worker to five infants, this is the minimum, and typically centres have ratios of one to three infants or one to four infants," she said.

"In addition, teachers are free to devote all their attention to the infants, unlike parents in homes who have many household and personal tasks to attend to."

Angus said he was "quite comfortable" with government policies encouraging participation in quality early-childhood education for three and four-year-olds. He was concerned about high rates of participation for children aged two and under.

- © Fairfax NZ News