Province receives passing grade for daycare

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Early-childhood educator Alan Buckley works with toddlers at the Discovery Children's Centre Tuesday.

Manitoba is one of only three provinces to earn a passing grade on the Early Childhood Education Index of the late education guru Fraser Mustard.

That puts the province firmly on an honours list with Quebec and Prince Edward Island.

Quebec has long held the honour as top spot for daycare in Canada, in part because it offers universally subsidized daycare at $7 a day. Manitoba and P.E.I. are newbies.

Early Years, Study 3 is the third report by the late social scientist Fraser Mustard, who died earlier this month.

The guru gave voice to three enduring messages to link early-childhood development to adult success: The years before five last a lifetime; it takes a village to raise a child; and pay now or pay later.

He took that passion and those messages to government offices, boardrooms, classrooms, living rooms and clinics.

In Manitoba, he had the ear of senior government officials and the provincial cabinet.

"I worked through the report and I was interested to see where it can provide us with guidance on where we can go from here," Family Services Minister Gord Mackintosh said Thursday. He expressed his condolences for Mustard's death, praising the social scientist for his vision and his passion.

Manitoba's ranking is the result of years of work, he said. In 2008, the province added half of the 11,000 daycare spaces it had promised. There's another 900 spaces to go under a five-year daycare expansion called Family Choices.

"And in the election we committed to more," Mackintosh said. "Another 2,000."

Right now Manitoba stands alone as the only province in Canada with a pension plan for early-childhood educators and a safety charter that sets standard codes of conduct inside daycare centres. It also has the lowest fees under daycare subsidies for low-income families.

Plans call for the province to roll out an online registry to help parents find child care that's convenient and meets their needs. The province is also injecting $14 million to boost wages over the next two years, Mackintosh said.

A co-author of the report said Manitoba's ranking means the province is on the right track.

"Manitoba is about halfway there. What Manitoba does well is it has a clear vision about what it wants and where it wants to go to get it. That's no small thing," said Kerry McCuaig, the Atkinson Policy Fellow at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca

More children than spaces

MANITOBA'S Family Services department shows 8,000 online registrations, including 5,000 children who are on waiting lists and another 3,000 registered for future spaces.

There are currently 29,811 licensed child-care spaces in Manitoba.

Advocates of universal daycare say less than 25 per cent of kids under 12 have access to licensed child care in Manitoba.

The Early Childhood Education Index in Early Years, Study 3 points out three things Manitoba is doing right:

-- Regularly posts online reports showing how much money Manitoba spends on daycare, its impact on early-childhood education and future goals for daycares.

-- Two-thirds of staff must be trained as early-childhood educators under Manitoba standards, a higher ratio of trained to untrained staff than other provinces.

-- Wage gaps are smaller in Manitoba than other provinces between trained daycare staff and elementary-school teachers, the measurement used to compare the patchwork quilt of services and standards across the provinces: Manitoba workers are paid more. Still, wages for daycare educators remain some of the lowest in Canada.

Two improvements would boost Manitoba's rating the next time:

-- Full-day kindergarten to bridge the gap between daycare and Grade 1. Right now it's half-days.

-- A higher education curriculum in daycares and a decision to use the same yardstick to compare the standard of education to the elementary school curriculum.

-- Sources: Early Years, Study 3, Manitoba Family Services, Cornish Child Care Centre

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 25, 2011 A11