These 50 centres have more than 800 children aged under 2 years, and nearly 600 aged 2 years enrolled.
There are another 1400 Dunedin children, aged 3 or 4 years, also attending ECE.
Parents well know the maze of funding and fees for any combination of over 2, under 2, free fees, more than 6 hours a day etc. All of which has been complicated by massive underfunding of pay parity and extended pay parity.
If you’ve seen fee rises, this will likely be why.
So, when the Ministry of Education began consultation on directly funding salaries and providing a bulk grant for operations, we hoped that life might get simpler. And then the government budget promised hundreds of millions more for early childhood education and free fees for 2-year-olds.
That would be 600 Dunedin families who wouldn’t have to pay for the first 20 hours a week — what a difference to family budgets!
But ... the direct funding proposal moves subsidies away from the under 2s — the most complex and demanding group to care for. That means fees would have to increase — a lot — for the families of those 800 children. Worst case, some centres might stop offering services to under 2s altogether.
And ... the 20 free hours (for 2, 3 and 4-year-olds) could be restricted so that no other hours could be enrolled in. Families could either get 20 free hours or have to pay for all of their hours if they needed more.
If the proposals roll out unamended the impact on Dunedin will be significant: family finances already stretched may break, wee ones may miss out on the richness and developmental boosts of early education.
And for women looking to return to work it could be disastrous.
Whatever the final form, the funding changes will likely be in place by January next year. They need to be better than this.
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