UNICEF UK is warning that the potential benefits of out-of-home child care could be lost if the world’s richest nations do not guarantee the less disadvantaged with high quality support and education.
A recent study by the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre in Florence, warns that low quality child care will harm development, and that poorer families face the double disadvantage of being born into poverty and receiving poor quality childcare.
The report proposes 10 steps to establishing standards to be monitored and compared across the countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
- A national plan with priority for the disadvantaged
- Subsidised and regulated child care services for 25% of children under three
- Subsidised and accredited early education services for 80% of four-year-olds
- 80% of all child care staff trained
- 50% of staff in accredited early education services tertiary educated with relevant qualification
- Parental leave of one year at 50% of salary
- Minimum staff-to-children ratio for four to five-year-olds
- 1% of GDP spent on early childhood services
- Child poverty rate less than 10%
- 1Near-universal outreach of essential child health services
Director of UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre (IRC), Marta Santos Pais, said –
‘High quality early childhood education and care has a huge potential to enhance children’s cognitive, linguistic, emotional and social development. It can help boost educational achievement, limit the early establishment of disadvantage, promote inclusion, be an investment in good citizenship, and advance progress for women.’
The UK still has three million children living in poverty and higher rates of infant death and low birth weight than many comparable countries. Though the Government has taken great strides in advancing child wellbeing, much more still needs to be done.
In the recent pre budget report the Government did not commit to investing £3bn to keep it on course to half child poverty by 2010 and end it by 2020. The UK should spend what is needed to eliminate child poverty and meet the benchmarks, and there is no better security than investing in the prospects of our youngest children.
