US – Poor childhood takes lifelong toll, study shows

Sebastian burped and gurgled on his mother’s lap Monday morning, three months into his Philadelphia life.

Because his family is poor, he’s unlikely to get the food, housing and living conditions he’ll need for his brain to develop properly over the next three years.

The circumstances of his just-begun journey could turn him into a bad student, an ineffective worker, and a poor man for the rest of his days, according to a new study on the cumulative effects of a deprived early childhood.

“Hardship is a constant,” said Sebastian’s mother, Joanna Cruz, 25, a married, unemployed former Dunkin’ Donuts worker from Grays Ferry. “It’s not something you can tell someone who never lived it. This is how we struggle.”

Researchers from Drexel University, as well as from universities and hospitals in Boston, Baltimore, Minneapolis, and Little Rock have reported that a lack of access to adequate food, housing, and home energy can have devastating effects on the health and development of children from 4 months to 3 years of age.

Known as Children’s HealthWatch, the researchers created a so-called hardship index to measure the diminished quality of food, housing, and home energy among the poor. This measure indicates that the recession has played havoc with the health of children and their futures.

In Philadelphia, the hardship index nearly doubled between 2006 and 2009. During the first three years of the index, Philadelphia had the highest hardship rate, though Boston eclipsed it last year.

The study of 7,000 people in the five cities combined was conducted over four years in hospital emergency rooms, where interviewers spoke with parents about issues of food, housing, and energy. The work was published in this month’s issue of Pediatrics, a journal of children’s health.

Hardships “all converge in the body of the baby,” said Deborah Frank, a pediatrician and HealthWatch investigator with the Boston University School of Medicine. “America’s impoverished families are in a complex humanitarian emergency.”

That’s not news to Cruz, who lives in a $725-a-month, three-bedroom house next to an abandoned building.

Her husband was laid off from a bakery job in March. In the winter, the family – including two other children, ages 4 and 8 – shivered in one room at night near the only space heater. This summer, two fans won’t be enough to cool them. And welfare and food stamps will be inadequate to stave off hunger.

To conserve, Cruz, her husband, and 4-year-old Silina eat just breakfast and dinner each day, while the 8-year-old gets lunch in school. There’s enough formula for Sebastian – for now.

Cruz stocks up on foods her children don’t like, such as Oodles of Noodles, so there’s something to eat at the end of the month, before new food stamps are issued.

Interviewers at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in Philadelphia found that 60 percent of families who showed up in the ER had one or more dimensions of hardship, according to Mariana Chilton, Philadelphia’s principal investigator for Children’s HealthWatch and a professor in Drexel’s School of Public Health.

“It’s heartbreaking to work on these issues and see the children try to grow and thrive, while parents hustle every day to help their families, and they still can’t make it,” Chilton said.

“This is a national disaster, but not obvious, like a flood in New Orleans. I’m shocked that people are able to tolerate this in our young.”

Defining the dimensions of hardship, Children’s HealthWatch reported that food insecurity is a lack of access to enough food for an active and healthy lifestyle. Nutritional deprivation, as doctors know, has severe consequences for cognitive, social, and emotional development.

In many cases, researchers found, children suffer malnutrition, which manifests itself in two ways: Either they fail to thrive, which means they are not getting enough calories to grow; or they get cheap, dense calories and become obese.

Parents who can’t afford formula will sometimes thin it with water, which dilutes sodium in the body and can cause seizures from cold-water intoxication. It can also lead to poor weight gain and growth, according to Dan Taylor, a pediatrician at St. Christopher’s who was not involved with the study.

Housing insecurity occurs when the family has moved at least twice in the previous year, has difficulty paying the mortgage or rent, or has more than two people sleeping in a bedroom.

Energy insecurity results when a family doesn’t have enough money to heat or cool a residence, or to cook. It’s also manifest in a family that has received utility shutoff notices, has had the energy turned off, or has used the stove to heat the home.

The stresses of housing and energy insecurity adversely affect a child’s health and development, Taylor said.

Babies and young children who move a lot, or live in shelters, or are crowded in a bedroom develop stress hormones that can damage a still-growing brain through age 19, Taylor said.

Similarly, living and sleeping without proper heat or air-conditioning can create the same kind of brain-stifling stress, not to mention respiratory illnesses such as asthma, he added.

Also, he said, he sees more childhood burns from cheap heaters or ovens used to heat homes, more domestic violence in overcrowded apartments, and more child abuse.

“A lot of people talk about post-traumatic stress after a difficult event,” Taylor said. “But these babies and young children see continuous traumatic stress. There is no ‘post.’ ”

Such is the case for Samonia Henderson’s 2-year-old twins. Henderson, 36, of Mount Airy, is unemployed and searching for work after recently earning an associate’s degree to become an administrative assistant. She said that household stress from lack of food, as well as arguments that she and her fiance have over money, has caused the children’s hair to begin falling out.

“I don’t want my babies going through this,” she said. “But we are barely making it.”

The HealthWatch study shows that antipoverty programs are “not working as well as they should,” Chilton said.

“We need a new and radical child-centered approach,” she added, in which every program meant to help the poor first takes into account the health and development of children.

“If we don’t change the way we think,” Chilton concluded, “the system is doomed to fail Philadelphia’s children.”

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/local/20100429_Poor_childhood_takes_lifelong_toll__study_shows.html

US – Childhood Obesity: Tackling a National Epidemic

Childhood obesity has more than tripled in the past 30 years. The percentage of obese and overweight children between the ages of 10 and 17 is at or above 30 percent in 30 states, according to a recent Robert Wood Johnson Foundation report, “F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies Are Failing in America.”

Obese children and teenagers are developing obesity-related diseases including diabetes, coronary heart disease, high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol and Type 2 diabetes that were formerly only seen in adults, the report said.

For instance, approximately 176,500 people under the age of 20 have Type 2 diabetes, and 2 million adolescents ages 12–19 have pre-diabetes

The percentage of obese and overweight children (ages 10 to 17) is at or above 30 percent in 30 states. Mississippi had the highest rate of obese and overweight children at 44.4 percent
“Overall, this generation of children could be the first to have shorter, less healthy lives than their parents,” the report said.

Yale University obesity researcher Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, believes food advertising plays a big role in the food choices that children make and subsequent rising tide of childhood obesity.

In an effort to develop lifetime brand loyalties and capture market share, the food industry “spends over $1.6 billion per year in the U.S. to market their products directly to young people,” according to the Rudd Center. The overwhelming majority of these ads are for unhealthy products, high in calories, sugar, fat and/or sodium.

McDonald’s pioneered the practice of marketing to children, according to Corporate Accountability International, a Boston-based consumer-advocacy group that has launched a campaign calling on McDonald’s to retire Ronald McDonald as a spokesperson for the nation’s largest restaurant chain.

“In 1963, rookie television announcer Willard Scott suited up as Ronald McDonald and the clown made its own commercial debut,” the report says.

“Though hard to imagine as extraordinary today given the ubiquity of advertising to children, in his first commercial Ronald made a direct appeal not to potential adult patrons but to children. The approach bucked all marketing conventions … and it worked.”

Click here to read “Is Junk Food as Addictive as Cocaine?”

In the words of Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s, “a child who loves our TV commercials and brings her grandparents to a McDonald’s gives us two more customers.”

“No icon has ever been more effective in hooking kids on a harmful product,” according to Stacey Folsom, the national spokesperson for Corporate Accountability International, which also waged campaigns against tobacco companies and was behind the effort to retire Joe Camel from Camel cigarettes. “Kids have become more obese and less healthy on his watch. He’s a deep-fried Joe Camel for the 21st century. He deserves a break, and so do our kids. This clown is no friend to our children or their health.”

McDonald also pioneered the practice of putting its restaurants near—and inside—schools. The first McDonald’s to open inside a high school opened in 1976 in Benton, Ark. Today, a quarter of the nation’s high schools sell branded fast food, according to Corporate Accountability International.

Author Eric Schlosser in his 2001 investigative book “Fast Food Nation” said it’s no coincidence that the little pieces of fast food are wrapped up like presents, or that restaurant chains appeal to children’s minds by employing “bright colors, a playground, a toy, a clown, a drink with a straw.”

McDonald’s operates more than 8,000 playgrounds––more playgrounds than any other private entity in the United States—and is the largest toy distributor in the world, according to attorney Jonathan Scott Goldman in a paper published in the Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review comparing the tobacco and fast-food industries. Burger King operates more than 2,000 playgrounds.

“When Burger King created its ‘Kids Club’ in 1991, sales of children’s meals tripled,” says Goldman. “Ninety percent of children aged 3 to 9 eat at a McDonald’s at least once per month and 96 percent of American schoolchildren can identify Ronald McDonald––the highest rate of recognition for any fictional character other than Santa Claus.”

“We take Joe Camel off the advertising billboard because it is marketing bad products to our children … but Ronald McDonald is considered cute,” says Brownell. “How different are they in their impact, in what they are trying to get kids to do?”

Goldman said that “in terms of society’s goals of protecting children from harm they cannot understand, Joe Camel and Ronald McDonald may turn out to be, legally, quite similar.”

At the same time, soft-drink giants like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Dr Pepper Snapple Group have dangled cash and other incentives in front of cash-strapped schools for decades in return for the right to sell sodas other sugary beverages in vending machines inside schools, says Michele Simon, author of the book “Appetite for Profit.”

To compensate for cuts in educational and athletic programs, many school districts sign what are known as exclusive “pouring rights” contracts with these soft-drink companies. In exchange for large upfront payments, school districts agree to sell only one company’s products in vending machines and at all school events and to prominently display advertising and marketing materials on school grounds.

“Soda companies make the deals seem like a charitable donation when the reality is that schools benefit far less than the companies do,” says Simon. “Sometimes these contracts can lock a district in for many years with the same vendor and the same unhealthy options. Usually the amount of money a school district receives is dependent on soda sales, thus creating a conflict of interest between health and profit.”

Recently, the soft-drink industry cut the number of high-calorie soft drinks sold in schools in response to the growing threat of lawsuits and state legislation. But other sugary drinks, including diet sodas, Gatorade, juice drinks and sweetened milk, are still being sold in their place.

“You only need to read the language of an exclusive soda contract with a school to understand that the companies call all the shots, making such decisions as what products are sold and how much is sold, even down to the number of ounces,” says Simon. “Also, the very nature of an exclusive contract restricts choice because schools cannot bring in healthier beverages from other vendors without risking violating the contract.”

Simon said that while it’s true that school districts are in desperate need of money, she does not believe the solution to that problem is load children up on soda and junk food and other products that make them sick.

“We shouldn’t be trading children’s health for after-school programs,” she says.

White House Weighs In on Obesity

In February, Michelle Obama launched her Let’s Move initiative, which is designed to get healthier foods in schools, give parents support to make healthier choices for their children, and get families up off the couch and active together. One important aspect of the program is focused on getting healthy, affordable food available in every part of the country.

As part of her initiative, Michelle Obama is urging the nation’s largest food companies to speed up efforts to make healthier foods and reduce the marketing of unhealthy foods to children. “We need you not to just tweak around the edges but entirely rethink the products you are offering, the information that you provide about these products, and how you market those products to our children,” she says.

http://www.diversityinc.com/article/7531/Childhood-Obesity-Tackling-a-National-Epidemic/

US – Early Learning Strengthens National Security

A summit in Harrisonburg is raising awareness about the importance of early childhood development. The benefits go beyond school grounds.

People at the fifth annual Smart Beginnings Early Childhood Leadership Summit at James Madison University say you have to start young and then build on a strong foundation. One coordinator even says a local economic benefit will follow.

Retired Brig. Gen. John Douglass says the effects of teaching kids when they’re younger will even improve national security.

He says, “If children stay in the educational system, we’ve found that over their lifetime, the kind of care that they need from their government is reduced by, estimates run as low as $70,000 over a lifetime, to $250,000.”

Speakers stressed the importance of teaching children at a much younger age than we’re used to, including starting when they are infants.

http://www.whsv.com/news/headlines/92412469.html

Canada – Poll shows support for increasing early childhood spending

More than 70 per cent of B.C. residents underestimate how many of the province’s children enter school developmentally vulnerable, an Angus Reid poll released today shows.

And most of those polled expressed strong support for increased public spending once they learned how many B.C. children are at risk and how low Canadian investment in early childhood education and daycare is in contrast to other wealthy countries.

Twenty-nine per cent of B.C. children, including many kids from middle-class homes, are developmentally vulnerable, according to the UBC-based Human Early Learning Partnership. “Developmentally vulnerable” is defined as not being ready to learn when a child enters kindergarten.

More than 88 per cent of those polled said they support the provincial government’s goal of reducing the number of children at risk in B.C. to 15 per cent by 2015. More that 60 per cent would be willing to endorse an additional public expenditure of a billion dollars a year to reach that goal. Eighty-three per cent supported financial support for low income families. Fifty-eight per cent supported extending paid parental leave to 18 months from one year, with additional months for fathers, and 53 per cent supported limiting the work week for parents of young children to 35 hours.

The poll results were released as part of a two-day symposium at the Wosk Centre for Dialogue titled “Inspiring Innovation — Investing in Human Capital, Early Care and Learning Hubs,” an event supported by the YWCA of Vancouver, City of Vancouver and VanCity Credit Union and hosted by the Vancouver Joint Child Care Council and the Vancouver Early Childhood Development MOU Steering Committee.

Tamara Vrooman, VanCity president and CEO, told the symposium during a morning panel that B.C. needs to make the kind of long term investment in reducing child vulnerability that it is proposing to make in the Site C dam.

“Strong family policy is not simply a social issue,” she said. “It is a core economic issue that the business sector needs to talk about in a serious way because investing in our children today is really an investment in our workforce of tomorrow.”

The Angus Reid public opinion survey, funded by the YWCA, was conducted online on April 12th of this year and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 per cent. The poll reflects answers from 800 respondents.

http://thetyee.ca/Blogs/TheHook/Education/2010/04/28/EarlyChildhoodSpending/

NZ – Government figures show children in Auckland spent more time in early childhood education

At the same time, the national average number of hours spent in early childhood education has continued to grow.

Children enrolled in early childhood education last year spent an average 19.5 hours a week in education or care. In Auckland, the figure was more than 22 hours.

Radio New Zealand’s education correspondent says he national average has steadily increased from nearly 13 hours per week at the start of the decade.

The figures also show about 20% of those aged one and under who were in early childhood education, were there for more than 36 hours per week, as were 22% of all children enrolled in Auckland.

However, Dr Linda Mitchell of the University of Waikato says such long hours could be detrimental if the quality of education and care are poor.

http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/stories/2010/04/30/1247feff44db

South Africa – Scaling-Up Early Child Development in South Africa

Introducing a Reception Year (Grade R) for Children Aged Five Years as the First Year of Schooling

This case study tracks the development of the policy environment leading to the introduction of Grade R, the Reception Year for five year olds, in the years of transition to democracy in South Africa and its subsequent rollout towards universal provision originally set for 2010/11 but recently revised to 2014. It includes a reflection on what, in the Grade R scaleup process, would inform the current rollout of a national plan for integrated servicing for children aged zero to four years.

The paper was written by Linda Biersteker from the Early Learning Resource Unit, an ECD NGO specializing in policy, advocacy and programme development located in Cape Town, South Africa. The South African case study is based on a survey of published and grey literature, the author’s own long experience as a role player and researcher for many of the processes described in this report, as well as interviews with several key stakeholders in the ECD sector in South Africa. These stakeholders have for the most part, not been identified in the text for ethical considerations.

Key informants included:

A senior education specialist in the National Policy Investigation Process

An academic/activist involved in drafting the National Programme of Action for Children

Leaders of the two major civil society bodies for ECD

Five national and provincial education department staff (past and present)

Members from the departmental review task team for Grade R

Researchers involved in Grade R research, and

An informant involved with early ECD policy formulation through the political process.
This case study is organised into seven sections. The first provides an overview of the context of ECD in South Africa, starting with key indicators of child status, and then outlining public sector institutions and civil society involvement in ECD, the policy environment and public programmes in support of young children, and how these are going to scale (or “massifying,” which is the current terminology). In the second section, the components of the Grade R intervention are described – its historical roots, the piloting phase, and the preparation for White Paper 5, which provides for rollout. The third section provides an assessment of the factors that led to the adoption of Grade R as part of the formal education system in South Africa, and the contribution of government and civil society to that. It also examines the funding mechanisms used for the start-up of this national programme. The fourth section focuses on requirements for the scaleup to universal provision, including governance, provisioning and capacity building for implementation, as well as advocacy trends in the scale-up period. In the fifth section, evaluations of progress towards universal Grade R provision at an acceptable level of quality are considered, as well as the probability that Grade R will be sustainable. The critical issues for mass expansion of Grade R are analysed next, and lessons learned from this are considered in relation to the currently developing national plan for ECD services for younger children. The final section contains recommendations for the next steps in the scale-up of Grade R and some preliminary recommendations for the scaling of services for children zero to four years.

http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2010/04_child_development_south_africa_biersteker.aspx

Cuba – Scaling-Up Early Child Development in Cuba

There are two distinct stages in Cuba’s history with regard to child development services. In the first stage, before the Revolution, health services were quite limited; there were only 300 children’s health centers in the entire country, and the child mortality rate was 54 per 1,000 live births. In the second stage, following the Revolution, health services became universal, with rates of child mortality and low birth weight comparable to those in developed countries and 99.8 percent of children under the age of six attending early education programs.

Cuba’s advancement with respect to child development services is a result of the ideology, culture, and values that have oriented and driven the country’s social policies in recent decades. Among the key events in that historic processwere the creation of the National Health System (1960), the National Literacy Campaign (1961), the U.S. embargo and the Cuba-USSR trade agreement (1962), the creation of community polyclinics (1976), the creation of the Early Education System (1980), the introduction of the family doctor concept (1984), the fall of the socialist bloc and the beginning of a period of economic crisis (1989), and the launch of the social-educational program Educa a Tu Hijo [Educate Your Child] (1992). Other important changes also took place, related to university education and teaching institutes, reform of the health and education sectors, the decentralization of the government, and the contributions of Círculos Infantiles (day care centers) and scientific research centers.

The fall of the socialist bloc in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 sparked an acute economic crisis in Cuba known as the “período especial en tiempos de paz [special period in times of peace].” With the tightening of the U.S. embargo in 1992, the crisis became even more acute. Imports and exports fell 20 to 25 percent between 1989 and 1993, and the fiscal balance as a percentage of gross domestic product (fiscal balance/GDP) fell 33.5 percent (Mesa Lago, 2005).

The tightening of the embargo and the deepening of the crisis interrupted the major advances made by Cuba in health care and education. Food and medicine became scarce, and health and education services deteriorated. Between 1989 and 1993, per capita daily caloric intake fell from 3,130 to 1,823 kcal (kilocalories) a day and daily protein intake fell from 76 to 46 grams, causing a severe drop in average weight for both children and adults. Child morbidity and mortality, mortality in children under the age of five, and birth weight indicators all deteriorated.

The Cuban government’s response was consistent with its socialist principles. Despite the economic difficulties of the special period, the Cuban government increased the percentage of the gross domestic product allocated for health and education, expanding disease prevention and health care programs and establishing universal preschool education with the launch of the Educate Your Child Program. Through that and other initiatives, Cuba was able not only to reduce the initial impact of the crisis on child development but also to improve all basic child development indicators throughout the 1990s. In short, the special period was a time of crisis for Cubans and its economic consequences could still be seen in 2003, but the period also saw progress in the implementation of social policies and programs for children.

http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2010/04_child_development_cuba_tinajero.aspx

US – Editorial: State must make pre-K a priority

When do children learn the fastest? Scientific studies are unanimous that it’s from birth to age 5.

So when do we start sending them to school?

In most cases, not till kindergarten, which usually begins at age 5. In other words, there’s a vast disconnect between what we know and what we do. Which brings us to the “pre-K” movement, which recognizes that what happens from birth is hugely important, and that kids ought to be going to school earlier.

Now let’s look at the record. The Center for Michigan, the non-partisan, non-profit “think and do tank” I founded, had an education action group meeting this March. An issues guide prepared for that meeting revealed that as of two years ago, 16 percent of Michigan 4-year-olds were in federally funded Head Start preschools. State-funded pre-K programs served another 18 percent.

But that leaves out nearly two-thirds of the rest. How do we do in comparison with other states? Not as well as we should. Currently, Michigan ranks 19th as a proportion of population served, while we rank 16th in support per child enrolled — below where we should be.

Yet instead of beefing up a program vital for our futures, the Michigan Legislature considered eliminating all state-funded pre-K last year! They finally allocated $100 million per year.

That’s not enough. Around 35,000 4-year-olds are eligible but not currently enrolled in either Head Start or the Great Start Readiness Program. If all legally eligible children were to enroll in publicly funded pre-K programs, it would cost $236 million per year, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research.

All told, spending for Michigan schools from state and federal sources together is about $11 billion annually.

Virtually all research shows that the return on investment in reduced prison and social services cost is far above — as much as eight times — the costs of those programs.

This is probably why more than half of the 300 people who attended the Center for Michigan’s action group meeting favored investing any extra money available in pre-K programs.

These facts led to the formation of the Early Childhood Leadership Council (ECLC), a group of 15 influential citizens formed to argue for pre-K in Michigan, even during times of budget crisis. (Full disclosure: I’m a member, and The Center for Michigan is helping administer a foundation grant for ECLC.)

At the council’s meeting in Lansing last week, talk centered around the hard fact that the capitol is preoccupied with the budget crisis, and that despite early education’s importance, most lawmakers regard advocates for pre-K as just another special interest group.

There are 83 organizations in Michigan dealing with childhood and education, according to Judy Samuelson, CEO of the Early Childhood Investment Corporation, a public body charged with arguing in favor of pre-K education.

These organizations — one of which is our state itself — are the funding vehicles for $2.5 billion going to early childhood programs.

This reminded me of the days in the early 1980’s when I was picked by then-Gov. Jim Blanchard to chair the Michigan Job Training Coordinating Council. Back then, the state was in the middle of a big recession (what else!), and most of the job training folks were whining about not having enough money.

I insisted on doing a census, and guess what? It turned out that there were a total of 72 job training programs in Michigan being administered by nine separate departments of state government.

The problem wasn’t financial. It was managerial — all those separate entities, each duplicating scarce expenses.

It didn’t take the folks at the Early Childhood Leadership Council long to see that consolidating programs into one place would reduce waste and increase accountability. Those are two key policies for the state worst-hit by the recession.

What’s needed, then is a focal point for overseeing and coordinating all the separate funding streams around this field — say, a Governor’s Office for Early Childhood Education.

This is something that might easily be done by executive order. The Early Childhood Investment Corp.’s Samuelson was asked to discuss this idea with Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

Are you listening, governor?

And, while we’re on the topic of disconnect between what we know and what we do, here’s the latest rumor from Lansing: The state faces a general fund deficit of around $1.8 billion.

That’s almost exactly what the state spends to support higher education. Supposedly some “geniuses” in the Legislature and the governor’s office are seriously discussing closing the budget gap by eliminating entirely all public support for colleges and universities!

If you want Michigan to have any future, just hope it ain’t true.

http://www.hollandsentinel.com/opinions/x1394813642/COLUMN-State-must-make-pre-K-a-priority

Victoria Invests $7.75 Million For Early Childhood Centre In Mernda

A new $7.75 million community activity centre in Mernda will provide families in the rapidly growing area with a comprehensive range of early childhood services.

Officially opening the centre today, Minister for Children and Early Childhood Development Maxine Morand said the Mernda Villages Community Activity Centre would provide a range of children’s services conveniently located for parents.

“This new facility will provide services for more than 300 children including childcare and kinder and also maternal and child health services, early childhood intervention services, family services and parenting programs,” Ms Morand said.

The Brumby Labor Government has provided $500,000 towards the project while the City of Whittlesea has contributed $3.5 million and the developer, Stockland, $3.75 million.

“A priority of the Brumby Labor Government is to ensure all children participate in high quality early childhood services and I’m pleased we’ve been able to work in partnership to produce this fantastic facility for local families,” Ms Morand said.

“I’d like to congratulate both the City of Whittlesea and Stockland on making such significant contributions towards this new service for their local community.

“We believe every Victorian child deserves the best possible start in life and should have access to the support, care and education in their early years to equip them for life.

“This centre, strategically situated next to the new Mernda Primary School now under construction, will make it easier for parents to access a range of children’s services in one location.”

Member for Yan Yean Danielle Green, herself a local resident, said the new facility would cater to a growing population in the City of Whittlesea, which is forecast to increase by up to 65,000 over the next 20 years.

“The suburbs of Mernda and Doreen, which currently have a population of 9,000, are expected to eventually house 44,000 people,” she said.

“It is great that we have been able to work in partnership to develop this centre which will help meet the needs of local families for many years to come.”

Ms Green said the centre would also be able to accommodate community meetings and playgroup activities.

http://www.thegovmonitor.com/health/victoria-invests-7-75-million-for-early-childhood-centre-in-mernda-29391.html

NZ – Government Set To Ruin The Party For The Early Childhood Sector

The education sector union NZEI Te Riu Roa says it is ironic that as early childhood teachers celebrate the huge strides made in early childhood education, the government looks set to pull back on its investment.

Early childhood teachers along with NZEI and the New Zealand Childcare Association are celebrating the 25th anniversary of their first collective agreement.

The Consenting Parties Agreement, now known as the Early Childhood Education Collective Agreement or ECECA, has set the benchmark for teaching standards and conditions in early childhood centres and services around the country. It is also one of the largest multi-employer agreements in New Zealand, now involving 162 employers who operate early childhood services.

At the heart of the agreement is a commitment to provide quality teaching and learning for New Zealand’s youngest learners.

NZEI says unfortunately the government doesn’t share that commitment. Last year it did a u-turn on agreed qualification targets and appears to have abandoned the target of having a fully qualified and registered teaching workforce by 2012. Now it is criticising the amount of money spent on early childhood education and signalling upcoming cuts in the Budget.

NZEI Vice President Judith Nowotarski says the investment is worth it.

“Early childhood education provides the building blocks for all future education and increased investment brings huge benefits for children and parents.”

“Research shows that investing in quality early childhood education is in the national interest and makes good economic sense. We need to hold onto the gains we’ve made and keep moving forward. The government should not seek to undermine that,” she says.

http://www.voxy.co.nz/politics/government-set-ruin-party-early-childhood-sector/5/46746