Without consultation, pre-primary rollout is putting childcare at risk

Last week the Liberal government unveiled the first phase of the pre-primary program they announced during the provincial election campaign. While it’s true that this province is in dire need of quality, affordable early childhood education options, that need extends from six months old to five years old.

For many parents, pre-primary may sound like a good opportunity and a welcome reprieve from the high cost of childcare, but is it really? This plan only scratches the surface of the need, and in a way that is not of much use to most of us.

The new pre-primary program will run during standard school hours. As far as allowing parents to participate in the workforce, there are very few of us with sixhour workdays. So, for those of us with fulltime or fulltime-plus jobs and four-year-olds, we are faced with the need to find appropriate wraparound care before and after school.

For my older children, there are options such as Excel and other community programs. Not so for four-year-olds.

But the concern isn’t just for after the program. What will happen in these new sites? Will all of these schools be retrofitted to accommodate 3.5 and fouryear-olds?

We were assured by Education Minister Zack Churchill that this would be an inclusive program, but how is that possible? The Commission on Inclusion just told us in its preliminary report that the inclusion system in the schools is not working and needs a complete overhaul.

The most striking thing about last week’s press conference, though, was the number of times Minister Churchill told us that he was “going to consult” with early childhood educators, with existing daycare centres and with parents.

As far as we know, none of these groups have yet been consulted in any meaningful way. The time to consult is before a program is launched, not after the details have already been established.

With consultation and transitional support from the government, it’s possible some providers could have adapted programming and business models, creating more beforeand after-school opportunities, but they were not given any lead time to do this. Perhaps such a consultation would have led to a very different outcome, such as stable core funding for existing sites, the ones that are designed, regulated and staffed to accommodate children under five. It’s an infuriating pattern. We need an affordable, universal childcare system in Nova Scotia and pre-primary is certainly a part of that. But it’s not the whole picture by a long shot, and rolling it out in this way only sets us back in the larger project of ensuring the best outcomes for children and supporting families.

Would I put my four-year-old in one of these programs this year? Not a chance.