On the Bottom Rung: Canada’s Early Care and Learning

Early care and learning should be one of Canada’s most significant educational policy issues in this new decade. Why? Because we are so very bad at providing high-quality early learning environments for our youngest citizens and the rest of the world knows it. It was less than two years ago when UNICEF issued a report card in 2008 that compared government policy and results for young children and their families in 25 developed countries. Canada ranked in last place, achieving only one benchmark out of ten (for staff training in child care programs) while missing benchmarks for measurements of child poverty, parental leave, access to essential child health services, and quality early childhood education and care programs. Similarly, the OECD’s 2006 international study of early childhood education, Starting Strong II, also ranked Canada’s approach to child care last among the over 20 countries included in its study, noting that our nation had the lowest public investment, the lowest access rates, and among the highest parent fees in the world.

Responsibility for early care and learning, like its primary and secondary education counterparts, is primarily a provincial responsibility. There have been many attempts, dating back to the late 1980s through the present, to develop a national approach to early care and learning, but the abolishment of the Canada Assistance Program in 1996 and the establishment of the Canada Health and Social Transfer block fund asserted the provinces’ primacy in this policy area. With the exception of Quebec, which expanded its early learning and child care programs beginning in 1997 to ensure better access to families, child care in the majority of the Canadian provinces is primarily a fee-paying service with many families not able to access services due to costs. While fee subsidies are available in all jurisdictions, limitations on subsidies exclude some eligible parents or the subsidy itself is insufficient to cover the child care fee. It is not unusual for middle class or modest income families to fail to qualify for a fee subsidy. Quebec alone offers a flat fee for child care at an impressively low $7/day.

These policy strategies ignore the human capital arguments that support government investments in early care and learning. Human capital theory suggests that a well-educated population is able to innovate and more readily adapt to technological changes, contributing to the society’s capability to produce wealth. The educational process happens over multiple time periods, and the stock of skills generated in one period depends critically on the stock of skills that served as a foundation in the previous period. Therefore, investments in human capital early in a child’s life cycle are likely to be more efficient than investments made at older ages.

Economic arguments citing positive social outcomes of early childhood education also support the idea of government investments. Knudsen, Heckman, Cameron, and Shonkoff (2006) cited evidence of positive economic, neurobiological, and behavioral outcomes to support their argument that providing early child education to disadvantaged children was the most efficient strategy for strengthening the future workforce and improving its quality of life. Karoly, Kilburn, and Cannon (2005) presented a similar range of outcomes, including increased high school graduation, college attendance, and labor force and participation, and decreases in socially negative behaviors such as crime, substance abuse, and teenage pregnancy.

Cost-benefit analysis in particular has been applied to provide evidence that investments in early care and learning have the potential to generate government savings and produce returns to society that outpace most public and private investments. The best-known early care and education cost-benefit analysis was the High/Scope Perry Preschool Project study in the United States. Utilizing random assignment of its 123 low-income, African-American participants to control and intervention groups with virtually no attrition during the almost 40 year-period under study, this study showed a consistent pattern of causes and effects from preschool to adulthood. In summary, this study provided solid evidence that children living in poverty who attend good preschool programs experience a series of positive effects that stretches from improvements in early childhood intellectual performance and disposition towards learning, to reduced need for placement in special education classes in later childhood, to higher school achievement and commitment in early adolescence, to lower rates of high school dropout, arrests, and welfare assistance and higher earnings and wealth in later adolescence and early adulthood. Significantly, most of the outcome gains accruing to program participants were maintained over the longer term—even as late as age 40.

Other economic studies of early care and learning programs reached similar conclusions to the Perry Preschool study. A random-assignment study of the Abecedarian program, conducted in North Carolina in the 1970s, focused on African-American children at risk of social and cognitive problems. The program delivered full-day high quality child care services from infancy to 5 years of age. By the time children had reached the age of 21, the total public benefits were calculated as $2.69 for each public dollar invested. A benefit-cost study conducted in Canada by Cleveland and Krashinsky in 1998 found that the incremental benefits of a universal high-quality early care and learning program for two to five year old children across the nation would be twice as high as the costs.

Given evidence from these studies, it is not unreasonable to presume that cost savings for provincial governments could be large enough to not only repay the initial costs of investments in early care and learning, but also to generate savings to the provinces as a whole several times greater than the costs. These findings move early care and learning policy from being strictly a social-service policy and philanthropic endeavor to help children from low-income families to also being considered an economic development strategy.

There are encouraging signs across the country that more provinces recognize the benefits of investing in early care and learning. Starting in September of this year, Ontario will provide a full day of learning to four- and five-year-olds as part of the province's plan to build a stronger school system and a well-educated workforce. British Columbia, guided by its Early Learning Framework, will make full day kindergarten available to up to half of its eligible five year olds this September, with access to all eligible children by September 2011. And Manitoba’s five-year policy agenda, Family Choices, commits Manitoba to maintaining the second lowest child care fees in Canada, after Québec, among many other innovative policy strategies.

Still, the lack of federal leadership on early care and learning is a hindrance to major policy improvements. In 2006, the authors of the OECD international report on early childhood education noted that almost all governments in Canada recognize that the lack of coherent early learning policies across the country was problematic and that collaborative action was needed. While there have been several sputtering attempts at the federal level during the past three decades to develop a national approach to early care and learning, nearly all have failed to gain traction. The previous Liberal government, under Prime Minister Paul Martin, had made the most successful effort, having negotiated bi-lateral agreements with all ten provincial governments. While there was some variation in the provinces’ agreements, all provinces committed to developing detailed Action Plans based on the four principles of Quality, Universality, Accessibility and Developmental [programming] that formed the basis of the Liberals’ national early learning and child care framework. All agreements also included provincial commitment to collaborative infrastructural work in areas such as a national quality framework and data systems. This was all cancelled by the minority Harper government, which opted to replace this commitment in favour of a $1,200 annual allowance to parents with children under six years of age and a capital funding initiative to support the creation of child care spaces by employers and communities through tax credits. The latter initiative has yet to meet its goal of creating 250,000 new child care spaces. Instead, federal funding cuts threaten to close more subsidized spaces, with child care advocates in Ontario stating that as many as 15,000 spaces are at risk when federal funding runs out in 2010.

Early care and learning in Canada has progressed little since the UNICEF report card and OECD report were issued, guaranteeing us a bottom rung position on this critical quality of life indicator should these studies be repeated in the near future. Given our current understanding of the positive societal benefits of investments in early care and learning, we cannot turn a blind eye toward this policy issue any longer. Our federal leaders need to work with the provinces and territories to create a nationally coordinated, publicly funded early learning and care system that ensures that Canadian families have universal access to quality child care.