children playing

Coming in 2020: A national child care program for Canada

Printer-friendly versionSend by emailPDF version
In Shaker, Erika. (2014). Our schools/Our selves: Poverty, polarization, and the educational achievement gap. Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives V.24 N.1 (#117) FALL 2014
Author: 
Friendly, Martha & Costigliola, Bozica
Format: 
Report
Publication Date: 
4 Nov 2014

EXCERPTS:

About three years ago, four national child care organizations - three struggling to stay afloat after federal cuts; the other anxious about its future - came together to see how they could work together to keep advancing the ideas they all stood for. The Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada, the Childcare Resource and Research Unit, the Child Care Human Resources Sector Council (now defunct as a result of de-funding) and the Canadian Child Care Federation believed in the urgent need for a robust national policy and sufficient federal funding to create a sustainable, universal, high quality early childhood education and care (ECEC) system across Canada. Decades of research, policy developments and international experience had already shown that high quality ECEC addressed multiple social and political objectives: women's equality and employment, poverty reduction, family-work balance, social integration and equal opportunity, healthy child development and well-being, and economic prosperity.

The Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada was particularly intent on looking for a way to bring the various parts of the child care movement together to work for a vision that had been more than 30 years in the making. The CCAAC wanted to reinvigorate the movement, which had so successfully put child care on the public agenda. They thought it critical to ensure that future generations of parents would no longer have to struggle with child care. Just as crucial was the need to pass the torch to newer generations of child care advocates. It was also important to articulate an updated vision of ECEC in Canada based on new knowledge about what works.

After much brainstorming, the organizations decided they would collaborate on planning and sponsoring a conference in November 2014 - Canada's fourth national child care policy conference, ChildCare2020: From Vision to Action. They hammered out a conference conception based on three priorities: to develop an inclusive vision of early childhood education and child care reflecting the needs of today's families and young children; ensure that this vision of ECEC was on the public agenda; and engage future generations to expand citizen and government support for ECEC.

....

The following previews are available from CCPA:

Table of Contents and Editorial - Erika Shaker 

"Mythology, Moral Panic, and the Ruby Payne Bandwagon" - Lucyna Cresnik And Laura Elizabeth Pinto 

Region: