Child poverty and early learning and child care

In 2006, almost 1 in every 6 children – 1,196,000 children – live in poverty in Canada live in poverty in Canada . This reflects an increase of over 15% since 1989 despite federal commitments to end child poverty by the year 2000 (Campaign 2000, 2006).

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation's comprehensive new report Starting Strong II (2006) identifies child poverty as one of the challenges policymakers face while focusing on the task of enhancing the well-being and learning of young children. Addressing child poverty not only meets the broader goal of social equity but is also essential to developing good early childhood policies:

The reduction of child and family poverty is a precondition for successful early childhood care and education systems. Early childhood services do much to alleviate the negative effects of disadvantage by educating young children and facilitating the access of families to basic services and social participation. However, a continuing high level of child and family poverty in a country undermines these efforts and greatly impedes the task of raising educational levels. (pg. 206)

More specifically, the OECD recognizes that ELCC services alone can not reduce child poverty. Rather, it recommends reducing child poverty and exclusion through upstream fiscal, social and labour policies while increasing resources within universal programmes for children.

Although providing care and education to children from "at-risk" backgrounds, early childhood programmes cannot substantially address issues of structural poverty and institutional discrimination... The challenge of reducing child poverty needs also to be tackled upstream by governments through energetic social, housing and labour policies, including income transfers to low-income groups, comprehensive social and family policies, and supportive employment schemes and work training. Preventive, anti-poverty measures can significantly reduce the numbers of children arriving at early childhood centres with additional learning needs. (pg. 213)

October 17 marks the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. To mark this important day, we have collected a selection of online readings about ELCC and poverty in this Issue File. This list is not intended to be an exhaustive list; for more resources, visit Childcare Information Resource Collection.

This Issue File is composed of six sections:

- Introduction
- Campaign 2000 reports
- Other Canadian reports
- International reports
- News articles (Canadian)
- Useful links