Importance of Early Child Care and Education

Even though remote learning strategies aim to ensure continued learning for all children, it is well known that the most marginalised children may not be able to access these opportunities.

The pandemic has highlighted the importance of affordable child care for working parents across the globe, as parents struggle to balance the demands of child care while working from home with shuttered schools. The urgency of restarting economies has accelerated efforts already underway in many parts of the world to move towards systems that ensure universal access to high quality child care.

Just last week, Canada's finance minister announced the creation of a long promised national child care programme with a huge investment over five years. Quebec has recently promised universal access to public child care. Singapore has been steadily expanding its early childhood care centres. Japan announced a goal of universal child care by 2027. The UK expanded free child care in August 2021 for all 3- and 4-year-olds and 2-year-olds from low-income families to 30 hours per week.

The Union cabinet of India in July 2020 approved the New Education Policy (NEP), which aims at universalization of education from pre-school to the secondary level. Unfortunately, we are seeing a contradiction as the funding for education has been reduced despite the goal of universalization. Overall, the budget for the Education Ministry has been reduced by Rs 6,086.69 crores, from Rs 99,311 crores in 2020-21 to Rs 93,224.31 crores in 2021-22. The Week magazine report dated September 16, 2020 by Sravani Sarkar, based on the policy analysis done by CRY and CGBA, highlights the substantial resource allocation gap between this budget, from both Union and state governments, and what is needed to meet the need of universalization.

As an academic, I would like to propose a solution for realising universalization of Early Childhood Care and Education. It is high time that the process of universalization effectively leverages, in a phased manner, resources from private organizations, corporate offices as CSR activity, mature workers who volunteer after retirement or sabbaticals, youth volunteers, and NGOs, providing them with enough functional freedom and a few controls. The Ministry of Education and State Government should provide guidelines on using the local language as the medium of instruction, with English as a transition language, and support these teams with affordable education materials. Additionally, incentives and salaries of ECCE teachers must be revised and brought at par with postgraduate teachers, so as to attract strong and motivated individuals to take the course and become self-employed. This should be coupled with the creation of online and offline short-term certification and diploma courses that can be disseminated by teacher training institutes and other autonomous training institutes from India and abroad.

In order to realize these efforts, I strongly believe that the Indian Government and state financial departments should support private organizations and NGOs in the reopening of pre-primary Early Child Care and Education Centres with quality stimulative education and target the universalization of child care by 2025. No child should be left behind without numeracy, literacy and nutrition right from the beginning of life. India is a growing economy and we can secure a highly evolved future for all of us if we pool and mobilize the assets of human resources that we have effectively.