Managing access to full-time public daycare and preschool services in Romania: Planfulness,cream-skimming and ‘interventions’

Abstract

This article engages with differently qualified parents’ experiences of and success in accessing public full-time early childhood education and care (ECEC) services in a Romanian urban context to illustrate the ways in which post-socialist welfare states are transformed not only from above, through formal rules, but also from below, through informal practices. Through the exploration of the narratives of both parents and managers, the article finds that parental planfulness, qualification-based differences in demand for full-time places and formal rules of access are insufficient to explain clear-cut qualification- and income-based differences in access. The article describes the crucial importance of hidden, informal cream-skimming strategies that daycare and preschool managers employ in the pre-enrolment phase and of the informal tactics of relying on ‘interventions’ with which unsuccessful parents respond to managers’ refusals to enrol. In the context of full-time place shortages, managerial autonomy in enrolment and insufficient institutional budgets, public ECEC institutions engage in hidden processes of redistribution through selective access, favouring well-educated, high-income parents and their children.

1 Introduction

Research focussing on childcare choices and variations in young children's care arrangements has found that better educated parents are more likely to make use of formal full-time educational care settings ¹ than their less educated peers across the board (Debacker, 2008; Fram & Kim, 2008; Vandenbroeck, De Visscher, Van Nuffel, & Ferla, 2008; Vincent, Braun, & Ball, 2008). A number of studies, zooming in on the interactions between structural factors such as local mixed economies of childcare, work-family reconciliation policies and labour market structure on the one hand and personal norms, preferences and non-maternal care resources on the other, have put forth competing explanations for this qualification-based difference. Some of these explanations have focused on demand-side factors, in particular parental (usually maternal) preferences for formal, group-based childcare services and parental (usually maternal) needs for childcare alternatives, usually to enable employment, training, education, etc. (Debacker, 2008; Ellingsaeter & Gulbrandsen, 2007). Other explanations have centred on supply-side factors, notably the cost or affordability, availability and quality of formal childcare services and formal conditions of access (Vandenbroeck et al., 2008). Considering that this qualification-based difference in take-up is evident across childcare policy regimes and countries with different care ideals in policy and practice (Kremer, 2007), this phenomenon is likely to be rooted in more context-specific interplays of both demand-side as well as supply-side factors.

1

In the UK, this is true especially for children older than three. In the 0–3 age group, lower income and working class parents tend to more frequently rely on formal solutions than their middle class, higher income peers (Vincent & Ball, 2006).

There is some research suggesting that this qualification-based difference in the take-up of full-time ECEC services is also present in some Central and Eastern European (CEE) welfare states (UNESCO, 2006: 143), including in the Romanian case (Lokshin & Fong, 2006; Kovács, in press). Romania, like many other CEE welfare states, has improved comparatively high coverage rates in public preschool education owing to its service-heavy socialist legacy after a dip in enrolment during the early 1990s (Bilţ et al., 2010: 12; Szelewa & Polakowski, 2008: 124; UNESCO, 2006: 134–137). Much of this expansion has meant additional part-time places, with full-time tuition constituting a minority in public preschool education, particularly in Romania. At the same time, public daycare service provision dwindled during the first decade of post-socialist transition especially and has recovered little since (Lokshin & Fong, 2006; Ulrich, 2009; UNICEF, 1999). Reform legislation was passed in the latter half of the 2000s, ² enacting substantive changes in the nature and scope of services offered. These reforms reflect a shift away from the medicalisation of early years childcare, a socialist-time legacy, to a commitment to supporting children's cognitive development and learning regardless of age, indicative of attempts to move towards what has been seen as the rise of the social investment state in Europe (Jenson, 2006; van Kersbergen & Hemerijck, 2012). Despite these policy changes, the Romanian legislation pertaining to care and education services for the 0–6 age group retains evident long-standing policy legacies, e.g. the absence of children's right to early years education (and care). In addition, new legal guidelines have been slow to show in the further expansion of public (full-time) service provision. In the absence of public authorities’ legal obligation to secure a place in a formal care and educational setting as a matter of right, as is the case in most Scandinavian welfare states (Ellingsaeter & Gulbrandsen, 2007) and, more recently, Germany (Fleckenstein, 2011), local authorities maintain what is nominally a demand-based supply of places, but in practice insufficient public provision constrained by financial, regulatory and bureaucratic barriers. Moreover, despite the introduction of a regulatory framework for the accreditation of private institutions, ³ the mixed economy of Romanian ECEC services – as in other post-socialist nations – is still dominated by public financing and provision (UNESCO, 2006: 132). As a result, demand for full-time places (far) exceeds supply.

2

Especially law no. 236/2007 and law no. 272/2009.

3

Especially emergency ordinance no. 75/2005, approved with modification through law no. 87/2006, and Cabinet decisions no. 21/2007 and no. 22/2007.

This article explores what appear to be divergent experiences of negotiating and attaining access to full-time public daycare and preschool places in a Romanian urban context among two groups of parents: highly educated, higher income parents on the one hand and less educated, lower income parents on the other. Through the exploration of parental narratives and of formal and informal discussions with daycare and preschool managers in city T, a medium-sized municipality in central Romania, this article demonstrates that the differentiated success in accessing full-time public daycare and preschool services between these two groups of parents was strongly mediated by a range of informal practices – both of parents and of managers. With little difference in the degree of ‘planfulness’ (Gordon & Högnäs, 2006) among highly skilled and less educated parents, respectively, what seemed to work more in the favour of the former – often unbeknownst to them – was a number of selective practices managers engaged in to ensure the enrolment of highly qualified, better educated parents’ children. In contrast, less educated, lower income parents encountered less favourable treatment, which often led to parents’ inability to enrol their children for a full-time place. Narratives of parental legwork in preparation of daycare or preschool selection, of the sign-up process and of different strategies adopted to ensure enrolment in an institution of choice reveal the fact that access was directly linked to what seems to be a tacit and unstated income-based affinity of managers towards higher dual-income, better educated parents.

The argument put forth is that the display by parents and interpretation by managers of what may be seen as income-related class signifiers become constitutive of an unstated income-based affinity which, in turn, acts as an effective enabling structure for enrolment: it compensates for the defects of vertical and horizontal structures (e.g. place shortages) into an advantage for those perceived as network members (Ledeneva, 2004: 8). Managers derive a range of financial and symbolic resources (e.g. ‘sponsorship’ and institutional prestige among higher income parent networks) that make their institution appealing and their managerial positions more secure. Parents gain access to what is perceived as high quality and heavily subsidised childcare and education, often seen as an essential stepping stone for children's admission into competitive primary schools. The boundaries of what is deemed acceptable membership, and therefore having an enabling potential, remains fuzzy, ‘ambiguous’ (Ledeneva, 2004: 7). As with any informal practice, daycare and preschool managers’ reliance on this unstated strategy of preselecting particular parents through a number of informal practices while discouraging others by being ‘hostile’ (Ledeneva, 2004: 4) is also fuzzy, ambiguous. It is for this reason that reliance on ‘interventions’ or ‘network capital’ (Ledeneva, 2004: 4–5) – the key component of parents’ repertoire of practices for negotiating access to childcare institutions of choice – can undo a refusal to enrol among less educated, lower income parents, but formal application or demonstrated need cannot. To put it another way, this article exemplifies how informal practices – expressions of parents’ and managers’ adaptation to perennially underfunded social welfare services of good quality, but in shortage – come to form informal parallel structures of opportunity for a select some, adding to ‘shadow processes of redistribution’ (Cook, 2007) that further exacerbate social inequalities in the Romanian welfare state (Polese, Morris, & Kovács, in this issue).

The analysis draws on in-depth interview data with a total of 34 familial carers, mostly mothers and fathers, in 17 urban families, selected from a larger sample of 68 familial carers in 37 Romanian families. The couples whose narratives inform this article all had direct experience with negotiating access to preschool, in most cases full-time tuition. Six couples also had experience with negotiating access to full-time public daycare. The interviews with the two carers in each family were carried out separately in spring 2010 in a medium-sized Romanian city. Families were recruited as a purposive sample using an opt-in strategy through public daycare centres and preschools. Families were selected based on these criteria: (1) the youngest child was aged 1–5; (2) parents’ level of education (ISCED 3 at most; ISCED 4 at most; and at least ISCED 5) and (3) variation in informal childcare resources. Reference children's age varied between 17 and 60 months. In eight couples both parents were highly educated (at least ISCED 5), in seven both were medium-educated (ISCED 4 at most) and in the remaining two one parent was highly educated and the other had medium-level education. A second set of data that the empirical section of the paper draws on is informal interviews carried out with three preschool managers, the head of public daycare services in the city and a formal interview with the county inspector for preschool education, Hungarian language tuition. All interviews were transcribed verbatim and coded in their entirety. The code development process and data analysis closely followed the steps of what has been called the ‘cyclical process’ of qualitative data analysis (Hennink, Hutter, & Bailey, 2011).

The discussion is structured into six parts. Section 2 formulates competing explanations for different patterns of full-time formal childcare and preschool services take-up among higher income, better educated households and lower income, less educated households, respectively by drawing on empirical studies on childcare choices in different countries. Section 3 explores Romanian aggregate daycare and preschool services coverage, details the scope of public provision and, most importantly, critically explores the regulatory framework pertaining to service financing and admission to illustrate the reasons why highly qualified parents might enjoy more ready access than their less educated peers to public childcare and preschool education services. Section 4 explores parents’ and managers’ informal practices around children's enrolment into full-time public daycare and preschool. Section 5 concludes.

2 Inequalities in full-time early years childcare service use: Competing explanations

As already noted, qualification-based differences in the take-up of ECEC services – including public or publicly subsides ones – seem to characterise advanced welfare state contexts as well as developing nations alike (UNESCO, 2006), suggesting complex conjunctural causation (Ragin, 1987) instead of a single causal mechanism explaining this phenomenon across cases. This means, firstly, that in-depth analyses of individual country contexts are much better suited to disentangle explanations for qualification- and income-based differences in the take-up of full-time formal education and care services for preschool aged children. A second implication is that it is unclear how well explanatory models may travel across jurisdictions. This section outlines three competing explanations that have been put forth in different national contexts to explain qualification-based differences in parents’ take-up of full-time formal childcare services, in some cases provided mainly through the private market and in other cases through the public sector, in an attempt to formulate hypotheses for explaining a similar phenomenon in the Romanian case.

In the UK, qualitative work on childcare choices has outlined the importance of material and moral peculiarities of social class processes in shaping differences in childcare arrangements and, implicitly, differentiated reliance on full-time formal childcare during the early years (Duncan, Edwards, Reynolds, & Alldred, 2003; Himmelweit & Sigala, 2004; Vincent et al., 2008). Comparing working-class and middle-class ⁴ mothers’ narratives about childcare preferences, choices and arrangements in the same London boroughs, Vincent et al. (2008) argue that class background strongly influenced not only the financial and moral, but also the social context in which decisions about childcare were made. As a result, the multifaceted material and informational differences associated with class background, e.g. housing tenure, employment status and opportunities, income and reliance on means-tested transfers, strongly shaped the differences in care arrangements that children from different class backgrounds enjoyed. Middle class parents had access to a broader range of formal childcare services due to higher income as well as access to networks of ‘hot’, first-hand knowledge about different providers (Braun, Vincent, & Ball, 2008; Vincent & Ball, 2001; Vincent et al., 2008). Middle class parents were physically more mobile. Middle class parents were found to also be more adept at operating in service – including childcare service – markets compared to their less educated, lower income peers (Vincent & Ball, 2001). Furthermore, individual childcare preferences and choices have been seen to take shape in and reflect local childcare norms, which often embody class-based or ethnic/racial particularities (Duncan & Edwards, 1999; Duncan, Edwards, Reynolds, & Alldred, 2004; Fram & Kim, 2008; Vincent et al., 2008). In short, one explanation for differentiated reliance on full-time formal childcare services in British mixed economies of childcare dominated by private sector provision is the different class-based moral, social and material contexts in which the choices of working-class and middle-class parents, respectively, take shape. Better educated, higher income parents, living amidst similarly situated families, enjoyed qualitatively different ‘circuits of care’ (Vincent et al., 2008) than their less educated, lower income peers living in more working-class localities.

4

The authors use ‘social class’ to differentiate between parents who had different qualification levels, had different types of occupations and had different housing tenures (Vincent et al., 2008: 10).

Ellingsaeter and Gulbrandsen (2007) propose a different causal mechanism for explaining why less educated, lower income parents are less likely to rely on full-time childcare services than better educated ones in Scandinavian countries. The authors argue that demand for and provision of ‘universal’ public childcare services is intimately linked to women's employment opportunities and status, which are closely related to educational attainment, and the policy framework supporting parental care during the early years (Ellingsaeter & Gulbrandsen, 2007). Parents’ (or children's) right to a place and cultures of motherhood and of childhood, although seen as important, seemed to be of less consequence. Although Sweden, Denmark and Finland (but not Norway) all stipulate either working and studying parents’ or children's right to a place in public daycare, enrolment levels have been by far the lowest in Finland (Ellingsaeter, 2012; Ellingsaeter & Gulbrandsen, 2007: 651). The explanation for Finland's anomalous enrolment levels seems to centre on fewer employment opportunities for mothers than in the other Scandinavian countries. ⁵ A smaller share of Finnish mothers (have the opportunity to) work than in other Scandinavian countries (Eurostat LFS) and, given limited job opportunities, less educated women are more likely to remain inactive. The differentiated demand for full-time childcare services among mothers with different levels of education, rooted in qualification-based differences in employment opportunities, has been exacerbated by Finland's cash-for-care benefit available to parents with children under age three. The take-up of this benefit has been significantly higher among less qualified mothers than better educated ones (Ellingsaeter, 2012: 6; Repo, 2010). In short, despite universal provision of (high quality) public childcare services as a matter of right, there are significant gaps in the demand for and reliance on (full-time) childcare services among mothers with different qualification levels. To summarise, qualification-based differences in job opportunities for parents of young children, combined with a universal cash-for-care benefit, form very different opportunity structures for childcare for well-educated, qualified parents and for less educated, less qualified parents, respectively.

5

Except Iceland.

A third explanation has been formulated by Vandenbroeck et al. (2008) in Brussels’ local mixed economy of childcare services, which resembles the Romanian one (described in detail in Section 3 below) in several ways. The authors’ explanation centres on the supply side, more specifically on rules around access to full-time childcare services. The authors argue that better educated parents are more likely to use full-time publicly funded formal childcare services than their less educated peers due to the interplay between daycare centre managers’ autonomy in deciding priority criteria for access in cases of exceeding demand on the one hand and parents’ search behaviour and care needs on the other. Vandenbroeck et al. (2008) find that managers enjoy significant autonomy in deciding which parents’ applications to prioritise in cases of place shortages. The most commonly prioritised criteria were families with an already enrolled child, parental employment, the time of admission on the waiting list, applicant families representing a ‘crisis’ situation and the regularity of applicant families’ childcare needs. Family income, for instance, was among the lowest priority criteria for admission. While priority enjoyed due to having another child enrolled has, at best, very little impact on qualification-based differences in access, parental employment or the regularity of childcare needs indirectly discriminates against less educated, who are less likely to be in (full-time) employment, more likely to be searching for work or studying and, consequently, have less regular care needs. Priority accorded to more planful parents, i.e. those who sign up for a place early, has been also found to put less educated parents at a disadvantage in access because this group of parents was found to start searching for a place much later than better educated ones. The authors conclude that less educated parents were less likely to access a place in full-time publicly funded daycare due to managers’ failure to apply principles of affirmative action for disadvantaged groups of parents, leading to the ‘non-intentional exclusion of parents with low levels of education’ (Vandenbroeck et al., 2008: 255).

These competing explanations are process-based, nuanced accounts of how parental levels of education, household wealth and social policies matter, a recurrent finding of scholarship across the board (especially UNESCO, 2006: 139–144). As such, they provide interesting points of departure for explaining qualification- and income-based differences in the take-up of full-time public ECEC services in the Romanian context.

3 Romanian local mixed economies of childcare and rules of access into formal full-time daycare and preschool

This section describes the Romanian context by reflecting on the factors deemed important in the competing explanations outlined in the previous section for parental qualification-based differences in the take-up of full-time formal childcare services: (1) qualifications-based differences in parents’ – notably mothers’ – employment patterns and Romanian childcare policy provisions, especially publicly subsidised childcare services and cash-for-care benefits; (2) institutional rules of access pertaining to publicly subsidised childcare services; and (3) evidence of different ‘circuits of care’ among Romanian parents with different qualification levels.

3.1 Romanian parents’ labour market participation and childcare policy provisions

During the mid-2000s, employment levels among Romanian women with children aged 0–2 – as in Finland, in fact – were around 55% (Eurostat). However, while 60% of Romanian mothers with children aged 3–5 were in employment in 2005, almost 90% of their Finnish counterparts worked for pay (Eurostat). Cross-national disaggregation of employment rates by qualification level among women of fertile age suggests that Romania exhibits greater employment rate polarisation than most European countries (see Annex 1). While highly educated Romanian mothers are very likely to be in paid work while having young children, especially long-hours full-time work (Burchell, Fagan, O'Brien, & Smith, 2007), their less educated peers are (much) less likely to be working. Furthermore, fertility trends among different socio-economic groups in Romania have shifted, with more children being born to active mothers than inactive ones and more children being born to urban parents, who are on average better educated and more likely to be in work, than rural ones (Gheţău, 2012). Most importantly, almost half of the children born over the last decade have mothers with at least medium levels of education (ISCED 3–4) in the context of employment rates among Romanian women aged 25–49 oscillating around 70% for ISCED 3–4 and 90% for ISCED 5–6 between 2003 and 2012 (Eurostat LFS). Put together, these mean the following. Firstly, the shares of less educated Romanian parents (especially mothers), more likely to be inactive, and of highly qualified, mostly active parents in long-hours full-time jobs, respectively, are comparable, in other words demand for full-time daycare and preschool places is relatively high compared to, say, a couple of decades ago. Secondly, polarised employment rates among highly educated women of childbearing age on the one hand and the rest on the other suggest that demand for full-time formal childcare services among little educated households with young children and better educated parents, respectively, will differ significantly. In summary, employment differences among parents with different qualification levels should be a driving force for differentiated take-up of full-time places in daycare and preschool in Romania due to qualification-based differences in demand.

As already observed, Romanian daycare services and early education services remain dominated by public financing and provision, although are separately organised for children aged 0–3 and 3–6, respectively. Official records reveal that the number of places in public crèches, open to children aged three months to three years, declined from c. 90,000 in 1980 to c. 11,000 by 2009 (Ulrich, 2009: 9), signifying a decline in the overall coverage rate from 10.4% ⁶ to 1.7%. In 2010 in city T, where interviews that inform this article were carried out, a total of 350 places were available in five public crèches for an estimated 6000 ⁷ children aged 0–3. Moreover, the few public daycare places available in Romania at present are almost without exception concentrated in urban areas (Ulrich, 2009). In other words, publicly subsidised childcare services for the 0–3 age group are practically absent and, where available, in very limited supply.

6

The total number of children aged 0–2 in 1980 was 867,500 (DCS, 1981); in 2007 655,200 (Eurostat); and in 2009 659,100 (Eurostat). Calculations were made using the annually aggregate number of live births.

7

In the absence of official estimates, I extrapolated from the national enrolment level in preschool education for 2007/2008, 82.8% (Eurostat) and the total number of kindergarten places available in the same academic year in city T, 5268 (provided by the inspector for preschool education, Hungarian line of study).

While public daycare coverage has been consistently very low, enrolment rates in Romanian preschool education have been rising for the past several decades, stabilising at around 82% in 2007 (Bilţ et al., 2010: 12; Eurostat, 2014a; UNESCO, 2006: 137). Enrolment levels rose most starkly among the youngest, from 39% in 2000 to 67% in 2011 among three-year olds and from 60% in 2000 to 78% in 2011 among four-year olds (Eurostat). And while the number of places has declined, in part reflecting the steeper fertility decline of the last three decades, the number of personnel has remained relatively constant – at around 37,000 – between 1980 and 2007 (DCS, 1981; INS, 2008), suggesting that the number of student groups has remained relatively constant. Unfortunately, official statistics regarding the share of full-time places in the total number of places, nationally or regionally, remains unavailable. ⁸ However, the vast majority of full-time places seem to be available in urban areas, ⁹ where they slightly outnumber part-time places, ¹⁰ but it is expected that geographic variations are also significant.

8

Eurostat reports all enrolled children as enrolled ‘full-time’. See Eurostat > Education and training > data > Database > Students by ISCED level, study intensity (full-time, part-time) and sex (educ_enrl1ad).

9

Statistics offered by the county inspector for preschool education, Hungarian line of study, in county M., where fieldwork informing this article was carried out, reveals that in the 2007/8 academic year 95% of full-time preschool places (5275 of 5550) were in towns and cities.

10

In city T, where interviews informing this article were carried out in 2010, the ratio of full-time to part-time preschool places in the 2007/8 academic year was 1.78 (i.e. 3300 full-time places and 1850 part-time ones) and 1.94 in the 2008/9 academic year (3450 full-time places and 1780 part-time places).

As regards cash-for-care benefits, these comprise a highly selective paid leave provision and a ‘back-to-work bonus’, whose generosity was increased significantly in 2011 in response to the negative social consequences of the recession. A one-year paid parental leave scheme was introduced in 1990, ¹¹ extended to two years in 1997, ¹² which has also stipulated a job guarantee at the end of the leave period. Since 2011 eligible parents have had the choice between a shorter leave, until their child's first birthday, capped at 3400 RON (€755)/month, and a longer leave, until their child's second birthday, capped at 1200 RON (€266)/month. ¹³ In the first half of 2012 93% ¹⁴ of recipients were on the longer leave. Although a tax-financed benefit, the key eligibility criterion for this cash-plus-time benefit – at least 12 months of uninterrupted employment prior to the birth of the child – makes it available to only c. 50% ¹⁵ of all Romanian couples with children. Considering employment rate differentials among Romanian women with different qualifications, it is not surprising that the coverage of this benefit has favoured parents with at least medium levels of education. The back-to-work bonus, available only to parents giving up their paid leave to return to work and receivable over the same period as the leave, was introduced in 2006. It was a meagre 100 RON (€25) between 2007 and 2010 and increased to 500 RON (€112) in 2011.

11

Decree law no. 31/1990.

12

Law no. 120/1997, Observations no. 754/1997 and no. 961/1997.

13

Emergency ordinance no. 111/2010.

14

It should be noted that 55% of these had gone on leave prior to having the possibility to opt for the shorter or the longer leave.

15

This was calculated as a simple ratio between the average monthly number of paid leave beneficiaries and the average monthly number of universal child allowances for children under age two for 2011, i.e. 196,680/377,895 = 52% (Ministry of Labour, Social Protection and the Family online publications).

In short, high income parents face strong financial incentives to take the one-year leave or return to work early and apply for the back-to-work bonus, leaving them reliant on very scarce crèche places or informal childcare arrangements during the first three years especially (Kovács, 2014; Polese, Morris, Kovács, & Harboe, 2014). In contrast, less educated, lower-income parents with an employment record face strong incentives to go on leave for two years and avoid formal childcare services over this period. Qualification-based labour market participation differentials among Romanian women especially means that qualification differentials translate, especially in urban areas, into significant polarisation in demand for full-time childcare places, although the affordability of full-time care and education services (see Section 4) may temper the degree of this polarisation.

3.2 Rules of access to public daycare and preschool

The organisation and financing of daycare and preschool education has exhibited remarkable resilience and path dependence over recent decades, although coverage, as the previous section showed, has declined greatly for the 0–3 age group and has increased for the 3–6 age group, with private sector provision remaining marginal. Neither early years childcare, nor preschool education is a legal entitlement of children in Romania, ¹⁶ as is the case in Belgium (Vandenbroeck et al., 2008: 247). As a result, guarantees for a place – especially a full-time place – do not exist. Public daycare and preschool education are provided as free services, ¹⁷ although it is parents who pay for meals associated with a full-time place (breakfast, lunch and an afternoon snack). This ‘meal allowance’, calculated per day per child, is set by individual institutions. In city T in 2010 the monthly meal allowance for one child ranged between 100 and 140 RON (€22–31), i.e. between 7.2% and 10% of the post-tax mean salary in 2010.

16

Law no. 84/1995 on education; Law no. 1/2011 of national education and related Ministry orders [MOs], especially MO 4464/2000 for the organisation and functioning of preschool education.

17

See especially MO 4464/2000.

Legal provisions ¹⁸ stipulate that preschools are open year-round, but tuition emulates the structure of the academic year of compulsory education, meaning that during school holidays preschools offer only care, but no educational activities. In addition, preschools may be closed for up to 60 days a year for repairs, cleaning etc. Interviews with parents and preschool managers suggested that the majority of children did not attend during July and August and some highly educated, higher-income parents avoided tuition during the winter months also. New groups or new institutions may be set up at the request of parents and other private or public entities as well as by county school inspectorates. The requirement for a new group in an existing institution is a minimum of 10 children and, for a new institution with legal personality, at least 150. However, neither local authorities, nor central authorities have formulated streamlined and transparent mechanisms to register demand for additional places. There are also no procedures to monitor fluctuations in local aggregate demand. The need for local authorities’ cooperation in providing the infrastructure before school inspectorates can approve new groups or new preschools means that childcare services coverage does not match local needs and information shortages affect both institutions as well as households. Moreover, the prospects of tackling demand-and-supply mismatches by local authorities are hampered by additional bureaucratic and budgetary hurdles.

18

See especially MO 4464/2000.

The sign-up process has arguably become more straightforward over time, presenting few bureaucratic problems, but – as Vandenbroeck et al. (2008) also suggest – the success of the sign-up process is dependent on much more than submitting the required paperwork. Romanian regulations stipulate that the sign-up process is free of charge, happens once a year, may take place year-round in exceptional cases, and parents can, in theory, sign their children up in several institutions prior to the commencement of the academic year. Interviews with parents and managers revealed that managers in fact often operated an informal sign-up process year round to ensure full occupation in the coming academic year and that the possibility for formal sign-up in several institutions, to ensure access into at least one, was prevented by a centrally established single sign-up day. In short, parents who could get themselves on an informal waiting list or who could make it on the formal sign-up day to several institutions were more likely to secure a place than others.

Although legal provisions in force in 2010 stipulated that preschool education respected the principle of social services provision for children in special situations, i.e. children from disadvantaged backgrounds, this principle was not reflected in preferential access. Instead, a set of other priority criteria were said to apply during the sign-up process. Firstly, the application package for a full-time place had to include formal proof of parental income as an assurance that parents were able to cover meals, meaning that inactive or informally employed parents were, by implication, unable to access a full-time place. Secondly, discussions with managers revealed the application of priority criteria similar to those of managers in Brussels (see Vandenbroeck et al., 2008: 252): children living in the neighbourhood, younger siblings and children of dual-earner couples enjoyed priority. Thirdly, in the context of informal sign-up and waiting lists due to exceeding demand, managers exercised substantial autonomy and, thus, discretion in deciding whom to admit and whom to refuse. Interviews with managers and the county school inspector revealed that it was expected that parents proactively exercised choice in their search for childcare institutions, meaning that parents were expected to ‘shop around’ for a place, particularly for a full-time place, sometimes a year in advance, meaning that more planful parents were more likely and – as Section 4 highlights – in most cases more successful in securing a place. However, as Section 4 also reiterates, the interviews did not reveal qualification-based differences in ‘planfulness’ as Vandenbroeck et al. (2008) and Gordon and Högnäs (2006) found in their studies.

The public provision of early years childcare services and the formal rules that govern access bear remarkable semblance to those described by Vandenbroeck et al. (2008) for the Brussels area. Romanian parents, as their peers in Brussels, often face full-time place shortages, the related need to be planful and engage in potentially time-consuming information-gathering prior to sign-up, including through informal channels, and selective admissions criteria that may not be favourable or explicit. This means that parents who are more planful will likely be more successful than their less planful peers in Romanian local childcare markets. Similarly, those who have greater access to better informed, more dense informal networks of parents and who are more able to do the legwork will be more likely to find out about services offered, rules regarding access etc. Finally, those who find themselves favoured by the priority criteria managers employ in the sign-up process will find it easier to enrol their children than others. If, as is the case elsewhere, planfulness, access to mothers’ grapevines and priority criteria at access favour higher income parents – as seems to be the case elsewhere –, we should expect greater success in accessing full-time places among highly educated, higher income parents and less success among their less qualified and lower income peers. Narratives of Romanian urban parents, explored in Section 4, revealed that the most important factor for a qualification- and income-based difference in experiences of negotiating and actually attaining access to full-time childcare and preschool services was primarily the fuzziness of rules around access and the informal practices that managers and parents employed to work around this.

4 Two worlds of accessing full-time daycare and preschool services

The 34 carers whose narratives inform this article described a total of 28 successful applications into public daycare or preschool for their only or both children, of which five were into daycare, eight were into part-time preschool (five of which by choice) and the remaining 15 into full-time preschool. Nine couples described unsuccessful attempts at enrolling their children into the daycare(s) or preschool(s) of their choice, some couples experiencing refusals at several institutions. Of these, three families managed to resolve initial refusals through informal strategies, leading to successful enrolment at the institutions of their choice. The other six opted either for alternative childcare solutions and tried later, with success, or chose the more flexible and inclusive part-time preschool option.

At the time of seeking admission into daycare or preschool for any of their children, most couples worked two full-time jobs or mothers were returning to full-time employment after paid parental leave. In five instances were mothers inactive: on leave with a second child or looking for employment. However, regardless of parents’ labour market participation and level of education, most shared a strong preference for full-time early years care and education and searched for a full-time place. Of the 17 couples only three were committed to not use daycare and to rely on part-time preschool education at a specific institution, which came highly recommended. In other words, regardless of parents’ levels of education and labour market participation, the vast majority deemed full-time daycare, but especially full-time preschool education the best care option for their children. Parental choice for full-time daycare, but especially preschool education was rooted in two widely shared convictions. Firstly, full-time tuition was seen to offer a clear-cut schedule, structure and rules for children in addition to socialisation and a learning environment conducted by professionals:

So the reason why I signed Kinga up for long-schedule, and not short-schedule, kindergarten is because I had the expectation from the long-schedule kindergarten that there is a schedule. One has to eat, sleep there is … now we have breakfast, now we play, now we have lunch, now we go and wash our hands. (dentist, part-time, mother of three-year-old daughter)

Another commonly cited reason for opting for full-time services was the perception that part-time preschool was, by comparison, lower quality due to the much briefer duration of educational activities and shorter exposure to professional staff:

Oh, they can't prepare them, the schedule is bad … one cannot go and pick her up … I am not a supporter of the four-hour kindergarten. She hardly wakes up in the morning, it is 8 am, 8.30 by the time she finishes breakfast, gymnastics at 9, at noon you are already there to pick her up, but she has already had lunch by then. What can she learn in that one hour? I: So the long-schedule option is better for you because there the activities are different? E: It is convenient because … convenient. I mean, it is the same thing, but she only has lunch at 1 pm, at 1.30 everyone goes to bed … we wake up, tidy up, play … (business owner, post-secondary degree, father of five-year-old and two-year-old daughters)

Despite these widely shared ideas about and preferences for full-time services, children whose parents were highly qualified and commanded higher incomes tended to be in full-time preschool (with the exception of three families, who opted for the same ‘highly recommended’ teacher), while children whose parents had medium levels of education were, in most cases, in part-time preschool. In short, parental preferences could hardly explain this clear-cut qualification-based difference in access to full-time ECEC services.

Nor were parents with different educational attainment levels planful to different extents (see Gordon & Högnäs, 2006; Vandenbroeck et al., 2008). Both less educated parents as well as highly skilled ones – mostly mothers – engaged in active searches for institutions with available places, whether in daycare or full-time preschool. In most cases, this search started around children's first birthday to ensure admission a year later, when paid leave would end, and mothers usually set out based on friends’ and acquaintances’ warnings or previous experiences. Similarly, parents who started searching for a place only a few months before anticipating changes in children's care arrangements (paid parental leave ending, the beginning of the academic year, children turning three etc.) were diverse: both highly skilled, higher income parents and less educated, single-earner couples were among those looking for a place ‘late’. However, regardless of when parents started looking, what emerged was that highly educated, high-income parents were invariably successful in their search for a place in an institution of their choice, while less educated parents, even when insistent, faced refusal, in some cases in several places.

I tried [for a daycare place]. There were no places. I: When did you try? E: Well um … the child wasn't a year old yet and I tried. I: How come so early? Because I had heard that a whole year is needed to … um … have him signed up on the waiting list … But there were no places … I mean there were no places a year later, either. And I didn't force it. (paid informal carer, part-time, mother of four-year-old son)

In contrast to this secondary school educated mother's experiences with daycare, highly educated parents described their experiences in a similar vein to this mother's:

In the autumn we started long-schedule kindergarten with Stefan again. Catalina, we introduced her to daycare. It wasn't hard to find a place for her, the harder part was for us to decide where exactly to take her … […] We searched through friends to find out where the staff was really close to the kids. So this is what we were interested in especially. (insurance professional, full-time flexible, mother of eight-year-old son and five-year-old daughter)

In fact, a recurrent theme in most highly educated parents’ narratives was the ‘ease’ of having children ‘written down’ on managers’ waiting lists, a first – though informal – step in the enrolment process. By contrast, less educated parents’ narratives invariably revolved around experiences of refusal. Parental experiences with enrolling their children either in daycare or full-time preschool were clearly class-based in this small sample of urban Romanian couples. Despite explicit preferences for similar services, in many cases similar demonstrated need – both parents working full-time and unable to rely on familial care – and similar legwork and planfulness invested in finding a place, highly educated, higher income parents and their less educated, lower income peers described very different encounters, often at the same institutions. Most highly educated couples faced welcoming managers, ready information about the formal sign-up process, having their children added to managers’ informal waiting lists and in some cases proactive facilitation of parents’ presence on the official sign-up day. By contrast, less educated parents invariably faced refusals with the claim that “there are no more places available”, few of them were ‘written down’ on managers’ lists and, having been sent away with a refusal, neither of them were contacted on the eve of official sign-up days by managers to recommend that they nevertheless attempt to enrol their children.

Although these markedly different experiences may be accidental considering the very small sample size, the narratives of two mothers suggests that some degree of tacit income- and qualification-based selection is undertaken by managers on a routine basis and across the board. These two mothers wanted to enrol their similarly aged children on relatively short notice at the same institution in the same academic year. One was a nurse working full-time, on minimum wage, married to a technician, also working full-time, and with no familial childcare resources in the city:

Ohhh, it was very difficult to sign him up for kindergarten a little bit at Mr. I.'s to begin with, but I've already told you, only through acquaintances, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to. […] So, how should I put it, it so happened that the children of his godmother attended that kindergarten […] and another goddaughter of hers. So it got to, through the friend of a friend, that's how she intervened. So she had quite some influence, so that I can make you understand […] for me to be able to sign him up at the kindergarten. (nurse, full-time, mother of five-year-old son).

By contrast, another mother, with two degrees, married to a construction engineer with a successful business, who also had a nanny for her daughters, discussed her enrolment experience thus:

… for this reason I quickly went and talked at the old kindergarten and asked them whether they could accept her [younger daughter] for four hours … I: And they accepted her at age two? E: Yes, they did. […] There were 30, 33 children signed up in [child]'s group. (accountant, mother of 10-year-old and five-year-old daughters)

Contrasting parental narratives, enforced by interviews with managers and the county school inspector, suggests that the encounters between managers and searching parents which precede the sign-up process, usually taking place in the confines of managers’ offices rather than on open day events, constitute occasions on which managers can engage in what are essentially hidden, perhaps even involuntary, means-tests. While parents enquire about places, teachers etc., managers also engage in information gathering of their own. Based on class signifiers that were easy to spot, managers appeared to adopt very different attitudes towards differently qualified (and paid) parents: they were either forthcoming, informative and proactive, or curt, perhaps outright irritable, disinterested or, as one manager explained, openly recommending tuition in a part-time institution. Highly educated, higher income parents often talked about ‘discussing’ enrolment with managers and managers committing to enrolment by ‘writing children down’, suggesting that these encounters were longer, more substantive and devoid of power imbalances. By contrast, less educated parents’ narratives reflected brief encounters with no discussion and an evident exercise of authority on managers’ part when citing the absence of places.

However, in some cases, initial refusals were turned into successful enrolment, suggesting that managers had significant discretion not only over who could get in and who was refused, but also over the number of children actually enrolled, regardless of the official numbers submitted to the county school inspectorate. Of the nine couples who initially encountered refusals, only three were highly educated, high-income couples, the latter having been refused because it was mid-year or because of strict age rules that managers stuck to. In two cases these parents enrolled their children without hurdles for the next academic year and in the third case the parents relied on ‘interventions’ and the child was subsequently successfully enrolled without delay. In fact, ‘interventions’ proved to be the most successful approach also for some medium-educated, lower-income couples who encountered refusals. As the below interview excerpt also suggests, initial refusals due to place shortages were undone and turned into successful enrolment at the institution of choice if parents managed to mobilise ‘relations’ to act on their behalf. Once these ‘relations’ delivered their ‘intervention’, usually a friendly request to the manager, parents would return and enrol the child as if no refusal had taken place.

Yes, so we went just like anyone else, we went and said “Look, we'd like to enrol her [in daycare] starting in the autumn if possible …” and, from the beginning, there are no places, there are very few places and there is no physical capacity and I do believe this is true, that capacity is limited according to formal rules, and then I made the connection that this colleague of mine and I said, let's try at least, and I called her. “Look, Claudia, can you help me?” and she said “Yes, let me talk to [manager]” and this is how I managed [to sign her up]. (nurse, full-time, mother of twin five-year-olds)

In this particular case and in other two instances parents admitted they had also gifted the managers who eventually enrolled their children. However, most parents’ narratives suggested that the way to tackle refusals was to have acquaintances to make ‘interventions’ rather than pay bribes. Those who felt bribes were necessary were the ones who had no contacts to rely on and also shied away from ‘pushing matters further’.

The puzzle, of course, is why managers would use their discretion to cream-skim children and occasionally bend rules, e.g. enrol more children than the official number of available places or enrol children mid-year. As parental and managers’ narratives reveal, one of the reasons for selecting children from highly qualified, higher income family backgrounds is the fact that public childcare institutions are affected by cash shortages, especially for consumables. The practice of ‘group funds’ and ‘kindergarten funds’, i.e. informal cash payments by parents for consumables or other more urgent expenses (e.g. an alarm system), was one common system of ensuring quality services regardless of institution. Some parents talked about a monthly quota for consumables such as toilet paper, detergents and supplies that all parents had to contribute with. One mother described the active income-based selection at enrolment that the manager of her son's preschool engaged in to make sure that all parents could ‘sponsor’ extra-curriculars (language and sports classes, competitions, even seasonal in-class activities etc.) for which the preschool was famous and from which parents were compelled to choose at least one.

Secondly, the extension of the enrolment list through ‘interventions’ was possible because not all enrolled children attended daily. As in schools, daycare centres and preschools operated groups of nominal rather than actual size. With children getting sick and some not attending daily, actual headcounts were always lower than the number of enrolled children, giving managers the opportunity to enrol more children than legally possible, particularly in the absence of regular reviews. ¹⁹ In summary, managers may often have their own – managerial, rather than personal – reasons to favour certain parents when demand (far) exceeds supply, particularly in certain neighbourhoods. Managing insufficient budgets and given a significant degree of discretion over admissions, managers will inevitably work out additional informal priority criteria, most likely reflecting the managerial constraints they experience. Lack of funds for consumables and uneven parental demand for extra activities create clear incentives for cream-skimming children from higher-income families and, at the same time, for forming socio-economically homogeneous groups in order to minimise the stigma that may arise from not attending the extras that the majority can afford.

19

As revealed by the interview with the county school inspector for preschool education.

5 Conclusions

This article casts light on the importance of non-monetary informal practices in accessing public full-time ECEC services in shortage in the Romanian post-socialist context by elaborating on the workings of ‘favours of access’ (Ledeneva, 2004: 11). In doing so, it explores what appears to be the emergence of ad-hoc forms of personal networks facilitated not by those who wish to ‘get in’, but by gatekeepers who, in situations of resource shortages, cultivate – often unbeknownst to parents – a network of ‘useful’ public service users who have the resources to literally chip in (see also Jancsics, in this issue). What is notable is that due to the constraints that regulations impose, preschool managers’ cream-skimming and occasional giving in to ‘relations’ promoting the interests of socio-economically less useful parents is ambiguous and unknown to most parents. Moreover, what the article finds is that the main purpose of such favours of access does not seem to be personal material gain, but – instead – managerial effectiveness in conditions of material shortage and institutional prestige.

In focus has been how the process of searching for a place in full-time daycare or preschool often constitutes a hidden means-test for many parents. Depending on the unstated and perhaps even involuntary assessment by the manager, parents may or may not find themselves faced with a helpful daycare or preschool director eager to enrol the child in question. In other words, Romanian urban children's access to public childcare services, especially full-time ones, depends both on formal application on the official enrolment day, according to clearly stated rules as well as additional – informal, fuzzy and income- and qualification-based – requirements. For those better off, these requirements will have been met prior to enrolment, often unbeknownst to them, through managers’ informal cream-skimming. For those less well off, these requirements will have to be waived one way or another, for instance through making recourse to ‘relations’ and ‘interventions’. Through favours of access – although it often seemed that these favours were to their institutions and themselves as managers rather than to applicant families – managers ensure that they form new groups of young learners whose parents can afford to act as an informal investment fund for institutional expenses. However, in doing so, managers are complicit not in supporting the equalising outcomes that public childcare and preschool are usually extolled for, but instead in putting into motion processes of inequality: employment and income inequalities by lowering chances of less educated, lower-income mothers to enter full-time employment through denying most of them access to cheap full-time daycare and preschool services; and by channelling children from less well-off families towards part-time tuition, often of poorer quality, and thus putting children with different socio-economic backgrounds onto different learning trajectories and educational outcomes.

Like the bribes paid in the healthcare sector, in Romania and elsewhere in the region (Polese, 2008, ahead-of-print; Stepurko, Pavlova, Gryga, & Groot, 2013), or in public education (Sayfutdinova, in this issue), the ‘interventions’ described in this article also constitute means to ‘redress inequalities of access’ (Stan, 2012: 77; see also Morris & Polese, 2014). However, unlike the open secret that ‘gifts’ and other means of securing access to scarce public services more generally constitute, the means of attaining access to initially inaccessible full-time ECEC services was neither evident, nor sure. There was also no perception that informal payments could represent an alternative. Some parents ‘gave acquaintances and family members a try’, not knowing what to expect. Others decided ‘not to push the issue’ and accepted refusal. This contrasts starkly with professionals’ predatory practices in the public healthcare system (Stan, 2012: 78–79) or in higher education in other post-socialist contexts (Sayfutdinova, 2015).

Another conclusion is that contrary to regulations, service provision is neither demand-driven (meaning that places are not simply dependent on expressed demand, but also on financial and material constraints), nor does place allocation happen on a first come, first served basis. In the absence of more sophisticated needs- or risk-based guidelines for the allocation of full-time places in public full-time ECEC institutions, these will remain geared towards the more affluent and, in financial terms, less needy families in the detriment of less affluent and, arguably, needier families in the Romanian context. Parents looking for full-time formal childcare enter an uncoordinated realm in which public institutions act as market actors in seller's markets: managers have significant autonomy – therefore space for discretion – in enrolment and are income- (even if not profit-)oriented. The result is a publicly financed, poorly coordinated network of ECEC institutions that provide highly sought-after places easily for better situated parents and, for the lucky few, at the cost of ‘interventions’, unwillingly to less well situated ones.