Politics of care in the early years in Australia since the pandemic

Abstract

Almost every part of human society have been impacted by COVID-19 and it has exposed our world’s economic and social fault lines. How each country cared for their youngest members rapidly became obvious as one of those fault lines. Many countries had inadequate early education and care systems that quickly started to buckle under the impact of lockdowns. What happened in Australia, although unique in the exact way it played out, was essentially replicated around the world. Education and care of our youngest citizens was realised to be essential, market based care systems began to crumble, the government poured more subsidies into the system, and educators and teachers watched as their roles were reduced in the public’s eye to childminders. Educators and teachers had to take on more work as they sought to engage with children at home, and sought to keep themselves safe. Eventually the government granted everybody that needed it, free ‘childcare’, a move that would see economists, feminists and families call for it to remain free once the country re-opened. The main opposition party has now joined that call and we may see a legacy of a re-imagined education and care system in Australia in the wake of the pandemic.

The spikes of the coronavirus that were going to change the lives of almost every human being in the world looked menacing in the images drawn by epidemiologists back in February 2020. What we didn’t know back then was that it wasn’t just human cells those spikes would penetrate. Almost every part of human society would be pierced, exposing our world’s economic and social fault lines. How each country cared for their youngest members rapidly became obvious as one of those fault lines. It was somewhat unnerving to watch this happen and realise that despite the differences in early education and care systems, the same problems were happening in many disparate western countries. Many countries had inadequate early education and care systems that quickly started to buckle under the attack of the spiky virus.

Who knew that early education and care is essential?

Like so many countries, Australia went into lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic. People were ordered to work from home where possible. Large classes of businesses such as restaurants and gyms were ordered closed. Initially our politicians declared that both schools and education and care services would remain open because it appeared that children either couldn’t catch COVID 19 or at the very least were not strong vectors of the disease.

As the country was put into lockdown bar essential workers, the absolute necessity of maintaining formal care systems for our youngest became apparent. To put it bluntly, the children of essential workers such as doctors, nurses, retail workers, farm workers, rapidly became understood as impediments to their work unless there was a system to care for them. This role fell on educators and early childhood teachers, but no allowance was made for the fear they may have had about carrying on in the middle of a pandemic. Used to working with little status and standing, they were not surprised that no gratitude was forthcoming from the government or from Australia at large. Care work, early education, was, as always a thankless task, albeit it an essential one.

Market based care systems falter

In Australia, like many other countries we have an extensive system of early education and care. Unlike many countries, ours is market based – some not-for-profit centres, and many for-profit and corporate ones. That market soon showed its fragility. Despite the fact that our education and care centres remained open, parents were scared. Despite receiving billions of government subsidies each year, our education and care system was unable to stand up to the sheer numbers of families withdrawing their children in the initial lockdown.

Parents were withdrawing their children because of health concerns and because they were soon told to keep older children home from school. But they were also withdrawing because despite the subsidies, childcare is expensive. When families lose jobs or income, childcare is an obvious place to cut. The funding that keeps these services open comes from parent fees and subsidies passed on to the services via parents. Without these, services were warning governments of predicted wholesale closures. Once services closed there was little chance of them being able to re-open post lockdown. Our entire education and care system looked to be at risk.

Education or care?

Gradually it became apparent that both education and care services and indeed schools were not, as we thought, primarily about education for children. Their main function, when push came to shove was care. Care to enable their parents to engage in productive work. Nobody called for education and care services or schools to remain open because of the damage to children’s education, it was only because children needed care. Early childhood educators and teachers felt that their role, always poorly understood at the best of time had been even further reduced to that of mere child minders. In Australia the legal name for the services where children go from birth to school age is ‘early education and care centres’. The government department with responsibility for these is the Department of Education, but the services struggle to be called anything other than childcare centres by politicians, media and the general community. The pandemic was making the care part of education and care the important one at the expense of the importance of children’s education.

The trope of children entering their parent’s zoomed television interviews, became commonplace, as did women noting the gendered burden of care, even in a pandemic. Young children were literally underfoot for most workers, struggling to work from home. This was intensified because grandparents, those unappreciated foot soldiers in the war of reducing the cost of caring for young children, were out of the picture. Everyone was aware that grandparents needed to be kept safe from COVID-19 so they were no longer allowed to see their grandchildren, let alone care for them.

Government rescue packages

Over the last 30 years, Australia’s education and care system has moved from one that was primarily provided by not-for-profit organisations to one that is big business. This includes publicly listed firms on the stock exchange, multi-national private equity firms attracted by guaranteed government subsidies, and developers and landlords keen to charge high rents. These big businesses were hurting and were in financial dangers. Services not only had high rents, they also had high wage bills – despite the low wages paid to early childcare educators and teachers, caring is still labour intensive.

Government was forced to step in with a rescue package for the sector. Education and care services in Australia are not funded directly, but via a complex system of subsidies to parents. Neoliberalism loves the idea of giving people ‘choice’, so the subsidies are essentially a voucher system that allows parents to choose which education and care service will receive their business. When the bureaucrats and the politicians decided that services needed more financial support, they were victims to their own complexity.

Free childcare at last

The bureaucrats dealt with the complexity of their system by abandoning it. It was announced that childcare would be free for all and services would receive direct subsidies to provide care for those who needed it. Services would also be allowed into Australia’s national pandemic wage subsidy scheme, JobKeeper. What were once pipe dreams of passionate but unrealistic advocates for young children, and their early education was now reality. Early education and care, having been deemed a necessity, and was now free.

Profiting from care provision shows its holes

It was not long before the holes in for-profit provision of education and care became obvious. The subsidies the government were handing out to keep services afloat were going to the providers, the owners of services. They were not automatically trickling down to staff. It became apparent how many of the educators in the sector were employed as newly employed casuals or were overseas workers in Australia on visas. These two groups were not eligible for the JobKeeper subsidy – the Department of Education reported that this meant up to 30% of the sector’s staff working were ineligible. This is a reflection of a situation where wages and conditions for educators are so poor that services are at times being staffed by those with no other options. It also indicates that businesses were relying on casual staff they could lay off when occupancy rates dropped, rather than permanent staff who could build strong relationships with children.

Educators learned how to pivot

Amidst all the funding drama, educators and early childhood teachers continued to do what they always do, educating and caring for children. But what they were doing and how they were doing it changed, for some of them dramatically. As well as supporting children through traumatic times, teaching them about handwashing etc, they were encouraged to support the children that weren’t coming into the centre through Zoom calls, recording videos and designing and sending early education at home packages. Some of their work couldn’t, and didn’t change. Calls for social distancing were impossible in the sector, especially for those working with babies or toddlers. Managers of centres had to become financially literate as they tried to understand the intricacies of government rescue packages that were so complex that at one stage the frequently asked question document provided by the funding department ran to 28 pages. Educators had to decipher for parents the rules about who could and who couldn’t access their service and had to set up new systems for meeting and greeting families as attempts were made to reduce the number of adults entering a service. They had to develop policies on the fly about privacy and online video calls, develop risk assessments about everything COVID-19 related and in many cases were forced to become cleaners, endlessly cleaning the high touch areas in their centres.

A thankless task?

The fact that educators and early childhood teachers did this, that they took on extra work and extra roles, is testament to their professionalism and the depth of their engagement with the children they provide education and care to. But it came without much gratitude from the wider society. Society was noticing what doctors and nurses and other health workers were doing, even noticing the retail workers who were continuing in their work. However, the sacrifices that educators and early childhood teachers were making were not noticed. They were fronting up, day in and day out, at a time when they were terrified of catching the virus, and at a time they were worried about taking it home from their workplace to their own families.

One state in Australia, Victoria, has had not just one hard lockdown, but a second one that as I write has been running for over 100 days. During this lockdown only workers with a special permit or whose children were vulnerable could send their children to an education and care service. Everybody had an 8 pm curfew and were confined to within 5 km of their home, allowed only to exercise outside of their home for an hour a day. Even in this hard lockdown, educators were fronting up to care for children.

The economic costs of COVID and lockdowns like these have thus been as high in Australia as elsewhere. Nobody has a guaranteed job in this world anymore. And if most educators and teachers do, it is because of the defacto, but unspoken of recognition that what they do every day, by educating our youngest children is very, very, important.

Given early childhood teachers are used to being undervalued and underpaid, they were not really expecting a pandemic to change this. But they would like to make it through the pandemic alive just to see if this act will get them the status and standing they deserve or if the image of them just as ‘childminders’ becomes even more entrenched.

Sparse information about how to remain safe

Educators and early childhood teachers were given little accurate information about how they could keep themselves (and their families) alive and safe. In early April, the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee (AHPPC – Australia’s key decision making committee for health emergencies) published a statement on strategies for education and care services. It stated that they considered these services as essential services that should continue at this time, but with risk mitigation measures in place to stop the spread of COVID-19.

One of their recommendations – that all children, staff and parents should have an influenza vaccine – became a contentious issue as business pointed out the cost of such a measure, as their was an immediate shortage of vaccines, and as antivaxxers leapt on what they saw as an assault to the bodily autonomy of staff. The AHPPC removed the vaccination recommendation but luckily some of the largest employers in the sector, such as the not-for-profit Goodstart Early Learning required all their staff to get a flu shot and sourced and paid for them.

First to lose wage subsidies

It came as a shock to many in the sector when staff employed by education and care services were the first and only workers in the country to have their access to the wage subsidy system, JobKeeper, removed. The for-profit provider lobby groups had argued that they wanted to charge fees again, that they were losing too much money now that parts of the country were re-opening.

Business had won at the expense of educators, teachers, families and above all children. What suited them (charging fees and receiving government subsidies) would once again be what happened. Of course, it couldn’t happen overnight, so ‘transition’ funding packages and ‘recovery’ funding packages were hastily cobbled together.

The economists and women cried foul

As time went on and as Australia tried to imagine itself living with COVID and post COVID, economists and feminists started to call for major changes. The education and care sector was suddenly at the centre of a debate about the need for free ‘childcare. So loud did those calls become that it became a political issue. In the wake of a recovery Budget produced by the Federal government that saw large investments into job creation schemes for men, the main opposition party, the Australian Labor Party, called for wholesale changes to early education and care funding as a route to universal access. Childcare, and the cost of it, has once again has become a prominent news story.

Our education and care sector survived

At the beginning of this piece I said that what happened to the education system in Australia, although unique to our country in the exact way it played out, was essentially replicated around the world. This is not, however strictly true. Our system, as wide open to being pierced by COVID-19, as others are, ultimately survived. There is now a push to redesign the funding system, to ensure that families can access free early education and care. This push, it is hoped, will become an issue for the 2022 federal election and Australia’s education and care system may in fact not just survive but may evolve.

It is hard to open a newspaper right now without seeing a fresh call from a think tank or an institute to make ‘childcare’ free. Most of the calls are being made on economic grounds about women’s participation in the workforce but there is at least a whiff of a call to rethink what is valuable to all of us in the wake of a life changing pandemic. Surely, some are asking, shouldn’t we be doing better at caring for vulnerable members of our community, such as the very young and very old? A new campaign, Thrive by Five, has been established by a philanthropic foundation funded by one of Australia’s richest mining barons, calling for a reform of our education and care system to make it high quality and universal.

The politics of education and care

There are however, sadly, few voices in Australia right now talking about early education and care, childcare, in terms of children’s needs. It’s about women or the economy. Children, and by default, those that educate and care for them, are largely the missing ingredient in the calls. But as essential as ‘childcare’ was during lockdown periods, and as essential as the people that care and educate children were found to be, the value of what happens in our centres and the people who work in them should be more obvious now.

The pandemic laid open the politics of education and care. It laid open the flaws in our market based. It laid open the differing views that exist about care and education. It laid open the gendered nature and underpayment of care work. It laid open the fact that despite investing a large amount of money in our education and care system, governments have left us with a system that is expensive and discourages some women from participating in the workforce. It reminded educators and early childhood teachers that their needs are rarely taken into account in system design.

A COVID-19 legacy

Wouldn’t a nice legacy of the pandemic be redesigned systems of education and care that are open to every child and every family that needed them and are truly responsive to those needs? Ones where what was best for children is the primary factor in their design? Ones where the educators and teachers who do the educating and caring are properly recompensed and are given the status and standing they deserve given the importance of their work? And ones where the needs of the market are totally irrelevant and not even vaguely of interest to anyone?

A pipe dream? Possibly. But if you had told me in January 2020 that the world as we knew it was to change unrecognisably in the next few months I would have told you that you were mad.

Stranger things have happened this year than the youngest members of our community being given the education and care they need.

Stranger, but not having nearly as much impact or longevity on our world as this one will inevitably, indubitably and irrevocably, have.