ECEs will raise fees this week, Labour says

[mashman]

If this is true then...

An attempt to stop people from having too many children? (http://nz.news.yahoo.com/a/-/top-stories/8740215/eces-will-raise-fees-this-week-labour-says/) What? Just a cost saving measure? Who benefits? Or are we seeing one of the results of where the tax cut money came from? Wonder what this latest brain fart was all about...

[Banditbandit]

The neo-liberal Nats want to cut the money from the ECE budget .. the background is something like this .... (I think)

The Government (Labour) encouraged ECE centres to employ qualified staff .. and to help existing staff gain qualifications - Labour set a ratio of qualified to unqualified teachers for each centre ... centres that employed more qualified staff got more money - so a centre with ten qualified staff got more money than a centre with four qualified staff and six unqualified staff (I don't know what the ratio is) ... and of course, qualified staff get paid more than unqualified staff ...

The Nats are saying that centres should run to the ratio and so some centres will have to replace qualified staff with unqualified staff because they will not be getting any more money than the minimum ratio of qualified to unqualified staff allows.

So, the choice for the centres is obvious - get rid of qualifed staff and replace them with unqualified staff or put the fees up ...

So the Nats can blame the centres, not themselves, in a typical piece of neo-liberal economics and quickstepping ... and avoiding the issue of qualified vs unqualified staff in early childhood education centres, possible the most important sector of our education system ...

[neels]

possible the most important sector of our education system ...
Shit, that must be why my kids are so stupid, they just stayed at home and their mum looked after them.

[Banditbandit]

Shit, that must be why my kids are so stupid, they just stayed at home and their mum looked after them.

Naa .. it's only "possibly" ... will be plenty of exceptions out there ...

[shrub]

My kids were put in the best ECE schools we could afford, and it paid dividends. They have both done exceptionally well at school and life, and my partner's daughter went to arguably the best ECE school in ChCh and is topping her class in most subjects - and she goes to STAC, so she's not surrounded by kids from deprived homes.

By ensuring children are well set up with a top class education in the critical formative years we are maximising the chances our schools have of producing kids with the ability to make it in an increasingly complex world where education and skills will make the difference. Plus the ECE subsidy allows more parents to take their skills back into the workforce when they have young children knowing their kids are getting well looked after. That means we don't have the problem of people having to take several years out of work and losing touch with new technology etc, and most importantly it makes it easier for women on the DPB to get back to work and stop bludging off us poor, hard done by tax payers.

[mashman]

The thing that gets me and something I've noticed as a parent, seeing friends and their kids etc... is that the kids who go to some form of regular kindy are more social and seem to have more of a respect for adults who aren't their parents. This obviously sets the tone for how these kids "develop" socially. I'm not saying that it's 100% good kids from Kindy and 100% bad kids from parents, but there does seem to be a "correlation". Trained or non trained doesn't bother me too much as long as they can do the job of looking after my kidlings responsibly.

Removing funding, for what I see is a basic necessity, is farkin madness... If the young kids don't learn social ettiquette at an early stage, then they're probably going to become social bastards. It would seem that the govt are ignoring this in a quest to balance the books and as such they're screwing NZ for the next generation of parents.

That's just how I see it...

[marie_speeds]

I am completely willing to pay an extra $45 per week. A small price to pay for one's sanity or rather what's left of it...... :blink:

Yay! School starts this week! :woohoo:

[mashman]

I am completely willing to pay an extra $45 per week. A small price to pay for one's sanity or rather what's left of it...... :blink:

I don't mind paying extra either, but there are those that won't be able to afford it and as mentioned above, I think NZ will suffer for it...

When my boy went to Kindy, oooooo so many years ago, I went to Uni, as did the g/f at the time... they started to bring in a pay 3 pound per week charge... That's about 6/7 bucks... at that point in time that meant an 8 mile (walking) round trip 2 days a week to get to and from Uni, as well as getting up earlier and missing lectures etc... It all adds up for some... If it had gotten any worse I would have had to quit Uni and would have never paid my student loans back.

As long as you're ok though :shifty: