Budget 09: Infants able to stay in early childhood centres for longer

Children aged 3, 4 and 5 will be funded to stay in kindies and early childhood centres.

Five-year-olds will be funded to stay in early childhood education from 2010 under the new Budget.

A total of $69.7 million was directed to extending the previous government's policy, which allocates 20 hours of free education to 3- and 4-year-olds as well as a limited number of 5-year-olds.

From July 2010 all 5-year olds will be eligible for the funding, meaning they can defer going to school until they are legally required to when they are 6.

Also, from July 2011 the six-hour daily limit will be removed, giving parents more flexibility to fit early childhood education hours around their work.

It is estimated up to 1100 5-year-olds will attend early childhood education centres that qualify for the funding and 8200 children will benefit from removing the six-hour cap.

Auckland Kindergarten Association's general manager Tanya Harvey said extending the scheme to include 5-year-olds was a positive step and something the sector had lobbied for for a long time, as many children were not ready to start school right away.

Minister of Education Anne Tolley said the inclusion of 5-year-olds recognised that some parents would not want their children to begin compulsory schooling until the age of 6.

While Sarah Farquhar, chief executive of the Early Childhood Council, agreed it was beneficial for some 5-year-olds to stay in an early childhood centre, she believed the money allocated to extending the 20-hours free scheme may have been better spent addressing chronic teacher shortages.

Improving teacher-child ratios to 1:5 would have helped with that but the $275 million policy was scrapped this Budget.

She said the 20-hours scheme had many flaws but it would be a "brave government" that decided to look at the problems with it.

The $69.7 million will also extend the 20-hours policy to children attending playcentres and kohanga reo from 2010.

The president of the New Zealand Playcentre Federation, Marion Pilkington, said it was "nice to finally be recognised" and she looked forward to working with the ministry to implement the scheme.

She said there were some areas that had been identified as problematic in research Playcentre carried out last year.

One was a concern that Playcentre had been "systematically underfunded" for a number of years, but Mrs Pilkington recognised the economic climate made it difficult to resolve that.

Mrs Harvey would have liked to have seen more detail around increasing participation rates of Maori and Pacific children in early childhood education, which had been on the agenda since the election.

She was also concerned no funding had been put aside for special education in early childhood centres, though it had been allocated to schools, when a behaviour summit held earlier this year clearly identified it was important to target behaviour issues at an early age.Jacqueline Smith