As many as 400 ECE centres could close in next year, group representing ECEs says
Hundreds of early childhood education centres could close within the next year, leaving thousands of families without childcare options as higher operational costs make it harder for providers to stay afloat, according to new analysis.
Labour, the Greens and te Pati Māori must look to Nationalise ECE if they win the next election.
The ECE market is held hostage via a few massive corporations…
Subsidise parents for childcare, not corporate shareholders
New Zealand’s early childhood education market has become increasingly corporatised in recent years. Since the 20 hours funding was implemented in 2007, the number of privatised ECE services has ballooned, while community-owned centres are dropping. Despite the quality of care among corporate services being demonstrably worse than in community-owned centres – for decades a documented fact in New Zealand and internationally – successive governments on both sides of the house continue to pour funding into this sector in an attempt to reduce costs for parents.
…why allow these corporations to make so much money off working mums and dads???
Best Start payments to rich-list founders Wright family trust rocket to $37m
Giant childcare charity Best Start made a tax-free operating profit of $32 million last year, while also increasing payments to its rich-list founders to $37m.
Best Start – the country’s largest childcare provider, with more than 260 facilities nationally – was controversially converted into a charity in 2015 when owners the Wright Family Trust sold the business to the Wright Family Foundation for $332m.
What should ACTUALLY happen is the Government should nationalise ECE and make it free so working Mums and Dads can drop their kids off to ECE and allow them to work and keep that money instead of paying for child care!
Working Mums and Dads are getting screwed over every single day by ECE fees that bleed them dry and bureaucratic FamilyBoost payments that are too complex for most to obtain and use, not to mention the clawbacks triggered by such low tax thresholds.
The Corporations are laughing, and you are still paying.
Kiwis should stand on their feet, not kneel to corporations!
The State empowers and provides for us all, the corporation is a free market mutation whose venal interest is to profitize every human interaction for their own benefit while masquerading as your interest.
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I have been saying this for the last few years .We can not and should not be propping up private corporations who only increase their charges as soon as the customer get a government top up or wage increases .There is no place for corporations in our education system .Why do the government need to give subsidies to families when they could integrate the ECE into the current primary school system which in the long run would be cheaper than handing out money and the cost of means testing etc to see if the family are entitled to the hand out .Like giving rent subsidies ,the rent goes up when the renter gets a top up of some sort .
Yeah but : Voting isn’t compulsory and lobbying isn’t illegal. Think about that for a moment.
We should be nationalizing rat-f**kers like the Wrights first cab off the rank. No compensation for national traitors like them.
Yes to all this. Spot on! ECE is a total Rort in this country.
Alternatively, we could make it possible for families to own a modest house and live a decent lifestyle on ONE fulltime salary, that should be the goal of a healthy society.
Yes Roxy the two income family has destroyed more families than it’s helped from my observations
Wash your mouth out Roxy7!
Winnie told us years ago that we were all economic units and each one of us had to make a contribution, i.e. each one of us had to pay tax.
Nothing about all the tax that’s saved by having one partner ‘free’ to help the elderly, children, the community, volunteering for all sorts of things. They don’t acknowledge that work because they can’t count it.
The proliferation of ECEs and retirement villages indicate they are very lucrative enterprises for their owners and very expensive for the people who need to use those services. The RW doesn’t like it when people can avoid using such services. It means their mates and donors don’t get to clip so many tickets.
That seems like a direct attack on international finance capital, ma’am. Wash your mouth out with soap.
If these ECE centres close, the economy will flounder, even more.
It’ll be a total shambles.
Shit food stories gone quiet. Van Veldon and Seymour threatening school funding if they keep complaining.
Yes agreecwith nationalising ECE but under this CoC everything is up for grabs Bryce Wilkinson is talking about selling all our state homes and giving people vouchers so they can choose where they live basically privatization of more state assets. And private organizations will choose who they want to accommodate leaving more people homeless we don’t need this. Watties Heinz is now saying they are not going to use NZ grown tomatoes beetroot and peaches in their tins, this is what happens when we sell NZ businesses the foreign owners have no loyalty to our food growers or country they look for cheaper options often not as good quality to maximize their profits. Bryce wrote the regulatory standards bill he is a right wing libertarian. And now he’s poking his nose in other areas,we need to vote those Act clowns out as son as we can do.