MONTREAL – Fixing her sights on the 27 per cent of the province’s four-year-olds who will go straight from home to school, Education Minister Marie Malavoy announced Friday that the province will start creating all-day kindergarten classes to help them be better prepared for school.
Speaking to the Chambre de Commerce du Montréal Métropolitain, she gave no hint as to what the additional grade would cost the province’s schools or where school boards, already struggling with $500 million in budget cuts, would find the extra money.
More critically, according to the Association québécoise des Centres de la petite enfance, which represents 750 of the approximately 900 early childhood education centres in Quebec, Malavoy provided no convincing pedagogical or psychological reason for turning to schools rather than expanding the capacity of the CPEs.
Malavoy suggested that schools might offer a new, more appealing option to families who have decided not to send their children to either daycare or CPEs. These are the families who see no need for their children to be in substitute care, she said. “But when these children start school, they start thinking they’re not as good as the others … But we want them to have a positive learning experience at the beginning of their school career.”
Malavoy cited a 2008 study by the Montreal Public Health and Social Services Agency that found that about 35 per cent of children started school “poorly prepared,” with language deficits or behavioural problems.
The early childhood education centre association argued that school is not the best place to handle these problems. “A school’s mandate and mission is to educate. The goal is cognitive development, but a child’s brain development at age four is not at the stage of abstract reasoning yet,” said Gina Gasparrini, member of the association’s executive committee and executive director of a CPE. “Four-year-olds need to learn hands-on, through play.” CPEs have the expertise to deal with the needs of four-year-olds, through specially trained staff and buildings adapted to play, said Gasparrini. Ironically, she said, the Parti Québécois government which now wants to send children to schools rather than to CPEs is the same government that set up the CPE network 16 years ago.
Gasparrini said the association is also concerned that the province wants to attract children from low-income areas to the new kindergarten classes for four-year-olds. “But these are the children who when we receive them, we receive the whole family. We meet with the parents almost daily. We coach the families on parenting skills. We support the parents through some hard times. And the schools just don’t have the capacity to do that.”
At the level of a CPE, the maximum ratio of educators to children is one to 10, whereas in a school setting, it is more like one to 20. “Four-year-olds are not as independent as five- or six-year-olds,” said Gasparrini. “I don’t see how a teacher with such a large group of children to look after can meet individual needs.”
Gasparrini cited a colleague from Gatineau who had to hire a third educator to handle a group of 18 children, many of whose parents are teenagers. “The children tended to be aggressive,” said Gasparrini, “because they had not developed their language skills and tended to act out. They’re hard to deal with in a smaller group, but almost impossible in a group of 20 or more.”
As for families of difficult children having automatic access to a class for four-year-olds in the public school system, Gasparrini said, “We’ve known of cases where the school calls the parents within two weeks of the child’s arrival and says, ‘Your child has needs we can’t meet.’”
Gasparrini said the association would like the government to do a proper analysis into why 25 per cent of four-year-olds are not in organized care. “Then maybe it could give us the tools to adjust our services to make them more accessible,” she said, adding, “Montreal has a lot of programs for four-year-olds and has had for many years and still there are one in four who are not in organized care and we don’t know why.”
Instead the government has moved ahead quickly to develop classes for four-year-olds.
“There are areas in Quebec where registration (for four-year-olds) is already done,” said Gasparrini. “But there’s been no consultation, no analysis, no effort to find out if there is a need.”
Research does not show that putting children into school at earlier ages leads to a lower dropout rate, said Gasparrini. Finland, where children don’t start formal schooling until age seven, scores highest on international testing, she pointed out, while France, where children start school at age three, scores much lower.
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