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Mixing idealism and realism: Meeting the changing needs of families in Canberra, Australia from 1944 - 2008
Background
The Australian Capital Territory (ACT) preschool program serves over 90% of eligible 4 year-olds. It is a significant phase of family life where, in Canberra, parents often make an enormous effort to be involved in the delivery of the program – often choosing to scale back work or opting to juggling shift rotations to become involved in an extraordinary display of volunteer effort and community spirit. Parents contributed, in 2007, approximately $1.3 million to the delivery of the program and managed an asset base of $6.8 million in teaching resources – their contribution and responsibility in the delivery of the preschool program.
The era of the suburban Pre-school came to the fore in the wake of the Nursery Kindergarten movement in the 1930’s and early 1940’s. In a period of post-war reconstruction, the Australian community experienced a significant shortage of resources: human, material and financial. Simultaneously, developments in the value of the early years of child care and education stimulated public demand for young children to participate in a program that would be of benefit whilst mothers were freed up to undertake other duties.
Canberra’s social and economic situation was no different and in 1944 the Ministry of the Interior commissioned the development of a program that would extend the benefit of the Canberra Nursery Kindergarten into the fledgling suburbs that surrounded the civic region. The ambitious proposal incorporated a collaborative “agreement” that effectively split the day-to-day fiscal management and ownership [of the entity] between the government and the parents of the young children enrolled in each suburban pre-school centre.
Throughout a series of significant changes regarding the governance of the ACT, the suburban preschool “agreement” remained relatively undisturbed. It appears that, being a small-scale, successful program that met the demands of high population growth in the 1970’s and 1980’s – preserved the original arrangements. In the 1990’s under ACT self-government, the ACT preschool program experienced a number of attempts to modify and reduce the amount of government expenditure. Throughout the past decade, further attempts to alter the preschool program reveals the presence of unidentified - yet disparate views regarding the nature, purpose and power of the two participants: the government and the Pre-school Parent Association.
How is it that such an intensive, community-led program can remain intact from 1944 through to 2008? Why have parents willingly made such domestic changes in order to manage the program’s delivery and responsibilities? Does the ACT preschool program hold the opportunity to understand the motivation behind successful community/government collaborative initiatives? What can the ACT preschool program teach us about developing community programs? Can those lessons be translated into the questions of the development of future early childhood initiatives to support the growth and development of human and community capital?
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