An early childhood education professor is unconvinced the Government’s latest cost of living measure, which could see some families get a weekly $75 rebate on fees, will work as planned.
The policy, called FamilyBoost, was first announced in March last year.
It means from July 1, parents and caregivers of young children will be eligible to apply for partial reimbursement of early childhood education (ECE) fees, up to 25% of the weekly fees, to a maximum of $75 per week.
Eligible people would need to collate their ECE invoices from July 1 and apply on a three-monthly basis for a lump-sum repayment through Inland Revenue’s online platform, MyIR. The first payments would be made in October this year.
Only families earning $180,000 and under, with childcare costs, were eligible, with the maximum repayment gradually reducing for families earning more than $140,000.
Victoria University’s director of the Institute of Early Childhood Studies, Sue Cherrington, told Breakfast she is unconvinced about the policy’s effectiveness.
She said that while an extra $75 would be “positive” for families who can get it, the overall process will be “administratively cumbersome to manage”.
“It’s putting a lot of demand back on families to actually manage that process themselves.
“And I think there’s also going to be a large proportion of families who are going to get a much smaller amount of funding or tax rebates.”
She said the level of administrative work required to get the rebate would be “more effort than it’s worth” for some families.
“It’s an arrears payment for parents, so it’s not going to help them right then and there. They’re going to have to wait a period before they’re going to be able to claim.
“And I suspect that for some parents who maybe are in a service where their fees aren’t so high where their child is attending part-time, the proportion that they’re going to be able to claim back is actually much smaller.”
Finance Minister Nicola Willis said that because most ECE centres already provide parents with invoices, “they won’t need to do anything further”.
“For parents, it’s as simple as uploading the invoices to myIR in either a JPEG or PDF format. Parents who only have a physical copy of their ECE invoice can take a digital photo of their invoice and upload that to myIR,” she said.
Willis said Inland Revenue would work with ECE providers before the policy is implemented to ensure families can access the rebate.
“IR will now engage with ECE providers ahead of implementation to ensure they are ready to support families access FamilyBoost. We know ECEs will want to make it as easy as possible for parents to make their claims.”
Some new staff at IRD will likely come to help with demand, but “it won’t be a huge number”, Willis said.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said that while the system is not as “dynamic” as the Government wanted, “the money still comes through”.
Cherrington is also concerned that the rebate will create a “strong temptation” for centres to up their prices.
The Government said it would regulate through invoices to ensure centres don’t abuse the system.
Luxon told Breakfast: “We will have, for the time being, a lot of data that we’ve been collecting to monitor ECE charges and prices.”
Overall, Cherrington called FamilyBoost a “band-aid over what is a pretty broken early childhood system in terms of funding”.
“Because it is regulated to a certain degree but it’s cumbersome, there isn’t a lot of regulation around how much centres or services are charging families,” she said.
“There is little oversight about how the quite considerable funding that does go into services is spent.”
She wants to see a similar system to schooling, the model “where teachers and kaiako are paid directly by government”.
“If we had government paying teachers directly, we would also be able to ensure that our qualified teachers in the childcare sector, education care sector were receiving equivalent pay for their counterparts in kindergarten and the schooling sector.”