She works 16-hour shifts looking after the sick. Why won't anyone take care of her baby?

Wednesday, 28 September 2022

Early childhood education is not just expensive – it can even be difficult to find a spot in a quality centre. National Correspondent Michelle Duff reports in the latest from an investigation into childcare.

She’s working 16-hour shifts to support her family, but nurse Maima Tapumanaia ​can’t sleep for worrying about who will care for her youngest baby.

“My heart is thumping, I’m just terrified,” says Tapumanaia, watching Litia, 23 months, happily playing in the sandpit on the closing day of her current child care centre.

“She’ll be the youngest at her new place, there’s just two teachers in between 20 kids, and I can’t start her there for three weeks,” she says. “I can’t work at all, but I can’t lose my job. I don’t know what we’ll do.”

**READ MORE:

* 'When will you be home, daddy?': The hard-working fathers struggling to see their babies

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* 'I can't afford to work': 'Free' childcare is a myth, and costs for parents are high

**

Tapumanaia is a registered nurse at Kenepuru Hospital, and her husband is a self-employed courier driver. They both work full-time to support their young family of five. Their oldest child is 13 and the two youngest, Litia and her older brother Jeremiah, 3, are in child care.

The centre they currently attend, Seeds Elsdon, is closing alongside its sister centre in Ranui, with more than 50 children.

The Tapumanaias are now among dozens of displaced families struggling to find child care in Porirua, an underserved, low-income area where quality, affordable childcare is increasingly difficult to find.

An investigation by Stuff has found centres closing down, with suspended licences, or being forced to offer half-days because of teacher shortages. Working parents have their lives thrown into disarray, or their jobs threatened, as a result.

At the same time, demand for quality services is increasing nationwide. Porirua, north of Wellington, is among the worst-hit in the country – almost 80% of services have waitlists in the city, many of more than six months.

“I’m trying to find elsewhere, and if I can’t, I’ll have to look at leaving work,” says administrator Jenele Hebden, ​who works full-time but is regularly picking her 1-year-old up at midday as her Porirua not-for-profit centre closes early due to teacher shortages and sickness. “It’s so much worse now than even three years ago – it’s actually at the point where I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

At Seeds, Tapumanaia could drop Jeremiah and Litia off before starting her day shift at 7.30am, and her husband picked them up. “We work around the clock, and this place just provided it all for us.”

With a month’s notice of closure she went to look at eight daycares, but couldn’t find any that would take both children. Some had waitlists of up to two years, or would accept Jeremiah, with no room for Litia.

She says one of the for-profit services she looked at, Best Start in Tawa, charged per minute the child was late to be picked up. (Best Start Tawa charges a $20 late fee, and $30 per 15 minutes past closing. It says the policy is meant to discourage a pattern of parent lateness, so centres can operate within staff ratios and licensing rules.)

The Tapumanaia’s combined income is $101,000 a year after tax. “We don’t get any childcare subsidies, we don’t get Working for Families, we don’t get any of that, and they say that’s because we earn too much but we’re barely making it now.”

The only place Tapumanaia can find is at a local kindy. While kindergartens used to take children from 3, many have now dropped to age 2 in line with working parents’ needs.

But there’s no room for Litia to nap there, it shuts at 2.30pm when both parents will still be working, and once a child is 2, the government-funded ratio is one teacher per 10 children. (Many daycare providers employ more teachers for this age group, as it still requires a high level of care.)

“That’s what I’m most worried about. This place [Seeds] had it on lock,” Tapumanaia says.

Equality in childcare?

Seeds owner Tolo Pereira, ​who has run the Samoan language child care centre for 20 years with husband Raymond and their daughters, says she made the heartbreaking decision to close for health reasons. Her enduring regret will be not seeing equality in childcare.

“I’m devastated, this has always been my dream, and I’m sad, really, really sad that we’ve had to close before the battle has been won for early childhood teachers, and for early childhood kids.”

Pereira trained as an ECE teacher then opened the centres herself after struggling to find anywhere she felt was good enough for her foster baby. They opened two more, then turned one into an after school programme after adopting two more foster kids and needing affordable after school care.

Since then, Pereira has been caught between parents not being able to afford to pay, and low government subsidies – rising at less than half the rate of inflation in the past decade – which make it difficult for her to pay staff. “We always paid our staff a little bit more than what we can afford, but we don't want to raise our fees for parents.”

She has funded the family-owned business from her own pocket, including proceeds from the sale of properties and a $200,000 inheritance. She still remembers the year they made $1 profit. “We all screamed and laughed, ‘Woo hoo!’.

“We had our bank manager come and bring another bank manager from Auckland to support him telling us, ‘Hey, you might have to close’. I just said – ‘I’m sorry, we can’t.’ I’ve got my faith in God, and I know that I'm serving him by serving these children and their families.”

Pereira has been part of a group pushing for a rise in subsidies so teachers can be paid fairly. Currently, kindergarten teachers earn the same amount as primary school teachers but other ECE teachers don’t have pay parity, in some cases earning $23,000 less a year for the same qualifications.

“It’s not only unfair, but it’s degrading, it’s disrespectful for teachers not to be paid what they should be paid. If you take care of your teachers your children will be well, and if you don’t take care of them at a foundational level you’re going to have many more problems when they get older.”

It means it’s hard to attract new graduates, and retain teachers – Pereira’s mother, Vaimea Lam, 78, is among the nannies still working in the centre.

While some of her low-income working parents would qualify for childcare subsidies from Work and Income, Pereira says, there was shame associated with applying and many did not, even when she filled out the paperwork.

Daughter Katinka Kirisome, 38, also an ECE teacher, says her mum has never sent a child away because their parents couldn’t pay. “One family owed $30,000 with three kids. She’s like, ‘I’m not gonna send bill collectors to my people’.”

The Education Ministry said it could bump her licence to 100 children, but this wasn’t a solution, Pereira says. “I said: ‘No, I don't want 100 kids.’ I want a relationship with these children and the family, and I want my staff to not feel stressed, and we want to know our children.”

Pereira and Kirisome say there used to be about 17 Pasifika ECE services in Wellington, and there’s now around seven. “It’s financial, the funding is nowhere near enough to support them.”

The ministry could not say how many Pacific Island language services had closed, treating the question as an Official Information Act request.

Asked if enough was being done to support small and not-for-profit services, Ministry of Education Te Tai Runga Hautū Nancy Bell said government contributed “substantially” to the cost.

“ECE subsidies are based on average costs to provide ECE and are not tailored to the costs of individual services. Additional equity and targeted funding streams are available to services who provide ECE to children from disadvantaged backgrounds.”

National childcare chains have already shown interest in buying Seeds.

The forgotten toddlers

Nationwide, there are more childcare spaces in low-income areas. But not all services are created equal. Cost is a problem, along with availability at high-quality centres.

Struggling to find affordable care or waiting for months is all too common for parents. Two-year-olds and under are more likely to be wait-listed at a service than any other age.

Almost half of all services nationwide have waitlists for this age group, with the biggest battle for a spot among 2-year-olds in the Wellington region, where 66 per cent of all services have waitlists. Broken down by council, it’s worse for Porirua.

The lack of available childcare is made worse by a historic policy gap that means 2-year-olds receive $5 less funding per child than any other age.

Education Ministry funding for childcare providers is based on funded child hours. Infants are subsidised at around $13.20 an hour, while 2-year-olds get around $7.30 an hour.

The logic is that infants need more care, and the teacher child ratio is lower, at 1:5. At two, the ratio moves to 1:10. This is double that of other comparable countries – in Australia, the younger age group is 1:4, and over 2-year-olds is 1:5.

In practice, centres say they need to employ more teachers for this age group – and end up having to prop them up with other funding, or raise parent fees. “It’s about making sure children are safe, and the interactions with children,” Pereira says.

Once the child gets to 3 they qualify for the 20 Hours subsidy, of $12.45 an hour, which parents usually see reflected in a drop in price.

After having Litia, Tapumanaia qualified for the government’s paid parental leave entitlement of 26 weeks, but went back to work when she was 14-weeks-old because their family couldn’t survive on it – at 80 per cent of the minimum wage, it was less than her nurse’s salary.

This reflects a common situation for middle income families, where there is no support between paid parental leave ending when the baby is 6-months-old, and the 20 Hours ECE subsidy beginning, at 3 years old.

In an interview, Education Minister Chris Hipkins said decreasing teacher/child ratios and reviewing funding for 2-year-olds was the next on his work agenda, after funding the next steps of pay parity.

However, he would not commit to extending higher subsidies to 2-year-olds.

A day’s notice to find childcare

Across the harbour in Titahi Bay, more working families’ lives hang in the balance after their child care, All About Children, had its licence suspended by the Ministry of Education.

The service is part of a national chain, Kids’ World Education Group, and both its Titahi Bay and Lower Hutt centres were forced to suspend services after a licensing audit found children were playing in hazardous spaces.

One mother, a probation officer who asked not to be identified, says parents were advised via email on a Monday that their kids couldn’t come the next day. “It was difficult because I have a big caseload, I have to be at work, but I couldn’t because we had no childcare,” she says. Neither she nor her husband, who also works full-time as a drainage technician, can work from home so had to take alternate days off to look after their 4-year-old while searching.

The Ministry of Education offered no help, she says. “It was quite overwhelming for him, taking him to multiple different daycares and just having to rush him into a new daycare,” the mother says. “Couldn’t they have done this in a different way?”

They tried 10 places before finding him a space, but it’s more than twice the price, at $223 a week – with the 20 Hours subsidy – compared to $90 at All About Children, she says.

She wants to return him to All About Children, where he liked the teachers and had friends, but worries about what they were shut down for. “We don’t really know, and if they were closed down with no notice …how bad was it?” The centre’s owners have asked parents if they can help with maintenance jobs to help the place re-open, she says. “You would think they could afford to do that themselves.”

A woman who identified as the manager of the Titahi Bay service says she does not know why the licence was suspended, as she had only been employed for three days beforehand.

Kids’ World Education Group national general manager Manjot Juneja ​wouldn’t go into the details over the suspension, saying it had “taken them completely by surprise.” They had no control over the notice period, with the ministry’s forced closure giving them a day to tell parents. “I’m just working with them now to get the paperwork together so we can re-open.” The licence for their Lower Hutt centre has been reinstated, he says.

An Education Review Office report from May 2021 shows at that time ERO identified areas of non-compliance with regulatory standards that are an “unacceptable risk to children.”

Nancy Bell, of the ministry, says All About Children was suspended due to multiple licencing breaches. “Some of these areas relate to health and safety, and nothing is more important than the safety of children.”

The centre had quickly addressed any immediate risk to children, but there were still a number of areas where licencing criteria were not met. Parents could contact the ministry for support.

But if there is support out there, many families aren’t feeling it.

When Stuff last caught up with Tapumanaia, she and her husband were using their savings to fly her mother over from Samoa to look after the children until they had the child care situation resolved.

“We came over here 15 years ago for a better life,” she says. “But to be honest, it’s just really stressful.”