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Excerpt: "The Full-Day Early Learning-Kindergarten Program (Draft 2010) has been in draft form for the first two years of implementation of the Full Day Kindergarten program, during which time the Ministry of Education has been accepting informal feedback. This response is written as part of the formal two-part review process being conducted by the Ministry.... This critical phase of reviewing and revising the Full-Day Early Learning-Kindergarten Program provides a valuable opportunity to reflect on the document’s strengths and areas for improvement."

Excerpt: "While the company’s website suggests that Edleun centres are focused on improving the quality of the early childhood system, research consistently shows that for-profit programs provide lower quality child care. The rationale for using for-profit operators is typically to reduce the onus on government, legitimized as being more innovative and cost effective. Research suggests however that non-profit or publicly owned programs are consistently found to provide higher quality services (Cleveland, 2008, Penn, 2010). The Australian experience demonstrates how a corporate child care monopoly can hold government ransom with regard to oversight, reduced regulations, and increasing parental fees."

Excerpt: "In 2007 the newly re-elected Premier Dalton McGuinty asked former deputy minister Charles Pascal to look into the best way to implement full day kindergarten for all Ontario four-and five-year-olds. Fast forward five years and another appointee, this time former banker Don Drummond, is being asked what to eliminate from the budget to ensure Ontario stays on track to eradicate a $16-billion deficit. Top Liberals are being ruthless signaling the provincial budget will proceed with previously announced corporate tax breaks while requiring ministries to cut up to 30 per cent of their costs. 'Bear the pain for future gain' is the current mantra but there won’t be much pain sharing. Program cuts tend to disproportionately affect the vulnerable while tax increases are shared across the economic strata. Finding cheaper ways of delivering full time kindergarten, or eliminating it altogether have been floated in the media. As Pascal told CBC radio, "There are two kinds of policy making—smart and dumb. And cutting full day kindergarten is definitely dumb.""

Excerpt: "A new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) is currently in development to replace the existing DSMV-IV. One of the changes proposed is in the diagnostic criteria for autism and related conditions.... The risk with the change in the definition of ASD is that some families will no longer be recognized as having rights associated with disability categories. All Ontarians have the right to accommodation on the basis of disability and a diagnosis allows parents to more readily claim these rights. As an example, one of the most common reasons for children to be asked to leave an ECE setting is because of their behaviours. If a child has a diagnosis of autism, the parents can use this diagnosis as leverage to get supports rather than being excluded from the service."

Excerpt: "Ontario Budget 2012 makes no overt changes to early learning. Full day kindergarten moves forward as planned to embrace all children by 2014. Its unique educator team remains intact. The Government should be commended for rejecting the narrow mindedness of Drummond’s recommendations. The back-story however has some twists. A $75-million reduction in education capital grants will crash into the need to build or refurbish classrooms in schools where there is no space for the remaining influx of 100,000 children during the final phase of the rollout. Most early childhood educators in kindergarten classrooms do not yet work under a collective agreement. Public sector wage controls leaves them, and new all ECE entrants, immobilized at the starting gate...."

Report by Kerry McCuaig, Jane Bertrand and Stuart Shanker: "Over the last few decades the science of early development has witnessed explosive growth. New technologies confirm that infancy and early childhood are the first and most critical phases of human development. A child’s earliest experiences shape the structure of genes and the architecture of the developing brain. At the same time families have changed, becoming more diverse and are raising young children in circumstances that are significantly more complex, and for many, more stressful."

Posted on Longwoods.com.

Article by Kerry McCuaig: "The needs of modern families have changed; the services designed to support them have not. Children's programming in Canada is divided into three distinct streams – education, child care, and family and intervention supports.... The result is service silos. Children and families don't experience their lives in silos; their needs can't be dissected and addressed in isolation."

The following are responses to the Government of Ontario's Modernizing Child Care in Ontario: Sharing Conversations, Strengthening Partnerships, Working Together discussion paper.

Excerpt: "Ontario’s implementation of the bold vision for school board operated seamless child care across Ontario that was described in, With Our Best Future In Mind , has hit a few road blocks. After a great deal of lobbying, some general election politicking, and resulting legislative changes, today, most school boards in Ontario have reverted to the status quo in terms of how before and after school programs are delivered. In the majority of school boards before and after care programs are delivered by a third-party agency resulting in access to service that ranges from comprehensive to skeletal. The exception to this pattern exists in Waterloo, Ontario."

Excerpt: "The task of creating coherence out of the province’s early years services took a step forward on January 23, 2013 with the release of the Ontario Early Years Policy Framework. It’s not the kind of document that gets media attention or stirs attention deep in the sector. The framework is about governance and while that isn’t as exciting as money or legislative change it is an essential forerunner if the latter are to be accomplished effectively."

Excerpt: "The Ontario Government has undertaken a review of the administration of the Early Development Instrument (EDI), including how data are collected, analyzed and reported. An external consulting firm, Malatest & Associates, conducted the review with a final report due in December 2012. The purpose of this paper is not to inform the consultant’s work but to use the occasion of a review to broaden the discussion about the EDI. Our interest lies in maximizing its benefits. Only by understanding the critical underlying principles of the EDI can we then address the issue of its administration."

Article by Charles Pascal and Janette Pelletier: Full day kindergarten for four and five year olds in Ontario has many champions – parents, educators, researchers and the children themselves. But it does have its detractors. In this response to The Munchkin Invasion appearing in the May 27/2013 issue of MacLean’s magazine, Charles Pascal, the author of Ontario’s blueprint for early learning, and researcher Janette Pelletier discuss the pitfalls of using disconnected research to draw broad policy conclusions.