Peter Moraitis, former TAFE teacher and long-term St Kilda resident, explores and critiques the thinking behind the proposed closure of three Council Early Childhood Centres and the implications of treating the Centres as Council facilities supplying products to ‘customers’, rather than as vital community-created public institutions.

The City of Port Phillip has recently released a public consultation on the proposed closure of three community run and governed, not for profit, early childhood centres.[i] Both in the officers’ report to Council, Portfolio Improvement: Child Care Centres, and for public comment on Council’s Have Your Say webpage, the issue is described as a proposal to sell three properties which are currently leased as community child care centres.

It is the proposed sale of council property that by law triggers public notification and consultation whether the property be a back lane, an area of land by a railway line, or some buildings leased by early childhood centres. The fact that the sale of the buildings and not the loss of three community run and governed early childhood centres – which have flourished since the 1970s and which the community so clearly values – is presented as the central issue for community consultation is extraordinary, given the profound impact the closures will have.

Aim of this paper

Councillors unanimously accepted the recommendation of the report which makes the case for closure of the centres and added two further recommendations[ii]. While it is not surprising that some councillors would like to see the Council divest itself of responsibility for early childhood education and care, and would see the closure of the centres as a stepping stone to that divestment, what needs to be explained is how all councillors accepted the reasoning of a report which recommends the closure of the three community-run and governed centres.

It seems that the main reason that councillors could accept the recommendation of the report is because the report constructed a TINA (There Is No Alternative) representation of the issue facing Council. The report did this through its description of what early childhood centres are and how they operate, creating the illusion that the closure would over time lead to little or no loss to the community. In other words, it is the framing in the report of what early childhood centres are that makes possible the idea that their closure will have little or no impact and so appears to make their closure necessary.

This paper aims to show that this framing is flawed and that a different framing of what the early childhood centres are may contribute to their defence. A reframing of the significance of the early childhood centres leads to a different conclusion to that of the report, namely that the loss to the community will be profound and so the closure of the centres should not proceed.

To counter the view that closure of the centres would not lead to loss to the community a description of the community governed early childhood centres, currently missing in the report, is developed below and then contrasted with the descriptions in the report to Council.

What are community Early Childhood Centres?

Council facilitated early childhood centres are distinctive cultures, distinctive communities of practice. They are places for the socialization and education of children through the collaboration between parents and early childhood expert practitioners. As a cultural institution, they are a modern historical creation, the outcome of the movement begun in the 1970s, primarily by woman – a new way of meeting the conflicting demands of work, family life and the call of autonomy. Parents, primarily women, in placed based communities have formed democratic governance structures and practices to mediate the relationship between tiers of government and employment relations of workers to provide a sheltering setting for loving childrearing. This institutional form is an historic achievement. The Council may own the buildings (even then only on behalf of the community as a representative public body ) but it does not own the institution. It is crucial to make this distinction between buildings and dynamic flourishing institutions. It is only if the value of these centres as well operating communities of practice is recognised that the real issue can be posed. In summary, the key issue is: how can these cultures be maintained and supported by council while at the same time addressing any facility maintenance or rebuilding issues?

More than ‘facilities’

There is no recognition in the Council report however, of the distinctive nature of these institutions. The report to Council principally conflates these institutions with the buildings creating the impression that the institutions are outmoded. Here is the description in the Report: the ‘fleet’ are ‘struggling to keep up with time and change – suffering from aged related change, functional obsolescence and non-compliance’ (2.5). Is what is being described here the state of a building (buildings do not ‘struggle nor ‘suffer’) or does the conflation create the impression that the Centres themselves, as communities of practice, are struggling, suffering and obsolescent. Far from it, the early childhood centres are acknowledged as outstanding organisations – being great settings for early child learning, rearing, creators of community through parent and staff partnerships, efficiently operating within their means and generating surpluses for future investment in improving outcomes for children.

Centres more than bunches of interchangeable childcare places

To the extent that the report to Council describes the centres in terms other than as ‘buildings’, ‘fleets’ and ‘assets’ its descriptions are very reductive. The Report does not recognise the reality of these cultures but just sees the centres as the sum of childcare places interchangeable with places elsewhere. This is a reductive managerialist view of these institutions, taking the emptiest of categories (a sum of money), the ‘childcare place’ as the essence of the institution – and also tellingly ignoring the shared public responsibility for early learning in the kinder programs that are also integral to the three centres’ offerings. This is evident in the report where the closure of these institutions, a forty-year-old ongoing community creation, is described as just a short walk by ‘customers’ to another site of (mostly for-profit) childcare places (4.26). It is a description that signals a complete blindness to the value of these institutions.

It may be that governments must create reductive objects like ‘childcare places’ for budgetary and accounting purposes. However, local government, closer as it is to the community, is well positioned to also recognise the institutions as immeasurably richer than that. Our Council should be protecting the centres and their communities and it should understand itself to be their custodian, a custodian of a treasure, safekeeping it and allowing it to flourish into the future.

Community participants not ‘customers’

The participants, the parents of these community developed and self-governed institutions, are not customers as the report makes out. If a market of for-profit early childhood centres has developed over the years that does not mean that these community governed, parent powered, not-for-profit institutions, which have the care and education of the children as the prime motivation, should be glossed in terms of customer-supplier (4.17) relationships. In fact, many participants have chosen these centres because the ethos of the centre and the care that ethos makes possible is in stark contrast to the ethos of most for-profit centres that have grown around them. And as a spinoff, the centres become virtuous circles: the institutions created by parents also enable parents to be civic participants in and for these historically new institutions, continuing to respond to and create community in Port Phillip.[iii]

To summarise: what appears to have occurred is that the value of the institutions has been unwittingly (or wittingly?) missed in the report through the combination of three flawed descriptions.

• First, a false equivalence is constructed of ownership and control of the buildings by council with the ownership and control of these community institutions.
• Second, rich historically created distinctive cultures are treated reductively as quantum of identical units of value, ‘childcare places’, substitutable by other childcare places in other locations.
• Third, the framing of the institution is in market terms with participants glossed as either customers or sellers, the customers able to purchase these units or commodities in other places.

Once these descriptions are put together the ideological stage is set for ‘properties’ to be sold, and ‘customers’ moved elsewhere with little or no loss. And the community cost of losing longstanding dynamic institutions can be dismissed with the belittling comment that “community members can have strong affinity with Council owned property” (4.18), again betraying a deep blindness to who these community members are and what the early childhood centre actually is and contributes.

Reframing the ‘problem’

Once the value of these centres is recognised however, then if a building which provides a home for these communities of practice needs repair or rebuild, then the problem is how to safeguard the continuity of the institution – the practices of early learning, the collective combined expertise of the staff, the collaborative relationship between staff and parents, the institutional knowledge, networks and capacities of committees of management, the relationships between parents which create a lifetime placed based community – while enabling the rebuild to occur. This should be the role of Council. In short, the problem should be re-described along the lines of how Council will undertake a necessary facility upgrade for these vital community institutions. A model in Port Phillip exists – the rebuild of the community managed Port Phillip EcoCentre where the 22-year-old community owned institution has been safeguarded and a new Council owned building planned.

Each of these early childhood centres is a unique culture, a community of practice which has developed over decades and should not be treated as the creations or playthings of local government. Although coming under the ambit of government custodianship, they are community generated civic institutions. To describe them as the Council’s ‘fleet of community centres’ mis-describes the relationship that Council should have with the centres.[iv] Of course, the early childhood centres should not be kept just to protect a heritage nor supported if there is little or no demand for the culture and service they create. But the reality is that the continued vitality and quality of these centres is undisputed and they cannot meet the demand for entry. Indeed, for-profit centres must be envious.

The relationship of local government to the centres should be one of immense respect and humility. As one of the speakers said at Council’s December meeting, these institutions are communities and a primary foundation for building community.[v]

It might be too much to expect some councillors, whose modus operandi is to shrink the role of local government, to accept that Council has a role to play in childcare and early learning. But it is to be hoped that this revised description of the significance of community governed early childhood centres, in contrast to that offered in the Report, adds to the public call to save the three centres. It might also assist a majority of councillors appreciate that the closure of the centres, far from involving little net loss to the community will mean a vital foundation of and for future community in Port Phillip will be lost. Rather than accept that there is no alternative the task for the Council majority is to collaborate with the community to establish a TIA (There Is an Alternative).

Some recommendations

First, the current report should be withdrawn and a different process of engagement commenced directly with the committees of management, staff and parents of the impacted early childhood centres with a view to exploring all possibilities for future preservation of the centres, and conducted by the section of Council responsible for fostering community and Council governed children’s services. Alternatives to the current recommendations, including strategies to keep the buildings, such as dipping into the capital works fund, submitting for State government funding, borrowing to preserve structures that create so much community benefit, should be discussed in these conversations.

Second, a new report that properly frames the problem be developed based on the above engagement, produced not by the property section of Council but by those officers with responsibility for the community early childhood centres, which is presented to Council and then to the whole Port Phillip community for consultation.

[i] These are the Eildon Road Childcare and Kindergarten, Elwood Children’s Centre in Tennyson St and the Avenue Children’s Centre and Kindergarten.

[ii] Following a series of incisive arguments brought by parents, members of the management committees of the centres and staff at the council meeting, the motion recommending acceptance of the recommendations of the report was amended to include ‘further dialogue and information sharing with management committees of the centres to identify alternatives to sale’ and advocacy by council officers for funding to Federal and State government funding for upkeep or redevelopment of the centres. While these amendments allow for belated consultation with centre management and advocacy which should have occurred prior to the report appearing before Council, the amendments do not alter the descriptions under which the closure of the child care centres are publicly legitimated which is the focus of this paper.

[iii] The Council officers are not supposed to be ideologically aligned, but the report is aligned with a particular ideological description of the meaning of the children’s centres, wittingly or unwittingly purveying and normalising both a combined managerialist and a market description ( 4.2) of these institutions.

[iv] Exposing this profound mis-recognition of the problem is relevant not just to early childhood centres, but other community institutions, such as Aged Care and Youth services. Such actions of local government reflect and create a particular identity for the Council as a managerial and contract state, rather than as a collaboration with citizens for public good. A different description of the relationship of state to civic institutions to that of both managerialism and market discourse is needed, otherwise the undermining of civic institutions through managerialism and marketization will again and again be repeated.

[v] Public comment to the councils report can be found on the Council webcast of the December 1 Council meeting beginning at the 34mins and 30 secs. The councillor’s questions , motion and views can be found commencing at the 2hr 03 mins and 40 sec mark. It is all well worth watching.