Childcare Choices: What Parents Want
Presentation: Childcare Choices - What Parents Want - Joel Bowman
Childcare Choices: What Parents Want
The Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) sector faces a host of problems from supply shortages, worker shortages and inflationary pressures. Ensuring parents are able to secure accessible and affordable childcare options is key to supporting women’s workforce participation, promoting productivity growth and assisting children’s development. Critical to addressing the problems plaguing the ECEC sector is understanding what parents want from ECEC services.
Joel Bowman shares the insights from the NSW Productivity Commission’s recent report Childcare choices: what parents want. In surveying a representative sample of over 2,000 NSW households, the study unpacks parents’ ECEC preferences using a discrete modelling techniques. This offers unique insight into the early education policy debate by shedding light on how key questions like: What government interventions do parents value most? How will increased subsidies affect access and affordability issues? How can we help new families to access childcare, and how might this affect workforce participation?
With early education in hot debate both in NSW and at the national level, this Seminar gives novel insight into a pressing policy topic.
About The Speaker
Joel Bowman is a Principal Economist in NSW Treasury’s Competition and Regulatory Policy Branch, which supports the work of the NSW Productivity Commissioner. He is a PhD candidate at the Australian National University, with a focus on business dynamism and competition economics. Joel’s previous research into the ECEC sector includes the costs and labour force implications of ECEC policies and evaluation of NSW-specific early childcare regulations, which can both be found on the NSW Productivity Commission website.
