Is Cinderella Back Among the Cinders? A Review of Early Childhood Education in the Early 1990s

The nineties started out as a time of optimism for the early childhood education sector: the Before Five policies, including phased implementation of higher funding, had just come on stream; policies were put in place in the late 1980s to improve the quality of early childhood education and were coming to fruition. The 1991 budget dampened this optimism: early childhood funding was capped at 1990 levels and a period of retrenchment set in. This paper discusses early childhood education policies over the last three years and some of the issues that arise from these.