Not much is said and heard about child care in Malta and to date, locally, research on child care provision and child-minding facilities has been rather limited. There seems to be an increasing demand for child care provision, but only 34.2 per cent of women of working age form part of the labour market (National Statistics Office Labour Force Survey, 2001).

Not only is this figure low when compared to 81.3 per cent for males but there was also a drop of nearly one per cent in the activity rate for women from the previous year.

Purely for the sake of research and to become more informed about what is available locally, who makes use of the child-minding services available, whether parents are satisfied, their expectations and why certain choices are made, Dr Valerie Sollars, senior lecturer in early childhood education at the University of Malta, recently conducted a survey on child-minding provisions in 23 centres in Malta and Gozo.

Ten are purely child-minding centres which accept newborns to three-year-olds, depending on when the child starts attending kindergarten. Thirteen are small private kindergartens accepting children between the ages of two and five. The KG centres in the state sector and services provided in some hotels or businesses were not included.

The total number of questionnaires distributed at child day care centres was 222. Of these 141 or 63.5 per cent were returned. The total number of questionnaires distributed at KG centres was 695. Of these, 375 (54 per cent) were returned.

A total of 920 questionnaires were handed out to parents and interviews were held with 21 service providers. About 520 questionnaires (56%) were returned by parents.

The questionnaire covered background information about parents' occupation and working hours, choice and use made of the day centre/playschool/ nursery and satisfaction or dissatisfaction with child-rearing aspects.

Results of the survey will be published at a later date.

In the meantime, how can a parent wisely choose a day care or preschool provider that's right for his/her child?

What is perceived as being appropriate for a particular child depends, really, on the parents' perception and expectations, Dr Sollars told The Sunday Times. Some parents look at a child care centre as a place where their child can socialise. Others look at it from the point of view of the sooner they start 'educating' their child, the more advantageous it will be for him/her.

"Unfortunately, this is where we need to find out more about what parents mean by educating their children. Carers should be qualified, not only in terms of knowing what to do if the child hurts, or gets an epileptic fit or is asthmatic, but also how to create and set up a programme which is stimulating and creative, allowing for children to be imaginative.

We do pay a lot of lip service to playing and learning through play, through fun and games, but it is the actual practice which really needs to be looked at carefully. How do we create a meaningful, play setting where children learn and enjoy themselves without really making day care or playschool an extension of formal education?" Dr Sollars asked.

An ideal child care programme, she said, is one in which there is variety, flexibility and creativity and respects children's individuality and needs. Varied activities should be stimulating for the children encouraging them to grow mentally, physically, socially, intellectually and emotionally. At the end of the day, it depends on how resourceful the carers are to take the initiative to be creative.

"I have seen three- and four-year-olds working on workbooks, met carers who told me they prepare four-year-olds for school and parents who expect that their children be prepared for school. These are the parents we need to target.

"I have wondered how parents send their children to certain centres and the underhanded answer was 'because they get results'. If people are just happy because their very young children are sitting at a desk for a certain number of hours, then we haven't really moved ahead as to what education should be," Dr Sollars said.

"We need to emphasise a multi-sensory approach where very young children are given opportunities to have very hands-on experiences in a shared community. Depending on the age of the children, such activities could, for example, include simple cooking activities or going to the market to shop.

"Educators could then link these activities to reading and writing activities/games (rhymes, poems, songs, stories). When one talks about children's active participation, this also implies that there is an adult guiding them.

"With adult guidance and timely adult intervention, a child is capable of achieving so much more. Carers should know when to intervene and make suggestions, and when to move away and let the child discover things for himself," Dr Sollars added.

In the child's first five years, you are really setting a pattern for life. Fortunately, we have moved away from looking at the child as a tabula rasa. Children are anything but lethargic and complacent, and need to be kept involved in meaningful activities, where there is a purpose.

Local research shows that child day care services are fulfilling several roles: as a relief for grandparents where children spend a few hours in care and then go home to have a nap in the afternoon, for the children's social well-being as well as to enable parents to continue to work.

Whatever the reason, whether a child stays at home, or is sent to a child care setting, the child stands to gain as long as the provider knows how and what to provide. For example, one service provider from the survey reported that a foreign parent refused to have her child watch videos and television while in care. She said the parent said in that case her child might as well be kept at home.

"I guess there are as many reasons for using child care as there are parents - is it a convenient babysitting service, a preparation for school, an opportunity to socialise," Dr Sollars asked.

Dr Sollars added that there seems to be a growing need for more day care centres to be attached to places of work since they are convenient for parents coming in to work without the added hassle of travelling to drop off or collect children at times which do not necessarily coincide with their working hours.

In countries abroad, some children stay on after official school hours in what are called leisure time clubs. At such centres, sometimes even on the school premises, children are with teachers who have had specific training in leisure activities. It is only when a range of options are available for the parents to choose from, will it be time to start talking about mothers rejoining the workforce.

Educating children from birth is all about providing the right environment at home and making the best of what is available while in settings away from home irrespective of the age we choose to send children. We need to work on training the service providers to have clear philosophies, policies and practices where early childhood education is concerned.

Very young children readily adapt to staying with adults other than the mother. Communication with the child and stimulation are of paramount importance from the very first days. As children grow older and start being active, the nature and range of the activities they engage in change and children's responses to these activities help them learn.

"The child should be encouraged to make music, sing songs and nursery rhymes," Dr Sollars said. "This is where the senses come in. Rhyme, rhythm, movement. This promotes the whole development of the child, helping him grow mentally, physically and socially.

"With colouring, quiet-time activities and storytelling, and through all the right games and activities which a child does, there is also intellectual development through seeing and doing things."

An issue which also exists in other countries is whether there should be a specific curriculum for young learners. One country in particular, Denmark, doesn't have a curriculum for their young learners and the issue is still debatable.

"In Malta we want a curriculum. The difficulty is how prescriptive and flexible that curriculum would be. Guidelines and general suggestions should be there as a source of inspiration for people working in child care," Dr Sollars said.

"Ideally, topics and activities, especially in kindergartens, should be varied according to specific areas of location. At the end of the day, this is ultimately what the KG assistant should be after - appeal, interest, stimulation.

"However, all activity should be guided and informed by research because the carer should not just do it out of habit," she emphasised.

In Malta, there is a training programme for both child care (0-3) and preschool education (3-5).

Grace Izzo, co-ordinator of the Child Care and Preschool courses at the Preschool Education Centre, based at the Junior College, Msida, told The Sunday Times that, as a nation, we needed to break away from the 19th and 20th century view of education - that of preparing children for schooling. Early childhood was a time in its own right. A child should be enabled to develop wholly.

Both the Child Care and Preschool courses contain four components - theory of child development, methodology, practice and personal enrichment (art, music, movement and dance and drama) at the students' own level.

Ms Izzo, who has a 35-year background in education and child care and a Master's degree in Child Development from London University, said the most important thing in child care is that you are a rich personality.

"If you're not, you're not giving the child enough. Creativity is very important for young children and if carers have not experienced any form of creativity and haven't had the chance to develop their creativity, they will not promote it in young children," Ms Izzo said.

"We tend not to talk about curriculum with the under-threes but a care programme in which there is education. We are not child minding and we aim at more. Developing the child's mind and body is very important.

"You cannot develop the mind without developing the body. Development is holistic. Movement and learning through the senses is what develops the mind. Our care programme definitely looks at the development of the whole child," she added.

Like the National Curriculum itself, guidelines and suggestions issued by the Education Department from time to time are updated and are now directly in line with the objectives and principles of the new National Minimum Curriculum. They focus on the areas of development and are meant to help kindergarten assistants in their work with young children. The Early Childhood Education Focus Group (ECEFG), of which Ms Monica Attard, education officer in charge of Pre-Primary and Junior at the Curriculum Department of the Education Division, is chairman and Ms Izzo and Dr Sollars are members, is also now working on an early childhood education programme for all state, church and independent schools.

"The main aim of the curriculum at kindergarten level is to enhance the holistic development of children. Activities are aimed at helping children to develop socially, emotionally, physically, morally and intellectually. Obviously, if the children are not socially and emotionally ready in their stage of developement, other areas will suffer," Ms Attard said.

Self-directed learning and life skills like self-confidence, problem solving and social interaction with young children were considered to be of great importance and one of the main pedagogical approaches to build these skills was play.

"Early childhood and kindergarten specialists have long emphasised the central role of play in young children's learning. In the course of day-to-day experience With young children, it is easy for one to see that play provides a wide range and real depth of learning in all the areas of development," she added.

Play was an everyday part of a child's life. The starting point in children's education was what they could do, not what they couldn't do. In play, children developed a sense of control of their environment and a feeling of competence and enjoyment that they can learn.

Play helped children grow in a way that helped them feel good about themselves. It is about doing and experiencing something, not necessarily about achieving a specific result.

Ms Izzo quoted Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message". In child care, the medium - play and the provision for play - is the message. Tiny children will not sit down and work maths. They will gladly accept a water tray and lots of jugs and that way they learn capacity.

Playing with nature, planting shrubs and flowers in pots, playing with sand, water and paint... discovering is learning. These are subjects within a curriculum but these subjects are never seen.

A child at play discovers and learns what sinks and what floats; that water gushes out of a big hole and trickles out of a tiny hole. What better way to learn!

Dr Valerie Sollars has a Master's degree in Educational Psychology from McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Her research was on the "Beginnings of reading and writing". Her doctoral research carried out at the University of Manchester was on the "Teaching of English as a second language with six-year-old children".