How child care in Copenhagen is “democratized’’
To understand Copenhagen’s ‘‘democratization’’ approach to childcare, I recommend a visit to Bologna, Italy, which also uses a centralized childcare admission system.
Like Copenhagen, Bologna's system has many advantages over decentralized admission systems. For example, the administrators of Bologna's childcare system gain similar metrics about each daycare's popularity as do the administrators of Copenhagen's centralized system. Thus administrators know what daycares face strong demand from parents and what daycares do not.
However, compare the two systems:
Bologna, Italy: Parents are asked to order list ten daycares in their application, and allocation is based on a best-practice algorithm with priorities that resembles a lottery — but favors low-income households. The city learns what daycares are popular but parents are left in the dark about what daycare they will be admitted to when they apply. Parents meet with daycares on a fixed date each year, with limited opportunity to experience all listed options in real operational settings due to the sheer number of daycares listed.
Copenhagen, Denmark: Parents can effectively choose any daycare in the city and when to start - Some daycares do not offer earlier start dates due to popularity. This system fosters a parent-centered atmosphere, where families can visit any daycare throughout the year, observe and meet with staff interacting with children in real time, and set mutual expectations well before the child enters daycare.
The admission system in Bologna does not give parents much agency to select their most preferred daycare. Researchers have noted that Bologna's childcare admission system makes it impossible for parents to isdolate a preferred daycare in the way that parents do in Copenhagen in their daycare applications. For example, an article by Margherita Fort, Andrea Ichino, and Giulio Zanella 2020 show that the exact ìncome cutoffs for each daycare varies a lot from one year to the next for each daycare. Therefore, the exact admission criteria is essentially random for most parents.
The essential experience of searching for daycare in Bologna is very different than in Copenhagen. In Bologna, parents are invited to meet with each daycares in a small window of meeting times with other parents, but the shear number of daycares that parents are expected to rank in their applications (Ten daycares rather than one or two) means that it is impossible to give parents opportunities to experience all their listed options in real operational settings.
In Copenhagen, there is strong and continued support for giving agency to parents to select daycare. Some of this support is based on familiarity with an admission system that works. However, it also supported by the management and staffing competences at each daycare to engage with parents who choose childcare. This is reflected by the Danish childcare education for pedagogs, which emphasizes a so-called ``democratization'' approach that gives focus to watching and interacting with the child in highly unstructured ways, and communicating these actions and observations to the parents. The idea is that staff can act on child interactions that are not easily monitored and thus resist simple means of quantification. This is contrasted by other approaches, such as the famous Montesorri approach, that looks for objective measures of child development - such as drawings and engagement in controlled settings - that can be directed to the identification of particular stages of child progress for the children in different circumstances including family backgrounds. Some Danish practitioners and scholars have dismissively refer to these more structured practices as ``schoolfication'', despite a tendency of Danish practices in past years to increasing align with approaches that were once held as ``non-democratic''.
Danish researcher, Sigrid Brogaard Clausen, at the University of Roehampton is part of important group of researchers who debate and investigate fundamental trade-offs in how to care for children in daycares. She writes: ''The influence of schoolification is exemplified in a detailed analysis of the raised expectations with regard to language assessment in England and Denmark. This discussion reveals the tensions between local democratic participation in early years communities and policy agendas that emphasize preparation for school.''
Takeaway
Both Bologna and Copenhagen maintain high-quality systems reflecting Europe’s leading pedagogical approaches. However, if the goal is to design daycare systems that lean towards either schoolification or democratization, the structure of centralized admission systems might be a crucial factor. Were either system to adopt the other’s admission model, one could imagine a substantial reorientation of pedagogical practices along these axes.
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