In a recent development, the government has chosen to remove specific targets for staffing ratios in Danish daycare centers, causing great frustration on the left-wing. These targets had previously allowed parents to compare staffing levels across institutions when choosing the right place for their child. The decision to abolish the targets is part of a larger plan to reduce bureaucracy in municipalities. The government and municipalities have identified 56 rules to be eliminated to ease the administrative burden. Children’s Minister Mattias Tesfaye emphasizes that although the removal of these targets will not free up significant financial resources, it is a step towards redirecting resources from administration to direct citizen contact. “It is many small streams that together must ensure that we move resources away from administrations and out to the citizens,” Tesfaye explains during a hearing.
Criticism from parties such as the Socialist People’s Party (SF), the Red-Green Alliance (Enhedslisten), and the Alternative (Alternativet) focuses on the fact that parents now lose an important tool for assessing and choosing institutions. Anne Hegelund from the Red-Green Alliance expresses concern that it will make it harder to fight for genuine minimum staffing levels, as it will be less transparent how far individual institutions are from the set goals. The Minister, however, defends the decision by pointing out that most institutions already meet the current legal requirements, and that the massive amount of data that daycare centers nationwide must validate often only shows small deviations from the norm. “There is a proportionality in this that should be part of the discussion,” says Tesfaye.
This change is part of the government’s ongoing work on deregulation, an area where many previous governments have tried to make a difference, but with limited success. It will be interesting to see how this latest change will affect both the daycare sector and parents’ choice of institutions in the future.