What a difference a decade makes: Counting the benefits of investment in early childhood development in Quebec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Child care services in Quebec have undergone a major transformation since 1997, when the government adopted its new family policy. One of the linchpins of this innovative policy was the setting up of a network of fixed-fee services for all children aged five years and younger, irrespective of family income. The network was intended to address the issue of work-family balance and to provide children, no matter what the financial status of their parents, with a preschool environment that fosters their social, emotional and cognitive development, and prepares them for entry into the school system (1). Quebec's change in policy represented a real commitment by the government to both early learning and child care programs. Quebec is, therefore, unique in Canada in the number of available regulated, fixed-fee, reduced-contribution child care places. In 2006, the number of regulated child care places in Quebec represented approximately 38% of all regulated places in Canada (2). The province is also unique in its method of funding them: cash payments or refundable tax credits to families were largely replaced by a system of direct funding of services, making regulated child care spaces more affordable for the vast majority of families. In 2009, direct grants to child care services represent approximately 37% of the provincial budget for families, or $2.4 billion (3). This led to a significant increase in demand that, in turn, stimulated the rapid growth of the sector. In 1997, Quebec had 82,302 regulated child care places (4). More than 10 years later, by March 2009, this number has reached 212,777 (which includes 6954 places in for-profit daycares that are regulated but not subsidized) with the objective of bringing the total number of funded spaces to 220,000 by 2012 (5). Presently, more than one-half of Quebec's preschool-age children have access to home- or centre-based child care that is regulated and affordable (currently, the parental contribution is $7 per day) – a more than 2.5-fold increase since the implementation of the policy in 1997 (4–6).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".