EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT: DRAFT BILL GAZETTED FOR COMMENT

EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT: DRAFT BILL GAZETTED FOR COMMENT

• 14 May 2024
• Education & Training
• SA Legal Academy

The Department of Basic Education has called for input by 13 June 2024 on a draft Children’s Amendment Bill – focusing on early childhood development. It should not be confused with a recently rejected Children’s Amendment Bill, which was tabled in Parliament in July 2023 by the DA’s Bridget Masango and focused on micro childcare facilities.

According to its covering Government Gazette notice, the draft Bill’s overarching objective is ‘to ensure that all children can access early learning and development opportunities’.

With that in mind, the proposed new piece of legislation seeks:

• to ‘further provide’ for:
  • ‘the requirements of a strategy concerning early childhood development’
  • ‘the specification of norms and standards for early childhood development programmes’, and
  • the funding of early childhood development programmes, and
• to provide for:
  • ‘the collection of data on early childhood development’
  • ‘measures relating to registration and conditional registration’, and
  • the ‘roles and responsibilities of organs of state and different spheres of government in the provision of early childhood development programmes, facilities and such other related matters’.

Please click the links below for more information:

• draft Bill
• parliamentary papers confirming the rejection of the DA’s Children’s Amendment Bill (page 3)
• rejected Bill
• parliamentary papers including committee report on rejected Bill (page 26)

Published by SA Legal Academy Policy Watch

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