In my previous blog, I set out what the research says about hours and intensity.  The finding was specific.  Children spending high levels of time in formal group childcare between age two and school entry showed measurably poorer socio-emotional outcomes by school year one.  The negative associations became more pronounced above 15 hours per week, and again above 20 and 35 hours.  T Many families in Malta operate well within or above those ranges as a matter of routine.

That observation is only useful if we know what the actual picture in Malta looks like.  This blog does that.  It draws on EU-SILC survey data, which is the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions.  This analysis is based on 2022 data, when I carried out the study.  More recent figures may shift some of the detail, but the structural pattern they reveal is unlikely to have changed substantially.

I will take the two age groups separately, because they tell different stories.

In 2022, 23.6% of children under three in Malta were in formal childcare or education for thirty hours or more per week.  The EU average was 22.4%.  The gap is small - 1.2 percentage points - and on its own it does not suggest an outlier position.  Malta is broadly in line with the European average for this age group in terms of high-intensity hours.

What is more striking is the direction of travel.  In 2013, 57% of children under three in Malta were cared for solely by their parents.  By 2022, that figure had fallen to 32.6% - a drop of 24.4 percentage points over nine years.  The EU average for parental-only care in the same age group stood at 47.6% in 2022.  Malta is now significantly below that.  The shift is not marginal.  It reflects a sustained structural change in how families in Malta arrange care for their youngest children.

The pace of that change matters.  It did not happen gradually across a generation.  It happened within a child's early years. The policy conditions that drove it - free childcare introduced in 2014, explicitly designed to return mothers to the labour market - are not incidental to understanding this trajectory.  They are central to it.

Concerning children from three years to the start of primary education, this is where Malta's position becomes more pronounced.  In 2022, 70.4% of children in this age group in Malta were in formal childcare or education for thirty hours or more per week. The EU average was 57%. The gap is 13.4 percentage points.

To place that in context: in the research I drew on in my previous blog, the threshold at which negative associations with externalising behaviour and emotional self-regulation began to appear was above fifteen hours per week.  The threshold at which those effects reached medium size was above 20 hours.  Thirty hours was identified as the point at which conduct problems were observable even in younger children.  Seven in ten Maltese children in the pre-primary age group are in formal care, at or above the 30-hour threshold. That is not an argument that those children are being harmed.  The research is not deterministic.  Outcomes depend on quality, stability, the home environment, and the individual child's characteristics.  But the exposure levels are real, and they sit within the range that the evidence flags as warranting attention.

At the lower intensity end - one to twenty-nine hours - Malta's position is different.  In the three-to-primary age group, only 23.7% of children were in formal care, compared to the EU average of 34.3%.  Malta is 10.6 percentage points lower.  The pattern this suggests is a polarised distribution.  A relatively small proportion of children in this age group are in part-time arrangements.  The majority are in full-time or near full-time formal care.

What does the data tell us, and what does it not tell us? These figures describe how much time Maltese children spend in formal care. They do not, by themselves, tell us about the quality of that care.  Whether those hours are spent in settings with adequate staffing ratios, qualified carers, and appropriate learning environments is a separate question. It is also the more important one.  I will address it in the next blog.

What this data does establish is the scale of the exposure. Malta's pre-primary-age children are in formal care for long hours, at rates above the EU average and at levels that intersect with the intensity thresholds identified in the research.  Understanding what that means for outcomes requires knowing what quality of provision those children are actually receiving. That is the question that follows directly from this one.

David Spiteri Gingell is a Governance, Institutional, and Digital Transformation Consultant