Malta's childcare system was not designed with children in mind. That is not a harsh verdict. It is a factual description of how the system emerged. When free childcare was launched in 2014, the Minister for Employment stated the objective clearly: to encourage mothers and fathers to work or study.  Stay-at-home mothers were excluded. The Minister of Finance, speaking at the same launch, linked the scheme directly to increasing women's labour force participation. The framing was economic from the start.  That framing has consequences. Policy design reflects intent. A system built to move parents into work does not automatically become a system built to serve children's developmental needs.  The two goals are not incompatible, but they require different thinking.  Malta applied one and expected both.  The child, in this construction, was the means. The parents' labour market participation was the end.

The results are visible in the data. When the Department for Quality and Standards in Education assumed responsibility for early childhood education and care in 2016, there were 98 centres.  By 2023, there were 195, with more applications pending. Childcare became a market opportunity.  When the state subsidises demand and keeps entry barriers low, supply follows.  Quality did not keep pace with growth. An audit conducted after responsibility was passed to the DQSE found that children were kept in kinder chairs for long periods, that carers had basic education levels, and that there was high staff turnover. These are not minor shortcomings. They describe conditions that do not support early childhood development. Children were being minded, not educated.  I think that distinction matters more than any compliance metric.

The DQSE initiated reforms. Standards were introduced covering carer qualifications, manager credentials, bilingual capacity, physical space requirements, and the ratio of carers to children by age group. An operator now had to satisfy educational standards to obtain a licence - something that had not previously been required. These were genuine improvements. The question I want to press is whether they held.

They did not. The Director of the DQSE, in a November 2023 presentation to the Family Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives, painted a picture of systematic non-compliance that deserves to be stated plainly. Seventy per cent of quality inspections carried out in 2023 found centres in breach of the carer-to-child ratio. In some cases, one carer was responsible for ten children. That is not an occasional lapse. It is the norm. A child in a setting operating at that ratio is not in an educational environment. They are in an understaffed room.

The space requirements were being gamed.  Operators included non-educational areas - offices, shafts - in the five square metres per child calculation. The purpose was to inflate the approved footprint, accommodate more children, and maximise revenue. That is regulatory avoidance disguised as compliance. The child's physical environment was being manipulated to serve a commercial calculation. The Director also identified a workforce that cannot meet the standards the system now demands. There are not enough qualified managers and carers to fill the positions required by the regulations. Operators are recruiting from overseas to close the gap. That is not a criticism of overseas recruits.  It is a sign that Malta built a large sector before it built the professional base to staff it properly.

Underlying all of this is the problem the Director named directly. Many operators do not accept that running a childcare centre is not purely a business. That view cannot be regulated away. It reflects how the sector was formed - as a market response to a labour policy, not as an educational institution with a developmental mission. The sector was invited in as a business. It is behaving like one.

Malta has moved in the right direction on the regulatory side. The 2021 national standards for children aged 0 to 3 aligned with the European Commission's framework for high-quality early childhood education and care. The national policy framework for children aged 0 to 7 established goals in the areas of access, workforce quality, curriculum, governance, and monitoring. These are substantive commitments on paper.

The gap is between commitment and enforcement. Standards that are breached in 70 per cent of inspections are not functioning standards. They are aspirations. Aspirations do not protect children.  None of this is an argument against childcare, nor against the participation of parents - mothers in particular - in the labour force. Both matter. But a system that was designed for one purpose and then asked to serve another, without the institutional culture, the qualified workforce, or the consistent enforcement to match, has predictable failure points.

I wrap up this article the way I started it: in my opinion, the system did not begin with the child at its centre. I think Malta built a childcare system to solve a labour market problem, and only later began treating it as an early childhood education system. The standards now exist. The policy framework exists. The question, in my view, is whether the system is prepared to enforce those standards and build the professional workforce required to sustain them.  Until that happens, the gap between policy ambition and the daily experience of children will remain.

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