Fund full-day kindergarten for all

Children entering kindergarten are starting school this fall. While the 2.5-hour kindergarten day commonly found in Manitoba schools sounds like a pleasant transition to the school system, in truth it remains one of the biggest missing pieces of the child-care puzzle.

Province-wide, families face a stressful dilemma — if they are lucky enough to have child care, they have to leave work at lunch and shuttle a child from school to child care; if they don’t, they must reduce hours, or forgo working or education, because they don’t have child care for their kindergartener.

The Government of Manitoba has made progress on making child care more affordable and accessible. But we have largely left one enormous piece untouched — part-day kindergarten. Why is publicly funded education for kindergarten still only 2.5 hours a day? To date, British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island have all implemented full-day, publicly funded kindergarten. The Manitoba School Boards Association passed a resolution in 2025 to implement full-day kindergarten programming, but the province has not provided sufficient funding to implement it province-wide.

There are currently 13,600 children in kindergarten in Manitoba. With a coverage rate for licensed child care of 32.3 per cent, roughly 5,000 families with kindergarteners lack access to licensed child care during the part of the day when their child is not in school. That is a precarious position to put any family in.

As Manitoba faces a continued child-care-space shortage, it is particularly inefficient for kindergarteners with child-care spots to use only partial hours of the day. If a child attends 2.5 hours of kindergarten, is shuttled to their daycare spot, holding that spot open for the hours the child is at school each day pinches the system further.

Creating full-day kindergarten has the potential to open up needed child-care spaces to infants and preschoolers before they reach kindergarten age. Full-day kindergarten effectively makes the public education system cover the educational portion of the day while allowing the existing, mainly publicly-funded child-care system to concentrate its scarce resources on preschool and infant care.

The move to full-day kindergarten would do much to decrease the stress put on families struggling with affordability. Families living with lower incomes often face significantly less workplace flexibility. These families might struggle to pick up a child after their partial day in kindergarten to bring them to child care, if they have it. Some families might choose to forgo kindergarten and the school readiness benefits altogether, keeping their children at home or leaving their child in full-day child care for the kindergarten year instead. This might further affect school readiness and future school success by delaying children’s entry into school.

Child-care expansion remains a major provincial priority that benefits children, the workforce and the economy. Through the $10-a-day child care Canada–Manitoba Early Learning Agreement, Manitoba has continued to expand spaces and champion child-care flexibility. According to the most recent publicly available information, 5,419 new infant and preschooler spaces were created between the start of the agreement and last November. Tens of thousands more are needed. Full-day kindergarten should be part of the plan to complement a public, universal child-care system.

Full-day kindergarten has been shown to yield positive results in numeracy, literacy and social skills compared with part-day kindergarten. Moreover, the province’s kindergarten curriculum has been newly re-envisioned and is ready to be implemented for more than part of the day. School divisions are leading the way — the Winnipeg and St. James Assiniboia School Divisions offer full-day kindergarten at targeted schools. The Division Scolaire Franco-Manitobaine and Louis Riel School Division offer it across their divisions, funded by education property tax revenues. However, the province needs to step in and fund this to ensure equitable access across the province.

Full-day kindergarten is essential infrastructure for working families, but Manitoba is currently asking families and the child-care system to solve a problem that the public education system could solve more efficiently and equitably. While it is families who might feel the stress of deciding between working or not and part-day kindergarten, no kindergarten, or shuttling between kindergarten and child care, those who suffer the most are the children.

It is they who stand to benefit the most from this shift.

Catherine-Laura Dunnington is an assistant professor of education at the University of Winnipeg. Molly McCracken is the Manitoba director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Both are members of the Child Care Coalition of Manitoba’s steering committee.