The government is to increase the proportion of qualified childcare workers among all staff at each in-house day care center to 75 percent from the current 50 percent in efforts to guarantee the quality of services such facilities provide.
The new mandatory rules will be applied to in-house facilities set up by day-care operators with capacities of at least 20 children. The existing facilities will be given a transition period of three years to increase their proportions of qualified workers. The government will also tighten requirements for new operators to enter the in-house day-care center market.
In-house childcare facilities mainly exist to look after the children of workers at companies concerned. Several firms can jointly run them, while day-care center operators can also set them up. Children living in the vicinity can also be enrolled in such facilities.
A Cabinet Office expert panel, headed by Prof. Masako Maeda of Konan University, had been working on measures to improve the quality of in-house childcare centers. The panel on Friday compiled a draft report with measures that included the proportional increase. The government will start gradually implementing the new measures from April.
The government has set a goal of reducing the number of children on waiting lists for day-care centers to zero by the end of fiscal 2020. To achieve the goal, the government considers in-house day-care centers as a trump card to secure a sufficient number of childcare facilities.
Although they are not certified as childcare centers, in-house day-care centers can receive subsidies equivalent to those of certified facilities. As a result, the number of operators entering the field has been rapidly increasing. Since the introduction of such facilities in April 2016, the number of them had reached a total of 2,597 across the nation by the end of March last year.
There are also problems with poor monitoring systems of such facilities, and there have been cases in which some were suddenly closed.
The draft report focused on tightening the requirements for new operators to enter the market and strengthening the government's roles to audit in-house facilities and provide guidance for them.
Regarding the requirements for new day-care operators joining the field, the draft report additionally stipulated that it should be limited to only those who have a certain level of business experience of five years or more.
Currently, the public interest foundation Jido Ikusei Kyokai uses its own criteria to screen operators who try to enter the market in order to determine whether they are entitled to receive subsidies. The foundation also provides guidance and conducts audits on existing day-care centers. The draft report stipulated that the government should compile new rules for such procedures, while it also stated that negligent facilities and operators that do not follow guidance should be directly supervised by the government.
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