When a crisis undermines quality public service provision: Romanian early childhood education and care through the SARS-Cov-2 epidemic

Abstract

What appeared to be the success of many Eastern European states in managing the toll of the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic in its first round has been attributed to the early introduction of strict lockdown. However, erring on the side of caution came at a high price, with mixed economies of welfare shifting sometimes radically towards families, with the related costs unevenly distributed. Using the case of early childhood education and care (ECEC), the article explores the specifics of what has been a more general pattern in epidemic-induced social policy adaptation in the Romanian context: the overnight, radical and prolonged individualisation of service provision without the corresponding remaking of the cash nexus. It expands on the timeline of government decisions on family policy adaptations, including ECEC service provision. The article also reviews fragmented evidence about the impact of ECEC service suspension on the mixed economy of early years care. The article explains how and why the Romanian government was able to effectively suspend ECEC service delivery between March and September 2020 while keeping related financial arrangements practically unaltered, and do so without open protest. The Romanian case reveals how and why a family policy environment historically characterised by fragmented, selective and partially adequate provision, directly and indirectly maintaining the familialisation of young children’s care, acts as a catalyst for more of the same in hard times: fragmented, selective and only partially adequate intervention. In conceptual terms, the article suggests that familialist family policy is particularly sticky, more so in times of crisis than in ‘good’ times.

Keywords

Care services early childhood education and care elections familialisation family policy pandemic

Introduction

Eastern European nations were hailed as the unsung heroes of the European SARS-Cov-2 pandemic,¹ certainly during the first wave (Walker and Smith, 2020), their low fatality rates² seen as the result of early and radical lockdown measures. This, however, often came at a price that has rarely been publicly discussed: the overnight, unexpected shift of responsibility from public provision to private households across social services, but without a commensurate shift in resources (or recognition). This was most painful in care-intensive domains: healthcare and early childhood education and care (ECEC), that is, care services for children under 3 – nurseries – and education and care services for 3-to-6-year-olds – preschools. Across the region, care and education services closed in March 2020, in many countries until further notice, but at least until May 2020 (Florian and Țoc, 2020: 19). Over the summer holidays institutions were closed, as usual, across Europe, with the majority of countries fully reopening in the autumn for the new academic year. Despite the second wave of the pandemic sweeping across Europe in late summer 2020, most countries kept education institutions open: Romania’s partial opening³ on 14 September, followed by country-wide closure and ‘online’ tuition starting 9 November, was unique among European Union (EU) member states (UNESCO, 2021). In other words, Romania was among a small minority of European countries that effectively suspended face-to-face education, including ECEC, between March 2020 and January 2021, without a corresponding reallocation of resources.

Exceptions to this prolonged country-wide closure of public education institutions were private entities, which reopened on 15 June 2020 following parents’ and private service providers’ national lobby in late April (Ivanov, 2020a), offering ‘before school’ and ‘afterschool’ services rather than education; public and private nurseries starting 15 June 2020; and a small number of urban public preschools during the summer holiday, offering only supervision, unregulated or monitored by the Ministry of Education. With reopening conditioned by strict safety measures defying basic norms of social interaction that ECEC services actively cultivate, service provision was of substandard quality. Despite this, public-sector ECEC staff retained intact employment relationships. To this were added statements from top government officials treating the burdens associated with absent service provision as a problem for ‘some’ families only (Hotnews.ro, 2020a) rather than as a systemic shift affecting all children adversely.

In short, the policy decisions concerning ECEC services in Romania make for an excellent study of several different processes. First, the article shows how and why a policy environment long characterised by implicit and explicit familialism (Kovács, 2018) relied on a similar policy response in a crisis, reinforcing further selectiveness, fragmentation and inadequate benefit and service provision. In more general terms, this article spells out how and why economic crises act as catalysts for notable shifts in mixed economies of care, in familialist family policy environments enhancing familialism rather than unravelling it. Second, the article explores the political means by which the social and economic costs of the epidemic could be shifted to private households without bothersome political outcry, partly through authoritarian, top-down governance and a largely one-size-fits-all education policy. The latter were used throughout Europe to manage lockdowns of varying strictness, the case of Romanian ECEC service provision thus telling a more universal story about the (im)possibilities of operating good quality service provision nation-wide in socially encompassing crises. A peculiarity of the Romanian political story is that the SARS-Cov-2 epidemic caught an insecure minority government ahead of local and general elections. To hedge its electoral advantage, the Liberal Orban cabinet chose to play it safe: unusual – path-departing – policy responses were scrupulously avoided, including in education. Thus, the article also hypothesises about the causal relevance of political business cycles in explaining policy continuity in the detriment of context-sensitive policy adaptation.

The time period analysed in this article is February–September 2020. Given the article’s reliance on chronological policy timelines, it draws on media coverage and legislative acts as primary data sources to support conceptual arguments. Online coverage by the news agency Mediafax was prioritised, specific information corroborated with online coverage by the most widely read news portal, Hotnews.ro. The full list of media reports is comprised in Supplemental Appendix 1. Policy decisions are discussed in light of actual legislative acts, available online in Romanian and comprised in Supplemental Appendix 2. In discussing the family policy environment, secondary literature has been used, coupled with reference to official statistical data on social and economic outcomes, where relevant.

The article is structured into three parts. Section ‘The family policy environment and the broader political business cycle’ provides a detailed discussion of Romanian family policy instruments geared towards the 0–6 age group, outlining the familialisms of recent decades’ Romanian family policy regime. In the subsection on ECEC service provision, the discussion also expands on governance issues. The second part of this section explains the political context in which the SARS-Cov-2 epidemic unfolded. The next section provides a timeline of the decisions that governed the lockdown and the ensuing ‘period of alert’, including a timeline of the policy measures adopted in the realm of ECEC service provision and work-family reconciliation. Concluding the article, the section ‘Assessing the failings of Romanian ECEC service provision during the epidemic’ explains how, in the particular context of (1) a familialist policy regime, (2) top-down governance in preschool services and the degree of centralisation in public education, and (3) the electoral timing of the epidemic, responsibility for young children’s education and care could be shifted to families overnight and indefinitely without a commensurate shift in resources, surprisingly without open political backlash.

The family policy environment and the broader political business cycle

The Romanian welfare system is a comparatively ungenerous, service-poor and ungenerous cash benefit-centred one. Historically, socialist Romania had one of the less encompassing socialist-time universal access welfare systems, with low-quality service provision and comparatively ungenerous cash transfers for a limited set of social risks (Popescu, 2004: 30). These features became more accentuated during the economically taxing 1990s, when state funding came to near collapse on several occasions, but when social risks not only multiplied in a slow-reforming macro-economic environment, but also intensified. Using data from the early 2000s, Fenger (2007: 25) characterised Romania as a ‘developing welfare state type’ with comparatively poor social outcomes, low social protection expenditures and low government revenue. These conclusions have been reiterated by analyses using data for the late 2000s (ICCV, 2020; Kovács et al., 2017; Kuitto, 2016).

Family policy provisions

In cross-national comparisons, family policies have often been assessed in terms of their defamilialising potential, that is, the extent to which they can mitigate the need for intra-family dependencies, especially the need for care (Esping-Andersen, 1999). With women still primarily responsible for caring for dependents of all ages, defamilialising policies are important especially for women’s participation in the public sphere. Equally, well-calibrated familiarising policies are important for enabling men to care. To analytically engage with the diversity of national family policy regimes and their over-time shift, and reflective of the rarity of defamilialising policy environments, scholars have advanced different taxonomies of familialism (Javornik, 2014; Leitner, 2003; Szelewa and Polakowski, 2008) and documented over-time shifts in family policy regimes through terms such as refamilialisation, including in post-socialist European nations (Hantrais, 2004; Szelewa and Polakowski, 2008).

Romania’s family policies have to a large extent reiterated the comparatively poor performance of socialist- and post-socialist welfare arrangements. A historical overview suggests a shift from an implicitly familialist policy environment with an authoritarian pronatalist agenda (Popescu, 2006) to a selectively and partially explicitly familialist one at present (Kovács et al., 2017). Cash transfer instruments supporting families with young children have been few and typically ungenerous. The universal child allowance, introduced in 1993 to replace the socialist-time employment-related instrument, has been consistently low in value and prone to benefit level erosion especially since the mid-2000s. The cash transfer for mothers with three or more children, a pillar of pre-1989 pronatalist family policy, was phased out shortly after the political regime change. Means-tested cash benefits to needy families were late to be introduced in the late 1990s, have been consistently ungenerous and changes in the aftermath of the 2008–2009 global crisis came with school attendance-related conditionalities that exclude the neediest (Popescu, 2015). Finally, indirect transfers through the tax system have been either absent (most of the 1990s) or ungenerous, amounting to insignificant tax savings (Kovács et al., 2017). In short, public support for Romanian families in the form of direct and indirect cash benefits has been historically selective, ungenerous and, certainly during the post-socialist decades, out of reach for the neediest.

The evolution of paid leave schemes has been somewhat different, increasing in generosity, but also selectiveness over time. Romania has improved its provisions related to maternity over the past 30 years, introducing protective measures for at-risk pregnancies in the 1990s and increasing the duration and financial compensation for maternity leave (Popescu, 2004: 177). Care leave schemes have undergone most change, Romania going from having no paid parental leave scheme prior to 1989 (Popescu, 2006) to having one of the most cash- and time-generous programmes across the EU by the late 2000s (Letablier et al., 2009). In January 1990 a programme available to employed mothers until the child’s first birthday was introduced by the ‘revolutionary’ provisional government. After two decades of increasingly tighter employment conditionalities, and with funding shifting from social insurance funds to general taxation starting in 2006, current eligibility conditions stipulate 12 months of taxable earnings during the 24 months preceding birth. The leave can be claimed until the child’s second birthday, with at least 1 month reserved for the other parent, if eligible. Benefit levels have risen from 65% of net wages in 1990 to 85% at present, with a cap of 8500 RON (approx. €1730 in August 2020). In addition to close to 2 years of paid parental leave, claiming parents giving up at least 60 days of their statutory paid leave time have been entitled to a so-called ‘stimulant’, a cash transfer currently amounting to 650 RON (approx. €130, half the net minimum wage). Initially available as an alternative to the paid leave for the duration of the leave time, the benefit is now available up to children’s third birthday, that is, a year past the maximum duration of the leave, functioning effectively as a cash-for-care benefit. The paid leave scheme has also become the main vehicle for the familialisation of disabled children’s care in recent years. Working parents’ right has been extended from 3 (since 2006) to 7 or 18 years depending on disability. In short, earning parents in Romania have been supported by a generous cash-plus-time benefit during children’s first 2 years of life, statutory paid parental leave acting as an attractive explicitly familialising policy instrument. In contrast, inactive parents have not enjoyed any kind of cash-for-care equivalent, which means that they have for decades faced an implicitly familialising policy environment, which, research has shown, has long-term familialising effects for mothers (Kovács, 2018: 244–57). In other words, public support for early years care has been selective and bifurcated in Romania, a low overall activity rate country, particularly among the less educated, younger female cohorts (Eurostat, 2020a), and has systematically been familialistic: explicitly so for secure labour market insider parents and implicitly for labour market outsider parents.

ECEC service provision for under-3s has long been inadequate in terms of coverage, though service provision is deemed of good quality where available. Coverage and service quality were among the lowest in the former Eastern bloc prior to 1989, at around 7% coverage throughout much of the 1980s in Ministry of Health-subordinated units (Kovács, 2018: 71; Stativă and Anghelescu, 2003).⁴ This figure declined during the 1990s against the backdrop of a steep decline in fertility (Kovács, 2015b) and the availability of the paid parental leave scheme. The closure of state-owned enterprises during the 1990s, many operating nurseries, was also cited as a key driver of coverage drops. In recent years, total coverage has been haphazardly increasing to over 15% (OECD. Stat, 2020a), a growth restricted to large urban centres (Kovács, 2015a: 10; Stativă and Anghelescu, 2003: 12; Ulrich, 2009) and due mainly to private service expansion. Thus, Romanian ECEC service provision for under-3s remains very limited overall and serves mainly urban, working, above-average-income families.

Despite a slow rise in public service provision coverage for preschool-aged children over the past two decades, Romanian authorities have been unable to sustain very high enrolment levels for 3-year-olds and children from the most impoverished backgrounds (Ministerul Educației Naționale, 2017). Coverage has also been lagging behind European trends (OECD. Stat, 2020b), with 69% for 3-year-olds and 91.5% for 5-year-olds enrolled in 2017 (Bilț et al., 2010; Ministerul Educației Naționale, 2017). The Romanian preschool system is dominated by public provision and is part of the overall education system, the latter meaning that individual institutions are subordinated to both local authorities (responsible for premises and operating costs) and to the Ministry of Education’s territorial bodies, county school inspectorates (hiring and paying staff and responsible for teaching). Despite this joint oversight, school staff are much more responsive to central government dictates and requests, the latter often reflective of a top-down, centralised, ‘whole-country’ approach.

Public preschool provision is a nominally education-oriented one, though attendance is neither a right, nor is it mandatory. Consequently, the majority of places are part-time, with negative implications for their defamilialising potential.⁵ Institutions offering full-time tuition tend to be concentrated in municipalities. One explanation for this is that meals associated with full-time tuition are not publicly funded: in smaller localities, where dual-earner families are notably fewer and poverty tends to be much more prevalent (Ministerul Muncii și Justiției Sociale, 2020), full-time services are deemed expensive and redundant (Kovács, 2018: 210–13). As with nurseries, private services – overwhelmingly full-time – are concentrated in large urban centres. As regards service quality, public provision is seen as good or excellent, certainly in light of its comparatively low costs. Rural student-teacher ratios tend to be higher (World Bank and Ministerul Educației Naționale (WB-MEN), n.d.: 37), whereas in urban areas part-time tuition tends to be less crowded and more inclusive compared to full-time institutions. With teachers’ full-time workload amounting to only 18 classroom hours per week, preschools – including full-time ones – average 18–30-to-1 student-teacher ratios.⁶ Despite this, informal institutional hierarchies favour full-time institutions (Kovács, 2018: 195–213). In addition, rural preschools are much more likely to have inadequate premises, lacking proper sanitation and appropriate outdoors spaces (World Bank and Ministerul Educației Naționale (WB-MEN), n.d.: 34). Finally, nursery and preschool education is dominated by indoors pedagogy: the option of moving activities outdoors is far from realistic in the vast majority of institutions.

In summary, the Romanian family policy environment shaping childcare decisions in families with children under age 6 can be characterised as a bifurcated, selectively familialising one, explicitly so for working families and implicitly so for inactive ones. In addition to employment-based differences in support, Romanian ECEC service provision, restricted to municipalities in a private-public mix for under-3s and dominated by good quality public provision for preschool-aged children, also reflects deep urban-rural differences: most rural families have access to part-time tuition of sometimes questionable quality only. Not surprisingly, early years childcare is dominated by women’s familial care: maternal care in less educated, less well-to-do, most rural families; and grandmaternal or paid informal care in better educated, high-income, especially urban families. With the exception of working families in large urban settings, formal ECEC is but a complement to familial care during the early years (Kovács, 2018).

The broader political context of the epidemic

The SARS-Cov-2 epidemic that started unfolding in Romania in late February 2020 caught political elites amid notable political turmoil after European and presidential elections in May and November 2019, respectively, and ahead of local and general elections in 2020. This section outlines the intricacies of the political context within which the epidemic took hold to highlight the role that the political business cycle seems to have played in shaping policy (non-)decisions in the realm of ECEC.

The Social Democratic Party (PSD)⁷ reached the apex of an internal crisis that had been brewing since October 2015, when Liviu Dragnea was voted president of the PSD in a party election with no counter-candidates (Pană, 2015). Although the PSD won the largest plurality in the 2016 general elections, Dragnea – as head of the party – could not form a cabinet because of a conviction for vote-rigging (BBC, 2019).⁸ Instead, 2017 and 2018 saw the formation of two short-lived PSD cabinets led by individuals widely seen as controlled by Dragnea, both ousted by their own PSD (Dadacus and Pecheanu, 2018; PSD Dadacus, 2017). The Dăncilă government, voted in in January 2019 (Pecheanu, 2019), was seen as by far the most dismal of all Dragnea-controlled cabinets, with substantial electoral costs: at the 2019 European parliamentary elections the PSD’s performance was unprecedentedly poor, a mere 22.51% (Antoniu, 2020). The following day, Dragnea was escorted to jail after a widely covered public arrest following his sentencing in a second corruption case (BBC, 2019; Mediafax – Dept. Social, 2019). Some commented that Dragnea still being president of the party as he was being driven to jail was telling of the PSD’s organisational weakness (Antoniu, 2020).

Another sign of the PSD’s weakness was the successful vote of no confidence against the Dăncilă cabinet, some of its supporters PSD members, in October 2019 (Mediafax – Dept. Politic, 2019), less than 2 months ahead of presidential elections. Following Dăncilă’s departure, President Iohannis appointed the leader of his formerly own National Liberal Party (PNL),⁹ Ludovic Orban, to form a cabinet. The Orban cabinet was voted in on 4 November 2019, less than a week before the first round of presidential elections. Incumbent Klaus Iohannis, the PNL’s presidential candidate for his second term, won the race. Former prime minister Dăncilă resigned from party headship a few days after this final defeat.

With the PSD defeated and the PNL’s candidate having won the presidency, the PNL made no secret of its plan to organise early general elections. It needed to consolidate its position in parliament for two reasons. First, its minority position meant that governing was going to be challenging. With the momentum of Iohannis’ re-election, the PNL hoped to capitalise on its popularity to win votes (and MPs) from the PSD. Second, both the European elections in May 2019 and the presidential elections in November 2019 showed that the USR,¹⁰ shifting further to the right in anticipation of general elections in autumn 2020, was growing in popularity and chipping away at PNL’s core electorate. Bringing about early elections was, however, a challenging process. With resignation from prime-ministership precluding the possibility to form a cabinet later on, Orban’s PNL was to instrument early elections by forcing three successive votes of no confidence in parliament against three successive cabinets. It set out to do this in January 2020 with a round of emergency ordinances on policy initiatives known to be strongly opposed by the PSD (Andrei, 2020; Bobei, 2020). The PSD initiated a vote of no confidence that led to the ousting of the Orban cabinet on 5 February 2020 (Mediafax – Dept. Politic, 2020). As the second PNL cabinet was in the making, the first SARS-Cov-2 cases were confirmed in Romania (Mihai, 2020) and towns in Lombardy, Italy, were already under lockdown (Associated Press, 2020). Given the circumstances, the PSD and PNL abandoned the feud over the composition of the next Orban cabinet and on 14 March 2020 parliament voted in the second Orban cabinet, with cross-party support. Party factions emphasised that their vote was one for the good of the nation in a time of crisis, not a vote of support for the Liberals (Grigore, 2020a).

Given the evolution of the epidemic, the minority Orban government reluctantly remained in power. Not only did it give up plans for early elections, but postponed local elections scheduled for May to 27 September 2020 and general elections typically held in November 2020 to 6 December 2020 (Gusuleac, 2020). Commentators note that the epidemic left all notable parties in a weakened position: neither the PSD (Antoniu, 2020) nor the ruling PNL (Radio Europa Liberă, 2020) gained in support over the months leading up to local elections. This is in large part due to the fact that political elites, generally first and foremost office-seeking (Grzymala-Busse, 2007), have been more reluctant than normally to make responsible policy in anticipation of elections. Nothing illustrates this better than the treatment of staff in public education and other highly centralised ‘strategic’ public domains, for example, law and order, as compared to public healthcare, crucial in an epidemic, but much less centralised and, consequently, electorally less reliable. The former enjoyed unaltered employment relations during the unfolding health crisis, protected from exposure as well as furlough in contrast to many public (and of course private) sector employees. In addition, the PSD parliamentary majority also passed legislation shortly ahead of local elections stipulating ‘exposure bonuses’ to public education staff (alongside raising pensions and increasing central budget allocations to local authorities), against cabinet protest at the time (Mediafax, 2020a; Pecheanu, 2020a). Consequently, in addition to the specifics of the Romanian family policy environment, the particularities of the Romanian political business cycle of 2019–2020 should also be seen as largely responsible for ECEC policy responses shifting responsibility, but not commensurate resources, away from public-sector employees and onto private households.

Policies for families in response to the SARS-Cov-2 epidemic

This section provides a chronology of ECEC service provision during the epidemic, interspersed with policy adaptations for families with childcare responsibilities. In Romania, the first confirmed SARS-Cov-2 case was recorded on 26 February 2020 (Casa Jurnalistului, 2020), at which time – as the earlier section detailed – Romania had an interim government. The first policy reactions amid what was by then an exploding epidemic in Lombardy, Italy, was a series of Ministry of Health orders on quarantine for people returning from high-risk countries.

The state of emergency: March–May 2020

Monday, 9 March, isolated political figures issued statements requesting the closure of education institutions as a safety measure for children (Eftimie, 2020a; Mediafax – Dept. Social, 2020). Cabinet decision 6/2020 was passed in the evening stipulating among others the suspension of educational activities in all pre-university education between 11 and 22 March. The Ministry of Education issued address 73/2020 the next day with a series of recommendations and information to all public and private institutions. In this, the Ministry encouraged technology-assisted courses for students and teachers maintaining contact with students; it provided that individual schools decide on how lost teaching would be covered, and, as a last item, assured all public-sector staff that salaries would not be affected during the suspension.

On 16 March, the president decreed a 30-day state of emergency, restricting various constitutional rights, including free movement, economic freedom, the right to intimate, family and private life, the right to education, to congregate and to strike. One implication of the state of emergency was that pre-university education was to remain suspended until past Orthodox Easter, that is, 21 April. During the second half of March, a host of legislative acts concerning various social entitlements were passed. These concerned both existent entitlements, for instance, furlough, the cash transfer associated with the paid parental leave scheme (‘indemnity’, indemnizație in Romanian) and the stimulant, as well as new ones, for example, the special care leave for working parents. A chronologically organised list of legal acts and their provisions is comprised in Chart 1. Chart 2 details legal acts pertaining to ECEC service provision specifically. To summarise, 2 weeks of ad hoc policy-making in the realm of family, education and work–family reconciliation resulted in (1) the introduction of a special care leave for working parents unable to work from home, for the duration of the academic year; (2) the extension of entitlement to the stimulant, the paid leave-related transfer and, later, means-tested family benefits until the end of the academic year, regardless of employment circumstances; and (3) the fine-tuning of the furlough scheme stipulated in the Labour Code.¹¹ No decisions were made, however, concerning ECEC service provision, not even after the issuing of the second presidential decree on 14 April extending the state of emergency for another 30 days. In fact, the Ministry of Education failed to issue any information, decisions or orders during the 11 March–20 April period, tell-tale of its weakness and lack of leadership during challenging times. Ministerial order 4135 of 21 April stipulated preparations for shifting teaching online in very general terms, without any specific dates or deadlines, and no resource reallocations.

Chart 1.

Timeline of family and other relevant policy decisions during the SARS-Cov-2 epidemic, March–September 2020.

Chart 2.

Timeline for ECEC service provision, March–September 2020. The top tier represents the legislated academic year (ministerial order 3191/2019), below the actual timeline in the context of the epidemic.

Despite the state of emergency, voices requesting the reopening of ECEC services emerged as early as 27 April: the National Federation of Parents’ Associations asked for the reopening of care and education facilities for the youngest, arguing that nurseries would normally be open throughout the year with the exception of August and technology-assisted tuition was no option for preschoolers and primary school pupils (Ivanov, 2020a). On 28 April, media reported on the cabinet’s plans to ease the lockdown following 14 May by having the president declare a ‘state of alert’ (Grigore, 2020b). On 30 April, members of the cabinet were declaring uncertainty about the possibility of permitting the reopening of ECEC services after mid-May (Hotnews.ro, 2020b).

Increasing pressure to reopen ECEC institutions specifically mounted against the background of increasing evidence that technology-assisted tuition, initiated spontaneously by some teachers or schools without formal ministerial approval, methodology or streamlined support as early as March (Florian and Țoc, 2020; Salvați Copiii, 2020), was no option for younger children. Online surveys by civil society actors showed that prospects for online tuition were deeply uneven across the country because of (1) the absence of teachers’ training in technology-assisted teaching, (2) the lack of technology and/or skills among pupils needed to participate and (3) the necessity that parents help their children with technology-assisted tuition (Botnariuc et al., 2020; Federația Națională a Asociațiilor de Părinți – Învățământ Preuniversitar [FNAP-IP], 2020; Florian and Țoc, 2020; Salvați Copiii, 2020). Furthermore, children’s surveys were highlighting the detrimental effects on well-being of the suspension of face-to-face education (Salvați Copiii, 2020; World Vision România [WV], 2020). Finally, increasingly more media coverage revealed parents’ struggles with assisting children with schooling and with work-family reconciliation (Ivanov, 2020b; Kovács, 2020; Sandu, 2020).

Surprisingly, emerging epidemiological evidence that children were the least affected by the new virus was ignored by policy-makers and only marginally cited by commentators during this time. Instead, top politicians were maintaining what may be regarded as a paternalistic argument in defence of closed schools: by keeping children safe, families were also keeping their elderly safe. Decision-makers were, thus, also hinting at what remains but a myth of early years childcare in Romania: most grandparents’ proximity to and near-universal routine involvement with young children. The myth of the retired grandparent caring for her grandchildren remains culturally widely shared despite recent research suggesting the opposite (Kovács, 2016, 2018: 177–180).

The state of alert: May 2020 onwards

Romania has been in a state of alert, renewed every 30 days, since mid-May, without an end in sight. The state of alert means that the cabinet can maintain restrictions on constitutional rights, including free movement and economic activity, and impose various obligations – including 14-day quarantines and mask-wearing in public, as elsewhere across Europe. It was the law regulating the state of alert which stipulated the extension of social entitlements mentioned earlier until 31 December 2020 the latest. It also kept pre-university education closed for face-to-face tuition, making more detailed provisions for the organisation of online education for the remainder of the academic year, ending on 12 June.

Meanwhile, at the end of May a group of MPs initiated a motion against the Minister of Education for general incompetence and, more specifically, for her inability to announce concrete plans for the upcoming face-to-face exams, the purchasing of technology to support virtual tuition and scenarios for the upcoming academic year (Mediafax, 2020b). This was a strong signal of disapproval, resonating increasing public criticism against her tenure since early March. Three days later, the deputy prime minister declared that private ECEC service providers may be able to reopen starting 15 June, an option deemed untenable in the public sector (Eftimie, 2020b) for reasons unknown, with the Minister of Education uncertain of such a possibility (Hotnews.ro, 2020c). By 9 June, however, the Minister of Health was declaring that the reopening of public ECEC services alongside private ones could not be forbidden given that parents were losing their right to the special care leave, and was delegating the decision to reopen to local authorities (Hotnews.ro, 2020d). On 12 June, the cabinet decided to permit the reopening of private and public ECEC service providers starting 15 June (Ivanov, 2020c), with specific guidelines issued as late as 15 June (Pirv, 2020). It again speaks to the weakness of the Ministry of Education that the guidelines were formulated by the Ministry of Health in conjunction with the Ministry of Labour, many objectionable on pedagogical grounds. Furthermore, in the absence of any changes to the academic year and to classroom staff’s employment obligations during the summer holiday, the reopening of a small number of public ECEC institutions meant that they only offered care under strict social distancing guidelines rather than regular tuition. In practice, this meant that preschool-aged children pooled from across the entire institution (in smaller municipalities from across several preschools) were encountering ever-changing unfamiliar adults with masks, dressed in protective medical equipment, and having to play alone, alongside unfamiliar children in an unfamiliar classroom. The uptake of such services, perhaps not surprisingly, seems to have been very low.¹²

Thus, after a 2-month suspension of education between 11 March and 14 May followed a month of patchy technology-assisted tuition, bringing the school year to a close. Despite institutions’ legal obligation to provide for the recovery of lost teaching, educators and auxiliary staff started their regular 3-month holiday without any changes in their labour relations, including paid holidays, as they would under usual circumstances. In contrast, families were having to tackle care (and education) needs left to their own devices in a highly unusual environment: the special care leave was unavailable during holiday periods for working parents; where local authorities decided to reopen, ECEC service provision was sparse and inadequate; and although private ECEC providers reopened with strict social distancing rules in place, their urban concentration and prohibitive costs meant that they, too, were sparsely attended. Furthermore, reliance on informal care resources was also posing challenges: many families may have chosen to avoid contact with elderly carers, such as grandparents and nannies. And the hiring of younger carers, typically university students, by the small minority able to afford it in the handful of university centres was undermined by students’ exodus following the shift to online tuition starting in mid-March.¹³

With new cases rising fast starting early July (Casa Jurnalistului, 2020), the Minister of Education declared on 22 July that the academic year would commence on 14 September, as planned, most likely in a hybrid form, that is, with classes split into two and switching weekly between face-to-face classroom tuition and online attendance (Pecheanu, 2020b). On 5 August, president Iohannis met with the cabinet to discuss plans for the ensuing academic year and announced that (1) depending on the number of SARS-Cov-2 cases per locality, individual institutions in conjunction with county school inspectorates would decide on how to start teaching, choosing one among three options: a green (fully face-to-face), yellow (face-to-face-online hybrid) and red (fully online) option; and (2) considering figures for early August, the majority of institutions were expected to start teaching in the green option (Pecheanu, 2020c). Regardless of active cases, however, K–4, 8th and 12th graders would attend face-to-face (Mihalea, 2020). In anticipation of the yellow and red options, the cabinet quietly extended working parents’ right to the special care leave (that stipulated in law 19/2020) in the event of the yellow and red options. On Friday, 11 September, the Ministry of Education announced the distribution of public institutions by scenario, with 71% preschools and schools starting the academic year in the green option, 27.7% in the yellow option and the remaining 1.3% in the red option (Burnar, 2020). With the majority of students starting the academic year face-to-face, most parents of children under 12 were ineligible for the special care leave.

Around this time, 2 weeks ahead of local elections on 27 September, the PSD-led parliamentary majority resurrected springtime governmental plans to increase salaries in public education starting September 2020 in the form of an ‘exposure bonus’, payable to all staff for the entire duration of the period of alert, that is, starting 15 May 2020 (Pecheanu, 2020d). (Given cabinet’s opposition, nothing eventually came of this plan.) Following the increase in the number of active SARS-Cov-2 cases in October 2020, the Cabinet decided to shift pre-university tuition online starting 9 November, regardless of local epidemiological situations (Buciu, 2020). Only nurseries and afterschools, that is, private ECEC service providers that became afterschools overnight through a simple administrative accreditation process, were exempted.

Assessing the failings of Romanian ECEC service provision during the epidemic

As elsewhere in Eastern Europe, surprisingly low fatality rates during the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic have been attributed to early, strict and enduring lockdown. In Romania many public (and private) services closed down without further notice for what became a 2-month state of emergency, followed by an indefinite state of alert, infection and death rates kept low by the severe curtailing of direct personal contact across all sectors of the economy (and low testing rates).¹⁴ Face-to-face public and private ECEC service provision was fully suspended between 11 March and 12 June as a result of central government decision, with technology-assisted tuition in place between mid-May and mid-June, where feasible. Following the conclusion of the academic year on 12 June, it was up to local authorities and individual institutions to decide whether they would open during the summer break, between 16 June and 11 September, offering holiday care services with strict social distancing in place. A small share of large urban institutions may have done so for part of the summer break.

For preschoolers, the effects of teachers’ efforts during this time should be seen as largely inconsequential for two main reasons. First, ECEC in Romania is not mandatory: children had no obligation to complete suggested assignments, as reiterated by several legal acts, offered for a brief period between mid-May and mid-June. Second, and more importantly, effective, high-quality ECEC service provision is predicated on co-presence, both with educators and other children. Indeed, ECEC is valued by Romanian parents not only for the cognitive skills children develop much more readily in a structured environment, directed by a trained pedagogue, but also for the socialisation with other children (and adults) and for the care formal ECEC offers (Kovács, 2018: 195–204). In the absence of real-time interaction between children and teachers, ECEC service provision ceased to amount to either care or education: anecdotal evidence suggests that in Romanian preschools virtual real-time interaction seems not to have taken place. To sum up, with the majority of public institutions effectively closed for 6 months between March and September 2020 and with private entities able to reopen only after 15 June, a tiny minority of children under 6 had the opportunity to attend formal education and care during this time, typically in the private sector, with the majority being cared for (and educated) at home.

In other words, the first 6 months of the SARS-Cov-2 epidemic in Romania brought an unprecedented shift in responsibility for young children’s care and education to families, away from formal – mainly public – providers, but without a commensurate shift in resources (or recognition). Overnight, families ended up with round-the-clock care and education responsibilities for all of their children, regardless of circumstances or resources. The strain was notable even for well-to-do, professional families (Sandu, 2020). Those with children under 3 and eligible for the selective paid parental leave scheme or stimulant could enjoy entitlements during lockdown, but precluding their partners from taking the special care leave. Those in employment may or may not have had the right to the special care leave, unavailable during school holidays, which were kept unchanged. With the SARS-Cov-2 known to affect the elderly disproportionately, many families with young children probably found themselves unwilling and/or unable to rely on the informal childcare of grandmothers or nannies. Comparatively low mortality rates from the new virus seem to partially stem from intra-familial efforts to protect elderly family members through social distancing well past the state of emergency.

In contrast, staff in public pre-university education remained with intact employment relationships despite their inability to provide the services they regularly provide. Come mid-May, only teaching personnel could engage in some educational tasks. Despite this, the possibility to selectively furlough staff, as was done in public healthcare and other locally or regionally subordinated public domains where service provision decreased or was suspended, was never on the table. On the contrary, teachers were to receive a retroactive exposure bonus for a period largely taken up by the unaltered summer vacation. It is telling that organisations representing teachers or school management remained silent throughout this period.

As elsewhere, the epidemic unevenly impacted families with children (Botnariuc et al., 2020; FNAP-IP, 2020; Florian and Țoc, 2020; Salvați Copiii, 2020; WV, 2020). First, children who reported socio-economic difficulties as a result of the epidemic, around 20%, reported the absence of substantive assistance when in need (Salvați Copiii, 2020: 16), revealing the chronic inadequacy of poverty alleviation policies. The Institute for the Quality of Life reiterated this conclusion, calling for a substantial rise in the value of unemployment benefit, social assistance and the universalisation of public healthcare (ICCV, 2020). Second, material need and difficulties were more common among rural families, who are also more likely to have more children: 27% of rural parents (as opposed to 10% in the Salvați Copiii study sample, where 73% of respondents were urban children) ceased to work as a result of the epidemic, being fired, furloughed or prevented from informal day labouring (WV, 2020: 3). Consequently, around 40% of rural families cut back on food, cleaning and personal hygiene products, medication and/or school supplies, in contrast to 7.1% in the largely urban Salvați Copiii study. Third, fragmented evidence suggests that rural children dominated student groups who missed out on informal technology-assisted tuition, largely due to teachers’ reluctance rather than children’s lack of digital technology (Salvați Copiii, 2020; WV, 2020).

The policies shifting responsibility for care and education to families with only selective, short-term and partially adequate time and cash resources reveal the fact that the Orban cabinet engaged in the same type of policy response given the broader context of the electoral cycle as several previous governments. Policies enabling parents of young children to care for and educate their children while tuition was suspended were selective based on children’s age, parents’ employment circumstances and the structure of the academic year. The family entitlements amended or introduced reiterated two core assumptions implicit in Romanian family policy: (1) parents’ care obligations and needs are not seen as universal or equivalent across diverse families, and (2) the role of the state is to support parents in their caring tasks selectively, partially and sparingly, prioritising those in work and ignoring those out of work. Furthermore, policy decisions concerning ECEC service provision reiterated the assumption that early years childcare is first and foremost a family responsibility, not a public one, and that early years education is less important than tuition for older children, especially those anticipating exams. In conceptual terms, the epidemiological crisis further reinforced the central tenets of a cash-transfer-centred, selective and selectively familialist family policy regime, true beyond Romania.

Cabinet’s preference for policy continuity rather than context-driven, potentially path-departing policy options reveals a reluctant, indecisive executive, pressured by pending elections and the related need to keep certain domains in public-sector employment appeased. Further evidence of this is the fact that the alteration of the school year, with implications for public education staff’s activity over the summer months, was never an option despite the legal obligation to recover lost teaching during the state of emergency and reports that many children were missing out on learning and socialisation. Furthermore, the government’s initial reaction to pressures to reopen ECEC service provision only across private providers reinforces the impression of a government reluctant to make unprecedented demands on staff in public education despite unusual times. This is the more evident as employees in other domains, for example, GPs or hospital staff in a less centralised public healthcare system,¹⁵ were mandated extra responsibilities for token pay increases at best or simply furloughed during the same period. Indeed, the SARS-Cov-2 crisis seems to have occasioned appeasing policy responses proportional to how centralised a specific public service domain is, precipitated by high-stakes elections. Employees in public education were protected from both exposure and unfavourably amended employment relationships in contrast to public-sector employees in less centrally controlled domains. The explanation seems to be that their sheltering was seen as bringing electoral gains. The already mentioned exposure bonus initiative was a cruder attempt by the PSD to outbid the PNL in this electoral strategy.

The perennial weakness and lack of leadership of the Ministry of Education also contributed to the mismatch between shifting responsibilities without corresponding shifts in resources. The 6-week silence of the Ministry between 11 March and 21 April 2020, while some teachers and schools decided to switch to technology-assisted tuition, is an excellent illustration of this lack of leadership. Second, the Ministry repeatedly revealed that it was first and foremost an administrator of public-sector employees rather than the central government entity responsible for ensuring educational services across the land. This is evidenced, for instance, by its inability to seek solutions for effective teaching, while working hard on bureaucratic procedures: grading to enable students’ progression into the next grade come September 2020, student enrolment procedures for autumn or the organisation of exams serving usual staff allocations during the summer months. As noted, the Ministry failed to even consider changing the structure of the academic year to enable institutions to organise lost teaching despite legal provisions. Furthermore, it failed to (1) amend curricula to incorporate online learning resources and tasks into regular, face-to-face teaching in future; (2) amend curricula to incorporate more outdoors activities, especially for the youngest, as a means to minimise epidemiological risks in face-to-face tuition; (3) increase staff numbers to reduce de facto student-teacher ratios where needed as a means to maximising face-to-face tuition for as many children as possible while minimising epidemiological risks; or (4) secure digital technology for schools, teachers and especially children in challenging socio-economic circumstances in time in the event of the yellow or red teaching options. Overall, public education, and especially pre-primary education, suffered only inconsequential and ill-fitting adaptations for delivering education well into the epidemic. Consequently, the shift in responsibility for ECEC without a commensurate shift in resources resulted in most adaptations, compromises and invisible costs being put up by resource-stripped families.

Why have families taken these failures quietly? First, Romania remains in a state of alert, which means that some civil rights, including the right to protest, are suspended. For a year now, Romanians’ acquiescence has been secured through authoritative means. Well beyond Romania, where a similar situation has been the case, this represents a worrying political precedent for managing crises. Second, as elsewhere, families have been split about face-to-face tuition, including for the youngest, which means that parents’ interest groups cannot formulate a coherent set of demands. Those hit hardest have had no voice. A similar dilemma has been faced in other countries. Third, with preschool being non-mandatory and typically part-time, the absence of ECEC service provision is deemed as less pressing than the fate of children in compulsory education, especially in end-of-cycle grades. Fourth, with the vast majority of families raising two children at most, many choose to manage, getting on along the lines of ‘anything for my child’. Finally, the parents most driven and able to exercise voice – urban, highly educated and civically involved – often have the means to exit, choosing private provision or informal care. It is against this backdrop that the Orban cabinet could stick to decades-old principles of family policy: selectivity, partial and arbitrary exclusion, thriftiness and, to quote president Iohannis, the hope that ‘each family will find a solution’ for managing care and education tasks during a ‘brief, passing phase’ (Hotnews.ro, 2020a). It is perhaps because schools could be open for elections, but not children’s learning that the PNL effectively lost general elections in December 2020 to the PSD despite the lowest ever turnout in Romania’s post-socialist democracy (Alegeri Parlamentare 2020, 2020).

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-gsp-10.1177_14680181211011369 – Supplemental material for When a crisis undermines quality public service provision: Romanian early childhood education and care through the SARS-Cov-2 epidemic

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-gsp-10.1177_14680181211011369 for When a crisis undermines quality public service provision: Romanian early childhood education and care through the SARS-Cov-2 epidemic by Borbála Kovács in Global Social Policy

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Borbála Kovács

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

Author biography

Borbála Kovács is postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Global Studies, Aarhus Universitet, where she is currently undertaking research on social trust and citizen-street-level bureaucrat interactions. As a EURIAS junior fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (2018-2019), she worked on personal income taxation and family policy in post-socialist Hungary, Lithuania and Romania. She has published a monograph, several articles and book chapters on the sharing economy, informality, the sociology of childcare and Romanian family policy.

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