{"id":247548,"date":"2026-05-28T09:10:39","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T03:40:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=247548"},"modified":"2026-06-07T13:46:43","modified_gmt":"2026-06-07T08:16:43","slug":"who-is-watching-the-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/who-is-watching-the-children\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Is Watching The Children?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Kasuni Ranasinghe<\/a>\u00a0\u2013<\/b><\/p>\n

\"\"

Kasuni Ranasinghe<\/p><\/div>\n

Unsafe daycares, absent regulators, and a crisis hiding in plain sight \u2014 and what Sri Lanka could learn from a country that chose to get this right.<\/em><\/p>\n

An eighteen month old child. Working mom. A pond with no fence. This is how the tragic incident in Medamulana, Hambantota entered the national news in March 2026, briefly painfully, and then like many other stories headlines quietly disappeared. Daycare center manager taken into custody. Yet for the mother, the loss remains beyond the reach of any judicial outcome. Across the nation, similar childcare settings persist, thousands of families continue to rely on these facilities out of necessity rather than the choice.<\/p>\n

This issue extends beyond one negligible center, it points to a systematic pattern of inattention toward early childhood welfare. Sri Lanka has policies, committees and designated agencies. But not the will and functioning mechanism to truly protect a child.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>A Policy That Exists On Paper<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is important to acknowledge the existing policy framework in Sri Lanka. Back in 2019, the National Child Protection Authority drafted a National Policy on Child Daycare facilities. The policy outlined a comprehensive cover for children from four months to \u200b\u200btwelve years. It sets a clear regulatory structure including trained caregivers with NVQ Level 4 qualifications, safe staff ratios, proper infrastructure, and a monitoring system reaching every level of governance. And yet it took 5 years- until August 2024 for policy to receive cabinet approval.<\/p>\n

Despite this, the reality remains stark. Most daycare centers across the country have never been inspected, registered, or rated. The reasons offered is that childcare regulation falls under Provincial Councils. With the long delay of election and councils inactive, enforcement has simply suspended. However, children of course have not paused their lives to wait for governance to catch up.<\/p>\n

In January 2024, the Attorney General’s Department identified this exact governance deadlock and raised concerns before the Sectoral Oversight Committee on Children, Women, and Gender. It was explicitly noted that the Central Government has the capacity to act in the absence of Provincial Councils. Yet, it chose not to. The warnings were acknowledged and documented, however the ground remained the same.<\/p>\n

The Structural Drivers No One Wants to Address<\/strong><\/p>\n

Demographic and economic trends in Sri Lanka are reshaping childcare realities. Due to the rapid aging population, grandparents, the historical backborn of informal childcare, are now older, less able and increasingly managing their own chronic illness. Additionally, increasing living costs have made dual income households the norm. The old safety net is fraying. In Colombo, a mother interviewed by The Morning <\/em>reported that she spends Rs. 30,000 each month on Daycare services which is nearly half of her income. In Kuliyapitiya, a factory worker leaves her toddler neighbour near the factory gate.<\/p>\n

These outcomes reflect structural gaps, not individual. Although the state provides free and compulsory education from grade one which is excellent but before that offers nothing- no subsidiaries, no standards and no safety checks. However, according to neuroscience early childhood is the foundation to cognitive and emotional development. Yet policy continues to treat these years as solely belonging to families, rather than to the future of the nation.<\/p>\n

What Australia Built \u2014 and What It Tells Us<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2012, Australia implemented National Quality Framework that significantly reshaped delivery, regulation, and oversight of early childhood education and care. This is not simply a story about a wealthier nation doing better. It is about the decisions it made. It is a decision of any nation \/ governing body which truly commits to enhance children\u2019s safety.\u00a0 \"\"<\/p>\n

Ten years on, National Quality Framework in Australia shows measurable sector-wide improvement. Evidence from Frontiers in Education<\/em> highlights a gradual shift in service ratings from \u201cWorking Towards\u201d to \u201cMeeting\u201d and even \u201cExceeding\u201d national standards over time. The key insight for Sri Lanka is not the ratings themselves, it is how services began to see the system. Greatest improvement comes where services understand the NQF not as a compliance burden but as a tool for genuinely better outcomes for children.<\/p>\n

This reflects a cultural transformation, not merely a structural adjustment.<\/p>\n

Beyond Policy: Mindset Must Change<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is a deeper gap here that no policy or international comparison can fully explain. Sri Lanka simply does not just lack right laws or institutions, though it struggles with both. It lacks a shared belief that children under five constitute a public responsibility rather than a private burden borne by families. It is not merely inaccurate, it carries significant risk. Such a gap reflects a problem of mindset that extends beyond the reach of Cabinet approvals alone.<\/p>\n

Each time a ministry passes responsibility to non functioning provincial councils, a choice is being made about the relative priority of children welfare. Each time the cabinet approves a policy without a defined implementation pathway, it quietly says the urgency belongs somewhere else, sometime later. Likewise, when a parliamentary committee notes a concern without follow through it reinforces a pattern that young children who do not have a political voice, can not lobby or can not represent themselves are left waiting. This is not simple incompetence, it reflects a hierarchy of concern. In Sri Lanka youngest children remain at the lowest level of priority.<\/p>\n

The required shift is not just structural, it is our mindset. In Sri Lanka, policymakers must begging from different truths. When a child is harmed in unregulated daycare service, it is not a private tragedy, it is a public failure. That investment in the safety and wellbeing of a two-year-old is not a welfare cost. It must be a core component of national development strategy. The quality of care a child receives before entering formal schooling represents the most powerful education policy a country will ever have.\"\"<\/p>\n

This cultural shift must begin at the top. A minister who sees a five-year policy implementation gap and feels urgency, not bureaucratic patience, is a minister whose department will move. A Cabinet that treats the death of a toddler in an unregistered daycare as a governance failure requiring immediate remedy, rather than a sad incident to be managed with an arrest and a press release, is a Cabinet capable of protecting children. The question Sri Lanka must ask itself is not what policy do we need? It already has a policy. The question is: do we believe, at the level of our governing instinct, that these children matter enough to act before the next tragedy?<\/p>\n

Three Things Sri Lanka Could Do Without Waiting for the Provinces<\/strong><\/p>\n

The governance deadlock over Provincial Councils is real. But it is also being used as a reason to do nothing, when several things could be done immediately at central level.<\/p>\n

First, establish a public registry. The Central Government can require all operating daycare centres to register with a national database publicly searchable by parents as a condition of operation. This costs little and begins creating accountability where none exists. Australia’s StartingBlocks platform gives every parent in the country the ability to look up any licensed service and see its quality rating before enrolling their child.<\/p>\n

Second, activate the NVQ qualification pathway. The Tertiary and Vocational Education Commission already administers the NVQ framework. The requirement for Level 4 certification exists in the 2024 policy. The Ministry of Education and the TVEC could begin phased implementation immediately, with a transition period for currently operating centres \u2014 without waiting for Provincial Councils.<\/p>\n

Third, empower the NCPA as an interim inspectorate. The NCPA was established by Parliament under Act No. 50 of 1998. It has the legal authority to investigate and recommend action on child welfare. The Government made a commitment at the Bogot\u00e1 global conference in November 2024 to enact child protection legislation by mid-2025. That deadline has passed. That commitment has not been honoured. Activating NCPA’s oversight role in the interim is not constitutionally complicated; it is politically inconvenient.<\/p>\n

The Question Beneath the Question<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sri Lanka speaks often about its human capital about the educated workforce that will drive the next phase of economic development. But human capital does not appear at age six, fully formed, ready for school. It is built or broken in the first three years of life, in the arms of caregivers, in environments that are either safe and stimulating or unsafe and neglectful.<\/p>\n

Every child who spends formative months in an overcrowded, understaffed, unregulated facility is not merely at risk of physical harm. They are at risk of developmental harm: disrupted attachment, chronic stress activation, developmental delay harm that is far harder and more expensive to address once it has taken root. The cost of poor-quality childcare is not measured only in tragedies like Medamulana. It is measured in classrooms a few years later, in the long tail of early adversity that follows children through their lives.<\/p>\n

Australia did not build the NQF out of altruism alone. It built it because the evidence was unambiguous: investment in quality early childhood education and care produces returns economic, social, developmental that dwarf the cost of the regulatory system itself. Sri Lanka cannot afford to repeat this lesson the hard way.<\/p>\n

Conclusion: A Choice, Not a Constraint <\/strong><\/p>\n

The children in Sri Lanka’s daycares today are not waiting for Provincial Council elections. They are not waiting for inter-ministerial coordination meetings. They are eighteen months old, or two years old, or four months old, and they are entirely dependent on the adults and the systems around them.<\/p>\n

Better laws will help. A public registry will help. Qualified caregivers will help. But none of these will be sustained without something more foundational: a governing class that has internalised, at the level of instinct and not just rhetoric, that the safety of the youngest child in the most remote daycare in Hambantota is a matter of national importance.<\/p>\n

That is the cultural shift Sri Lanka needs. Not a new committee. Not another policy document. A change in what its leaders believe they are responsible for and who they believe they are responsible to. Who is watching the children? Right now, in too many places across this country nobody is. The question is whether Sri Lanka’s policymakers are finally ready to be the answer.<\/p>\n

*Kasuni Ranasinghe, Research Student, Department of Education, Macquarie University, Sydney. <\/em>(Master of Education- University of Melbourne, Graduate Diploma in Early Childhood Education- Victoria University, Master of International Relations- University of Colombo, Bachelor of Arts – University of Kelaniya)<\/em>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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