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Childcare allowance for Swiss daycare centres remains talking point

Childcare allowance for daycare centre children continues to be a talking point
Childcare allowance for daycare centre children continues to be a talking point Keystone-SDA

In future, a childcare allowance should relieve parents of the cost of daycare places in Switzerland. After the Senate, the responsible committee of the House of Representatives is also open to a new funding model. However, it wants to make the government more responsible.

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The House of Representatives’s Committee for Science, Education and Culture wants to extend the counter-proposal to the daycare centre initiative adopted by the Senate. In particular, it decided by 16 votes to nine to reintroduce the federal programme agreements deleted by the lower chamber into the draft bill, the parliamentary services said on Friday.

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The House of Representatives committee also requested additional areas of funding. For example, measures to improve the pedagogical and operational quality of the programmes and to improve the compatibility of family and career should also be promoted. The federal government is to provide a maximum of CHF200 million ($225 million) over four years for this purpose.

The bill will be discussed in the special session of the House of Representatives at the beginning of May.

Translated from German by DeepL/ts

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