Daycare teachers and protesting parents have got their wish as the city council scraps funding cuts

The City Council has withdrawn from a plan to cut 47 million kroner aimed at public facilities with difficult access or poor physical layouts.

But the conflict with parents and daycare centres is not over, as national council association KL is threatening to take the association of day care teachers (LFS) to court for encouraging parents to blockade city daycare centres over the past few weeks.

Specifically, KL pointed to LFS vice-president Jan Hoby’s comments on Facebook that included ‘supporting and urging’ its members to fight over the issue.

But Hoby told Berlingske Tidende newspaper that the majority of the blockades were conducted by parents, not daycare teachers.

‘We can only be held responsible for what our own members do, not the parents,’ he said.

But while all public daycare centres are reported to be open today in Copenhagen, many parents in Hillerød council have reached breaking point over the lack of personnel at the council’s own centres.

As the situation is now, parents are subject to a ‘traffic light’ system, where conditions at facilities are designated by green, yellow and red signs. A red sign at their children’s daycare facility means there are too few instructors to handle the number of kids, and often the children who arrive later are sent home.

According to MetroXpress newspaper, on several occasions parents have been called up at work and told to pick up their kids from the centres due to the lack of personnel.

At parliament, parties are aware of the growing problem, and the Social Democrats, Socialist People’s Party and Danish People’s Party want minimum standards implemented for how many children per instructor should be allowed at daycare institutions.

Government majority party the Liberals, however, say councils have sufficiently large enough budgets to deal with the problem at the local level.