18 August 2014 - Melbourne Public Hearing Transcript - Childcare and Early Childhood Learning

______

PRODUCTIVITY COMMISSION

INQUIRY INTO CHILDCARE AND

EARLY CHILDHOOD LEARNING

DR W CRAIK AM, Presiding Commissioner

MR J COPPEL, Commissioner

TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS

AT 530 COLLINS STREET, MELBOURNE ON

MONDAY, 18 AUGUST 2014, AT 9.01 AM

Childcare/Early Learning 18/08/14

© C'wlth of Australia

INDEX

Page

ROGAN FAMILY CARE:

SUSAN ROGAN1-7

MONASH CITY COUNCIL:

GEOFF LOFTUS

JENNIFER SEBIRE7-16

CHARLES STURT UNIVERSITY:

LINDA HARRISON16-24

DANIEL ATTARD24-30

KYLIE SWAN31-35

EARLY LEARNING ASSOCIATION AUSTRALIA:

SHANE LUCAS

JOANNE GEURTS35-42

ENDEAVOUR FORUM INCORPORATED:

BABETTE FRANCIS

ANGELA BOURNE42-48

BESTCHANCE:

KEVIN FEENEY

CHRIS THOMPSON49-54

UNITED VOICE:

DAVID O’BYRNE

KRISTY WILKIE

CLAIRE PENNO54-63

SWALLOW STREET CHILDCARE ASSOCIATION:

KYM COOK

TONI COOK63-71

EAST WEST CHILDCARE ASSOCIATION:

RUTH HARPER

FELICITY NABBS87-96

MURDOCH CHILDREN’S RESEARCH INSTITUTE:

FRANK OBERKLAID

TIM MOORE96-107

AUSTRALIAN COUNCIL OF TRADE UNIONS:

GED KEARNEY

BRENDA TKALCEVIC107-117

NICK HANSEN117-122

Childcare/Early Learning 18/08/14

© C'wlth of Australia

DR CRAIK: Good morning ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the public hearings for the Childcare and Early Childhood Learning Inquiry. My name is Wendy Craik, and I'm the Presiding Commissioner on this Inquiry, and my fellow Commissioner on this Inquiry is Jonathan Coppel.

The purpose of this round of hearings is to facilitate public scrutiny of the Commission's work and to get some comments and feedback, particularly to get people on the record, which we may draw on in the final report. We've already held hearings in Perth, Port Macquarie and Sydney and, following this hearing, there will also be hearings in Canberra next week.

We expect to have a final report to government in October this year and, following our delivery of the report, the government has up to 25 parliamentary sitting days to publicly release it. We like to conduct these hearings in a reasonably informal manner, but I remind participants there's a full transcript being taken. We don't take comments from the floor but, at the end of today's proceedings, there will be opportunities for people who wish to do so to make a brief statement, and obviously people are able to submit further advice to us if they chose to do so as a result of things they hear said today.

Participants are not required to take an oath, but should of course be truthful in their remarks, and participants are welcome to comment on issues raised by other submissions as well as their own. The transcript will be made available and published on the Commission's website, along with submissions to the inquiry. If there's any media representatives here today, I'll ask you to get in touch with a staff member here, because we have some general rules applying if you haven't already been in touch with Monika, who's wandering around there.

(Housekeeping matters)

We've got a fairly busy day today so I'd ask you to try to keep your opening remarks reasonably short, because the value for us really is in asking you questions and getting your responses to it. So we might start today's proceedings and our first presenter is Susan Rogan from Rogan Family Care. Now Susan, if I could ask you to start by stating your name and organisation for the record, and then if you'd like to make a brief opening statement we'd be happy to hear from you. Thank you.

MS ROGAN: Thank you. My name is Susan Rogan, I'm the General Manager of Rogan Family Care which is a part of the Interwork Australia Group. I'm here today to respond to three of your recommendations that are focused on the proposal to fund nannies or more in-home childcare.

The first one that interests me is recommendation 12.4, which spoke about the deemed cost of care. I think it's essential that the government and the Commission consider that the same funding model couldn't be used for in-home childcare that is for across the board. The rationale behind that is, if you have one child and one carer, the cost is the same that if you have three children, or very similar, three children and one carer. So to have a cost per child deemed cost simply wouldn't work.

If you have one person looking after one or two children, you have to pay them adequately regardless so you'd be looking at, you know, $25 an hour or something, so the funding model would need to be very specific to the sector.

The second thing that I'm interested in is your proposal 8.5, to fund nannies or in-home care. From our perspective of course this is positive, given families’ flexibility and choice, which is the one thing that's been spoken about very extensively in the submissions. What concerns me is: what is your proposal to support nannies and to support and monitor the program? PORSE, which is a New Zealand organisation, put a submission in 4.21 which spoke extensively about the success of their model, given that they are very well funded by government, to provide education, care and monitoring.

People working one to one in family homes; if anything need more support and monitoring than people working in group settings. Currently at the moment our government seems to be focused on cutting funding to services, and that's happened with family day care, their operational funding is under threat, and I think that, if we are going to have funding for nannies in family homes, to have a realistic and well funded support model would be the only way that it would succeed.

You spoke in the submission of ACECQAmonitoring the delivery of care and, again, it's impractical to consider that ACECQA would be able to monitor individual nannies working in individual homes. They currently have a great workload as it monitors long day care services, and family day care services. So without an interim body between the nanny and the family and the service delivery - you spoke about them meeting the standards - most nannies wouldn't have the capacity to be able to do that.

The third recommendation that I noticed that concerned me somewhat was 8.6, which was a suggestion that when the nanny model became part of approved care, that in-home care would essentially be got rid of, if that's the right word. I think that's concerning in that we currently have - I also deliver in-home care as well as private nanny sector - an excellent model in in-home care. It makes more sense as far as I can see to expand and grow that sector because it focuses also on a different client base.

Families that access in-home care are frequently families that wouldn't have access to home-based care in the circumstances, and they wouldn't have the capacity or the ability to monitor and to support an employment of nannies. We work with many families in in-home care who are in crisis, either for the children or for the families and children at risk. And I think in-home care is a very valuable program in its own right.

DR CRAIK: Okay, thank you, thanks very much for that. Perhaps I'll start with nannies. Am I understanding correctly when you say - well I'll just start at the beginning. What we're proposing is that there be one model for centre-based care, another essentially for care that's based in the homes, so that would pick up family day care and nannies. I guess our view was that the regulations around nannies would be similar to those around family day care, and things that we haven't thought a great deal at this stage about, but will be interested on your views on.

In family day care, as I understand it, you're usually part of a network and there's a coordinator, or coordinators who are responsible for a number of family day carers. Isuppose some people have sort of raised this issue for us in respect of nannies and whether nannies should have a similar sort of approach. So Iguess from what you are saying you are suggesting that sort of approach, are you?

MS ROGAN: Ithink it would be essential, and the In-home Care Program is already in place and is there. Isuppose it would make more sense to open that program up so that more families can access it. At the moment, in-home care is limited to a certain number of families and we are restricted in the number of places that we can deliver. My concern is that the government is currently – is cutting the service support program money for family day care and Iam fearful that that may happen for in-home care in the past. So whether government would look at resourcing this sector adequately, Idon’t know.

DR CRAIK: Iguess our view on the government’s reduction of the - you’re talking about the community supportprogram

MS ROGAN: Yes, funding.

DR CRAIK: for annual funding, sustainability of payments, I’m not quite sure, it’s CSP payments.

MS ROGAN: Yes, that is right.

DR CRAIK: Our view was that if there is a coordination cost, that should be reflected in the price of the cost, the cost of the family day care, so on an hourly basis, so that when the deemed cost – under our model, when the deemed cost is calculated, that that would pick up the coordination cost as well. So it would all be built into the price so that the price of family day care would actually reflect both the coordination and the caring as well, so that – yes.

MS ROGAN: Ithink that that makes a lot of sense. However, in the case of in-home care or nannies, the realistic thing is that one carer, if you look at the cost of it, might cost, Ido not know – by the time you pay super and WorkCover and all the on-costs, because we employ our carers, we don’t engage them as contractors, you’re looking at about $30 an hour.

So if a coordination cost was added in on top of that, what you would have to be very careful about is not making it assessable to a large number of families, despite the fact that they may get government – the proposed funding that would be available. At the moment, in-home care is only really accessible by families if they have a large number of children. If they perhaps have four children, then it can be done. But, with one child, it is still not particularly cost-effective and that would be a major issue, Ithink.

DR CRAIK: We would see that the subsidy that applied to family day care would also apply to nannies.

MS ROGAN: Yes.

DR CRAIK: The same argument would apply that, if you had multiple children, then a nanny might be very cost-effective, otherwise it might not be.

MS ROGAN: That’s right. But for some families, the inflexibility of, say, family day care or long day care is a major problem. So it would be – but the New Zealand model has a great deal of positives about it, but it is extremely well resourced by government; far better than our current community support funding is.

Ican’t remember the exact numbers now, but it is – they run brilliant support programs and families can choose to either use a family day care model, a nanny model or long day care. But all of those sectors are well – Imean, Iknow it is easier, they have got a very small population, but the reality is that that program only works – and Ithink PORSE in their Submission 421 did provide a number of support documents, and that is why it is very much a best-practice model. And Iam fearful that if we do it without adequate resourcing, all of the opposition that a lot of sectors have to in-home childcare would be problematic.

DR CRAIK: All right, thanks.

MR COPPEL: You mentioned that if support was extended to nannies, that the rating system would be impractical to apply for a nanny unless the nanny was supported through some form of nanny service that provided a network of nannies.

Our recommendation makes an extension of support to nannies on the condition that they are part of the national quality framework. Iwas wondering if you had used them or how that national quality framework could be adapted to support the extension of support to nannies.

MS ROGAN: Currently, in-home care is not under the jurisdiction of ACECQA or the National Quality Framework for that very reason. It has not been tackled as to what you can expect in a family home, how it could be monitored. Ithink it would be unreasonable to expect a private family and their home-based carer to actually meet those standards without a support unit of some sort behind them.

There are issues for nannies and nanny carers at home, and that includes the resources, the family values, the current situation, you know, the children’s needs. Iagree, there has to be some monitoring but Ithink the current NQF would have to be – and ACECQA would have to do some work to come up with a fair and reasonable and equitable way that it could be assessed.

But Idoubt that ACECQA – well, Iam certain ACECQA could not monitor individual families, that would just be impractical. But if there was a coordinating unit – Imean, at the moment there are entrant standards for in-home care and we ensure that our care is delivered in line with those. So it is not impossible, but Ithink it would need to be customised to meet the requirements of both in-home care and nannies, yes.

MR COPPEL: Do you have any ideas on how that customisation would take place? How does it work for in-home care?

MS ROGAN: In-home care is not currently under the - you know, the NQF. Most of us do implement the Early Years Learning Framework. But the difficulty we have with in-home care at the moment is that there is no monitoring of standards, and we do not come under any Victorian regulations, so it is very much a self-regulatory framework.

Yes, there are lots of things that could happen, but it would be in case of what is realistic in – to adapt, to simplify, Isuppose, and to make it doable for one person. And the majority of nannies would not have the education or the skills to be able to cope with the framework without some support from a support unit. Then it could be done. But Ithink it is – Iknow that NICA, the National In-home Childcare Association, has – they are proposing, Ithink, that in-home care come under the framework from about 2016-17. But to be frank, it has not really been tackled by government at this stage.

DR CRAIK: We are proposing effectively that in-home care as a category be got rid of and it would just sit under the family – you know, Iguess the services that are provided there would sit under family day care or nannies, you know, one or other version of those.

Iguess, the question Ihave is do you have qualification requirements currently for in-home care?

MS ROGAN: No, no. Imean, the majority – Iknow in my service, we have about – we employ about 100 nannies every week. Half of those work for families that get the in-home care funding, half of them do not. And last time we did a census, 87 per cent of our carers do have at least a Certificate III. Ithink that is a very positive thing to ask for a Certificate III. Iwonder why though we could not look at it the other way, to keep the In-home Care Program but to expand that to include nannies.

In other words, the thing that limits it at the moment is the fact that only certain families can access that program. And if that were broadened out - well it does not matter what you call it really.

DR CRAIK: Indeed, yes.

MS ROGAN: But a lot of the families that we work with in that program would not have the resources as individuals to be able to source that care. But certainly if there were coordination units in the same way that family day care or in-home care has now, that would be a possibility. Ido not suppose it matters whether you call it in-home care or nannies, really, it does not matter what you call them. government has been very resistant to the “in” word. They nearly have a nervous breakdown if you talk about nannies, because there is a perception that that is funding wealthy families.

But the reality is now, with the cost of other care and the inflexibility of it, it is actually quite cost-effective for a lot of families that would otherwise use long day care.

DR CRAIK: We had a remarkable number of submissions from families who said, “We’re not particularly well off, but we’re at either shiftwork or hours overlap”, and so they use nannies, yes.

MS ROGAN: Well, even for most families, they work in the city, they live in, Ido not know, Box Hill, how can they get home by six o’clock to pick their children up from afterschool care or long day care; they just simply can’t. And the inflexibility of other programs is one of the major problems. My concern is that if government do proceed with this, that they do make it an accessible program, and that is going to be, Ithink, the issue and that certainly has to be well-resourced.

MR COPPEL: You may have seen that in what we are proposing, in terms of funding to the family, we have a rate which is dependent on household income.

MS ROGAN: Yes.

MR COPPEL: It is also dependent on an activity test. It starts at 90 per cent for low household incomes and it drops to 30 per cent at $300,000 household income. Do you have any views on that proposed support design, particularly at the higher end of household income?