Productivity Commission

Inquiry into Childcare and Early Childhood Learning

Comments from people who use education and care services

Included are only those comments received by 5 September 2014, for which the submitted gave their approval for use of their comment by the Commission. Some comments have been edited to remove information which the Commission considered could enable identification of the submitter.

1.  As a woman schooled in the 80s, you encouraged me to be the best I could be. Each cohort was more educated than the last and we were expected and expecting to have a career.
I put off having children until my career was well-established . You encouraged me back into the workforce with long day care, creating a false sense of security.
My children went to school and I was stunned and felt shunned. There was no before or after school care available, public or private. The principal told me to get a nanny - which we could not afford. How could I maintain my career! I was expected to drop my children at school no earlier than 8.35, so I was late for work and then pick them up by 3pm. I could not maintain my professional career in this circumstance and my employer was not flexible enough to allow for school hour roles.
The stress this placed on my family and my relationship with my employer was immense!
It is no surprise that Australia has a shortage of skilled workers. We have the highest level of part-time workers in the world (‘Australia Compares’). My European colleagues were amazed that Australia, a leader in women's equality, did not allow for women/parents with school children to work a normal day.
Please do something to allow for before and after school care at every public school to allow parents to continue to work and improve the productivity of Australia.
2.  Please do not overlook the desperate need for more before and after school care to allow people (usually women) to re-enter or remain in the workforce once their children start school. My reference point is as a part time working mother living the Sydney's lower north shore (Willoughby). I always had the misguided understanding that childcare would be the great challenge for me returning to work after my children were born, but the reality is that before and after school care is a much more challenging issue and the lack of services is keeping more people out of the workforce. It is not a matter of affordability, as the costs are much less than long day care, it is not a matter of lack of facilities, as every school should be able to accommodate these services, and it is not a lack of people to work in the centres. The problem is that schools are not required to provide these services, therefore they simply do not.
Two changes would significantly change this situation at almost no cost to the government:
1) Make it a requirement for schools to provide facilities for before and after school care.
2) Relax the NDF guidelines that are targeted more at day care centre and therefore place unreasonable burdens on schools and providers for the facilities to be required.
Not only would these changes have no ongoing costs, they would allow additional revenue streams for schools and therefore take away some of the funding burden borne by the government.
The lack of before and after school care is a serious problem when comes to workforce participation rates, but the solution seems simple and cost effective so it should be addressed as a matter of urgency.
Thank you for your time.
3.  The lack of out of school hours care is a seriously overlooked problem. In NSW many public schools do not have access to enough (or sometimes any) OOSH care. The NQF guidelines make it even harder to get OOSH up and running - they need to be watered down a bit to reflect that OOSH needs are different to those for early childhood facilities. It would also make a massive difference if NSW Public School principals were directed/encouraged to support OOSH at their sites (using school halls and libraries etc). There are clear policies on this at Dept level but the individual principals have complete discretion and often refuse OOSH because it is ‘too hard’ ‘inconvenient’ ‘not suitable’ etc.
4.  I believe that the licensing for childcare centres is not flexible enough especially for small rural centres such as ours. We like all country towns suffer fluctuations in the demographic and this will affect the number of children who can attend. There should be flexibility within the licensing to cater for this. We will also struggle greatly with fundraising which will bd endless in order to cover wages and other major operational costs. Government assistance is absolutely required! The committee will be under great stress continuously to maintain the centre and will need help for it to run. Please help!!!! We really need this facility in our town
5.  The amount of money I pay for child care I should send my 3 year old to one the best private schools in Sydney as it's the same price.
By the way you talk about people working longer well I bet your commissioners will retire on nice payouts and supers before they hit the mandatory age. Maybe the commission should include normally members of the public not members from the eastern suburbs and north shore of Sydney personally picked by the elite in the Liberal Party.
6.  I am a single mother with a 16 month old child. Without subsidised day care, I would not be able to return to work. As it is, I pay close to $500 per fortnight in child care fees. If this were to increase (due to restrictions in child care rebate and benefits) I would struggle financially and may reach a point where I am better off financially to stay at home rather than work. From a personal development perspective, and to be a good role model to my child, I would prefer to work than stay at home. In this way child care is essential.
7.  Notwithstanding the fact it took us two years to get my daughter a place for daycare (in North Sydney, notoriously high demand for places), my main issue is that the rebate does not take into account such high cost centres, i.e. Sydney CBD/North Sydney. Daycare for our three-year old costs $119 per day. In my situation, the rebate only really covers three days of care before we reach the cap which means any subsequent day is a full-fee paying day. On my mid-level professional salary (I am a public servant) I am not much better off financially by taking on extra days, although I am seeing career benefits in doing this (better fit for my job, more effective in getting through workload etc.). While I am certainly in favour of the rebate, I think it needs to take into account the varying costs of services around Australia and adjust for that cost.
8.  We are still waiting for a childcare spot with the local council-run childcare after 10 months of being on the waiting list. I had no more leave after 7 months off work. I had to go back to work 6 months after my son was born, but the childcare facility wouldn't even list our application as 'active' until our child was six months. How does this help women get back to work?
We are currently using a childcare facility close to my work, but my workplace is moving location in 12 months time. What are we supposed to do then? There is literally just the one childcare place near our home, but there is currently somewhat of a baby boom in ours and the surrounding suburbs - how are the local, state and federal governments planning on dealing with the extreme lack of childcare in most regions?
9.  My concern is that my daughter has serious medical issues if she does not drink enough water each day. The center is aware of this and over the past 8 months I have continually asked and begged for them to make sure she drinks a litre or more (hot weather) a day.
10.  I gave them permission to entice her by asking if she wanted to play in the sandpit and if so to have a drink of water first. I was told they are not allowed to do this.
After nothing happening and my toddler screaming in pain for days from not drinking enough water I took hydrolyte ice blocks to school and asked if she could have 2 a day if her water intake was inadequate.
A couple of times I asked if she had her ice blocks I was told them she was given one but then other children wanted an ice block so it was taken off her and she was not given any more ?????
I was then told that I would need to get a doctors certificate before they could give her any hydralyte ice blocks. I did this and the letter even stated that they need to make sure she drinks adequate water each day.
Again the water intake was not happening. A staff member said she could not understand why after all this time nothing had been done so she drew us a roster of 30min slots when my toddler was to have a drink and it was marked off by the carer.
This worked amazingly. My toddler was not screaming in agony and bleeding and ill for days. Then it all started again.
I asked could I see the drinking roster that was drawn up and nobody claimed to know anything about it. I was persistent and said that her Doctor wanted to see it and I was told by the director that they are not doing any drinking roster for her because they do not have the time. ????
Where is the duty of care here. I ask, beg, do everything they ask (Dr's certificate) and they choose not to follow through with what works. After many conversations with some of the staff their response is ‘well she has a drink at morning tea and lunch’. My response is ‘do you have more then 2 x 125ml drinks of fluid a day’? How do you expect a child running around playing all day to be ok on 2 drinks a day’?
What more can I do or who can I talk to, to help my toddler. ?
11.  My comment regards the availability of childcare in my area, the Inner West of Sydney, which has over the past few years had a surge in the number of children and families seeking to access care. I'd also like to comment on the effectiveness of Family Tax Benefits in relation to this. I've chosen to submit a shortform comment rather than a longer formal submission because my interaction with the care system is putative and my evidence is based only on my own experience.
I've over the past few months attempted to access any available kind of daycare for my daughter, who is 1 year old, in order to consider a return to work. This has proven exceptionally difficult as there is simply no availability of any care places, either in centres close to any potential employment, close to my current place of study, or close to home.
I have made inquiries at twelve different centres, both long day care and family day care, and have been told that the waitlist improbably extends for up to 2 years for places for children of my daughter's age. (When I asked one provider, how could there be a 2 year waiting list for places for 1 year olds - wouldn't they age out of the places before they became available? she told me that many parents waitlist their children from the time of conception! And laughed at my shocked face.)
For me, now, this lack of care availability is preventing my economic participation at any level beyond the household and putting huge stresses financially on our family, for whom I have always been the primary breadwinner. I am a prime-age professional person, tertiary qualified with nearly a decade of employment experience, and I'm very employable - I've never had any difficulty gaining employment in a competitive field. I cannot stress enough that the sole reason I am unable to begin working out of the home is that I cannot obtain any kind of regular childcare that would enable me to work at least 3 days per week. In the meantime, my mother-in-law provides regular childcare one day per week for our family. She is wonderful and this care is appreciated, but it is not enough to enable me to return to work and as my daughter grows older I strongly believe that her participation in a properly qualified early learning environment is essential.
As some background, I was a contract employee prior to my daughter's birth and as such have no employment to return to. I also want to point out that over the period of 6 months of the financial year that I worked during the pregnancy, I earned nearly as much as my partner earned in a full year; as such, based on my 6 months of income our family was ineligible to receive Family Tax Benefit payments for my caring for our child in our home after her birth, although I would certainly have been eligible for these payments had my partner earned our combined family income by himself, a startling and discriminatory outcome given that every other payment is allocated according to family income. I mention this because - despite our income disparity, which would make it seem sensible that my partner stay at home with our child rather than me, it wouldn't have allowed us to breastfeed, a public health good whose cost was borne by my family.
12.  As a mother to two young children with another on the way, I have a personal interest in the productivity commission’s inquiry into childcare. It would appear that there are two main aims to the study - increasing workforce participation for women/primary caregivers and ensuring quality care and education for preschool children. Within that scope I hope the commission is considering advances in neuroscience that point to the early years (0-2/3years) as critical times of cognitive and emotional development for children and evidence from large scale research projects that group care outside of the home is not optimal for children under the age of 2. The research seems to suggest that children would benefit from being at home with a devoted carer for the first 2/3 years of life, after which good quality childcare provides many long-term benefits to the child and society.