Child Care News
Election 2016: Coalition promises $20m for early childhood scheme
The Australian - Andrew Burrell - June 21, 2016An acclaimed program in a disadvantaged area of Perth that combines schooling with early intervention in prenatal, child health and family services will be rolled out to indigenous communities in Alice Springs and elsewhere. Campaigning in the marginal seat of Burt, in Perth's southeast, Education...
Childcare sector on track for record year of investment
Financial Review - Larry Schlesinger - June 20, 2016The childcare sector is on track for a record year of investment, according to a new Colliers International report, which notes the emergence of the sector as a "true property investment class". On the investor side, demand has been driven by A-REITS like the Folkestone Education Trust and Arena REIT...
Comment: In-home child care industry in desperate need of oversight
SBS News - Erin Riley - June 20, 2016But the bigger issue is not whether this particular arrangement is legal, but that broader industry of nannying needs more oversight. Live in arrangements often take advantage of nannies, routinely undervaluing their time and work, and overvaluing the board that is included in their package...
North Perth child abduction: Care centre supervision inadequate, internal review finds
ABC News - Nicolas Perpitch - June 20, 2016The supervision of children at a Perth care centre from which a four-year-old girl and a five-year-old boy were lured away and sexually abused was below the "standard required", an internal review has found. Vincenzo Mule, 52, has appeared in court charged with child abduction and penetration of a...
The one policy that could fix sliding education standards, growing inequality and sluggish economic growth
The Age - Kelsey Munro - June 19, 2016Professors Melhuish and Barnett argue Australia is being left behind while other leading OECD countries, including the UK, have mandated two years of quality preschool. Broadly, Australia provides for one year (16 hours per week of preschool for 4 year olds). NSW last year removed subsidised preschool...
Tasmanian Government to set up group to help drive controversial early education plans
ABC News - Pablo Vinales - June 19, 2016The Tasmanian Government will establish an Early Years Coalition as it moves to lower the compulsory school starting age from five years to four and a half. The Government wants to legislate the proposal later this year and said the change would be in place from 2020, arguing it would improve education outcomes...
Why childcare is still secret women's business
The Daily Telegraph - Sarrah Le Marquand - June 19, 2016Data also shows that 46 per cent of female employees in Australia work part time - an inequity that is a direct result of the inadequacies in the current childcare system. "The unequal division of responsibility for childcare has a detrimental impact on the types of employment Australian women are able to access," says Dr Hill...
Gold Coast schools cut childcare services despite significant demand
Gold Coast Bulletin - Emily Selleck - June 18, 2016TWO Gold Coast private school childcare centres have banned babies. Coomera Anglican College and Saint Stephen's College at Coomera have shut their doors to children under two years old to make room for early learning programs targeting students aged two to five...
Silly rules make childcare expensive
The Australian - Adam Creighton - June 17, 2016A strong contender for worst policy announcement of the election must be Labor's childcare "package", which proposes to jack up the levels of two payments that have comprehensively failed to make childcare affordable or plentiful. The cost to taxpayers of the means-tested childcare benefit and...
Sydney hospital childcare centres privatised by stealth, NSW Opposition says
ABC News - Sarah Gerathy - June 14, 2016The New South Wales Opposition has accused the Government of trying to privatise hospital child care by stealth, with up to six Sydney centres affected. Labor said in the past year, the Government had announced plans to close, scrap subsidies or privatise childcare centres at a number of...
On-site childcare is a blessing for workers, so why don't more companies offer it?
The Guardian - Miriam Cosic - June 13, 2016Experts at Australian universities say they haven't come across statistics for on-site childcare but industry sources estimate that perhaps 40 to 50 companies offer on-site childcare. Tom Hardwick, the chief executive of Guardian Early Learning Group, a nationwide provider of childcare facilities...
Federal election 2016: families $400 worse off under Labor
The Australian - Rick Morton - June 11, 2016Labor's about-face on cuts to the family payments system will hit average working families with two children by about $400 per year compared with the settings under the Coalition, but lower income and single-income families will keep their payments. Bill Shorten's last-minute plan to slice by half the...
Teachers who fear technology leave students short, findings show
The Daily Telegraph - Laura Sullivan - June 11, 2016Notes from a government task force into early learning obtained by The Saturday Telegraph reveal how a fear of technology among some preschool teachers is to blame for young Australians falling behind in the crucial subjects of science, technology, engineering and maths - known as STEM...
The policy failure that costs us most
Sydney Morning Herald - Michael Pascoe - June 10, 2016The children who most need professional childcare generally are not the offspring of nurturing working mothers, or at least the offspring of upper and middle class mothers, the children who will go on quite adequately to school anyway. Yet these are the children that the political childcare issue...
Childcare policies have a missing piece
Sydney Morning Herald - Lisa Bryant - June 10, 2016Childcare in Australia is a mess. Supply and demand are unequal, squillions of taxpayer dollars are spent but families can't get affordable childcare when and where they want it, and some of the funding ends up as private profit. What's worse? The fact that what's good for children, doesn't come...
