EXCERPTS:
Five-year-old Liam Bray is dropped off after dinner in his Sesame Street pyjamas, almost ready for bed. In Kim Senior's Hampton Park home, a home Liam has come to know as well as his own, he brushes his teeth, solves a wooden farm puzzle and is read Aladdin, his favourite story book.
Crawling under a sheet he is now ready for ''quiet time'', when he will usually drift off to sleep.
This nightly routine happens often here, in his carer's home. It is in Ms Senior's loungeroom, on a trundle bed, that Bray sleeps about 13 nights a month when his father, a station master for Metro, is rostered on the late shift.
He is not alone. According to family day carers (qualified home ''educators'' who look after children in their own homes) requests for care outside traditional office hours, and often overnight, are on the rise.
New government figures show the number of children using family daycare jumped 15 per cent in the year to March 2013, compared to an increase of 3.8 per cent in the number attending long-daycare centres in the same period. More than 135,770 Australian children were being cared for by family day carers by March.
Acknowledging the nation's childcare system as one that caters to the working week of last century, Prime Minister Tony Abbott in November announced a Productivity Commission inquiry to examine flexible childcare. As the inquiry now prepares to hold public hearings, it will be looking closely at family daycare, with educators often willing to work irregular hours compared to long-daycare centres, which usually operate from 7am to 6pm and, in the past, have found it financially untenable to stretch beyond these hours. In particular, it will be looking at the results of a federal government trial of overnight childcare.
From July last year, 18 sites across Australia started to offer extended-hours care to emergency workers for the government to gauge demand.
Family Day Care Australia, which is running the trial, says it is too early to assess demand so far but reports an increasing uptake of care outside of traditional hours, particularly in rural areas. Kim Senior, who works for City of Casey Family Day Care, says many families she works for are in need of care outside the 9am to 5pm day.
But Early Childhood Australia chief executive Samantha Page said past trials of extended care struggled with demand.
''Previous trials of extended hours and overnight care over the years haven't proven popular with families, with too few children attending to justify keeping centres open late in the evening or overnight,'' she said. ''Models of family daycare have been somewhat more successful but still have low levels of take-up.''
Assistant Minister for Education Sussan Ley said people were turning to alternative types of childcare because ''our modern, 24/7 lives no longer fit in with the traditionally strict nine-to-five model of childcare''.
"However family daycare, like any other service-type, faces its own challenges, which is why we've tasked the Productivity Commission with undertaking a holistic review of the sector."
Meanwhile, shiftworker Andrew Bray believes he would have been ''stuffed'' if his local council hadn't informed him about family day care. He said overnight care means he is able to spend time more time with Liam when is he awake than if he worked more traditional hours.
-reprinted from the Age