Excerpts
Lack of supervision, hunger, forced sleep and down-time, and unhealthy meals are some of the consequences of falling standards in a childcare sector increasingly in the hand of for-profit operators, a government inquiry has been told.
The Centre for Policy Development stated in its submission to the Senate inquiry into early childhood education that the proportion of early childcare services rated as “exceeding” minimum standards has fallen from 32.5 per cent in 2018 to 17.8 per cent in 2023.
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Equally, higher fees do not reflect higher quality, the CPD warned. “Not-for-profit providers generally have higher quality ratings than for-profit providers. As a result, the price families pay does not reliably signal the quality of the services.”
A submission from Professor Karen Thorpe, an Australian Research Council laureate fellow from the University of Queensland, who has conducted detailed, large scale observational studies inside childcare centres, said she and her researchers had witnessed “children going hungry, educators giving their own food away and attendant escalating conflict across the day”.
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Both providers hit the headlines in late June after Victoria Police charged childcare worker Joshua Dale Brown, 26, with dozens of offences for abusing eight children between the ages of five months and two years old. He had worked at 12 Affinity centres, and another four run by G8 Education.
The inquiry was launched in August in the aftermath of those revelations. Just a few days later Education Minister Jason Clare said he and his state counterparts would establish a national register of childcare workers, trial surveillance cameras in 300 centres and make child safety training mandatory for everyone working in the sector.
But Thorpe argued CCTV cameras and surveillance were not the answer to protecting children from abusive carers, arguing footage would need to be monitored constantly and destroyed if it captured children without clothes.
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In its submission G8 Education argued that all providers should be judged against the same regulator framework, outcomes and compliance history, “not ownership structure”.
The Senate education and employment references committee will report by March 10 next year.