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The understaffing that besets the sector leads to ratio breaches, which in turn means “you’re not having workers keeping a check on other workers. So there’s a whole bunch of issues around the workforce.”
The federal government announced on Friday it would fund a national educator register, mandate child safety training for staff, carry out additional spot checks on centres and facilitate information-sharing around working with children checks.
Boyd says this won’t be enough. “It tinkers around the edges,” she says. “It’s woefully insufficient to address the systemic and structural issues in the sector that have been allowed to fester for so long.”
High on Boyd’s agenda of reform are private providers, which now operate almost 70% of centre-based daycare services.
A 2024 Productivity Commission report found that for-profit providers spent less on wages, paid staff less, and that fewer of their staff were employed full-time than at not-for profit centres.
As a result, the commission found, not-for-profit centres had lower staff turnover and fewer vacancies, two things child safety experts say are linked to creating a safer environment for children.
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But she would like to see a ban on private equity companies operating childcare centres, and a limit on the number of centres each company can operate.
She wants the government to cap the amount childcare centres can be charged for leases.
Childcare is “after all, an essential public service”, she says.
“We just need to really be bold in the way that we regulate them so that it’s actually brought back to being a service for the public, not something to be traded.”