When Sarah Lebner sat down at Khancoban’s Pickled Parrot cafe in February for a crisis meeting with other local mothers, her eye was drawn to the view outside.
Their children’s bush preschool had closed for want of a teacher months earlier, leaving the parents stranded for childcare, and months of advertising had failed to attract a single application for the job.
The view of the Snowy Mountains from the Pickled Parrot cafe.
But to Lebner that day, the beauty of the Snowy Mountains and the way her tiny village was lost in the depths of them seemed to her both the problem and the solution: if just one teacher, in all of Australia, could find this place and see what she could see, surely they would want to stay.
It’s a familiar story across regional Australia, where attracting and retaining workers is one of the biggest issues affecting the availability of childcare services, according to an Australian Competition and Consumer Commission report into the sector published late last year.
Much of the country is in a “childcare desert”, where limited or a complete absence of childcare leaves parents unable to engage in paid work, and denies children the benefits of an early childhood education. The issue also affects the delivery of essential services because the key workers who would provide them – like doctors – cannot secure care for their children.
In Khancoban that day, the mothers at the cafe decided to make an online video to showcase their village and preschool, hoping it would find their children a new teacher and allow them to resume their lives at work and home. One mother volunteered to film it, another to do the voiceover, and they all donated their own photos and videos of life in Khancoban.
“[The preschool] is in an old, little cottage building that’s quite picturesque, and then it has this huge wild backyard that backs onto bushland,” Lebner said. “When you’re coming from city centres it seems quite amazing and special.
“[But] when you look up a job advertisement for a random rural place you’ve never heard of, it’s very easy to dismiss it, and very hard to understand what living in that place might be like.”
The video – an act of love and desperation – has been viewed thousands of times on social media and shared far and wide but Snowy Valleys Council, which runs the preschool, says it has only received one genuine inquiry about the job and no applications, even after it increased the pay and conditions to “centre director” level, paying up to $43.38 an hour. Now the council says it may have to consider closing the centre permanently.
Lebner said that would be devastating for Khancoban because the preschool brings people together, leads children into the local primary school, and draws new working families into town.
“It would be a huge loss,” she said. “Early childhood really underpins both a community and its local economy, in ways we really don’t give enough respect to.”
She said parents have already had to give up their jobs or cut back their days since the preschool stopped operating six months ago.
Other families have had to hire nannies or drive up to an hour away to access services. Lebner managed to secure one day of care in a nearby town for her three-year-old daughter but otherwise relies on family for childcare so she can run her architecture practice.
Children paint in the garden of the Khancoban Community Preschool.
Advocacy group The Parenthood has called on the federal government to do more to improve access to early childhood education and care in regional areas and says it should play a greater role in the sector, as it does for other levels of education.
“Essentially the market is set up for metro areas. It’s not set up for regional, remote or rural areas … for an early learning centre to be viable, it needs at least 70 enrolments and that isn’t always possible in regional and remote areas,” campaign director Maddy Butler said.
“The workforce is a major issue … [Workers] are leaving the sector in droves, and it is so often leading to these kinds of closures all across the country.”
The federal government is waiting on a Productivity Commission report into the sector to work out how to improve access to early childhood education and care, due at the end of this month.
Khancoban is nestled in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains.Credit: Sarah Shoard
But a draft report issued in November found childcare will only become more available if workforce challenges are addressed. The government also allocated money in the budget to secure a pay rise for childcare workers.
“The burden shouldn’t be falling on these communities, these poor parents,” Butler said. “On a national level, it needs to be fixed.”
Federal Early Childhood Education Minister Anne Aly acknowledged the problem facing regional communities and said the government was helping some centres stay open through the Community Child Care Fund, a $600 million program that largely supports services in regional and rural Australia.
“However we know more needs to be done to achieve the quality universal early childhood education and care sector Australian families deserve, supporting children’s learning and development as well as workforce participation in the broader economy. A sustainable early learning workforce is vital to this,” Aly said.
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