Alamanda College: Camp Australia fined for breaching student limit in 2018

An after school care provider will have to pay thousands in fines after it was caught skirting regulations in Melbourne’s west.

A company which runs after school care programs at dozens of schools around Australia will have to pay $35,000 in fines and legal costs after it was caught skirting regulations at a school in Melbourne’s west.

Two senior staff and lawyers for Camp Australia faced the Melbourne Magistrates Court on Friday, where the company had previously pleaded guilty to failing to comply with education service provider regulations.

For more than two months in 2018, the company let more than 150 kids from Alamanda College at Point Cook attend its after school care program, despite a strict government limit on numbers.

In total, the company breached the limit on student numbers 14 times.

Up to 20 children were marked off on a handwritten roll, and looked after in a separate room that had not been approved by authorities, as part of a “workaround” on the limit.

The court on Friday heard the company had been pursued over a similar scheme in Western Australia, and had previously been prosecuted interstate over record keeping and providing substandard care.

Camp Australia was fined $10,000 for exceeding limits on the number of children that attended the after school program it ran at Alamanda College in Point Cook.

Magistrate Roslyn Porter said the offending took place when an online booking system allowed more parents to book their kids into the program had been approved to take.

She said there was an important public interest in making sure that companies which care for children complying with strict government regulations, but she said there was never any suggestion the company compromised the safety of children at the school.

The company also did not charge the parents for looking after children in what it called the “free care” room, so did not profit from its offending.

Ms Porter convicted the company and fined it $10,000, as well as ordered it to pay $25,000 in legal costs to the Victorian Department of Education and Training, which prosecuted the case.

In a statement following the hearing a company spokesman said: “The service was motivated by the desire to provide care to those that sought it … we used appropriate facilities to deliver the care and supervised the care in accordance with regulatory educator to child ratios.”

The company said it had since “set a new direction for the organisation” under a “revitalised and experienced management team”.