Sue Dunlevy: After-school care is a mess and needs fixing
First it was the banks. Then it was the building industry. Now we’re finding massive gaps in the regulation of the after-school care sector, and our children deserve better, writes Sue Dunlevy.
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Parents weighed down by the work/family juggle want the best care for their kids but in too many after-school care services they are not getting it.
Our investigation has found one in four of the nation’s after-school services don’t meet the standards and they are being allowed to get away with it by an under-resourced regulatory scheme.
Services that are not up to scratch are meant to be checked within 12 months to ensure improvements occur but we found there were five years between checks in some cases and even then services still weren’t meeting standards.
But that’s only the beginning of the crisis in after-school care because our research found thousands of families can’t even find a place for their kids in the sector.
This is because our governments are not planning for it.
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Teachers need their classrooms after school to set up for the next day and this means often after-school care services have only limited space in school halls to run a service and can’t meet demand.
We spoke to multiple services who said they had waiting lists of 30-100 children.
Families where parents are working hard to pay off a mortgage need a safe place for their kids to be after school.
The federal government spends $740 million a year subsidising the sector but washed its hands of ensuring the money goes to quality services when it axed its $20 million contribution towards the regulatory scheme in 2018.
And state governments are clearly not keeping up with demand for care or the inspections needed to ensure the care that is available is of sufficient quality.
After-school care has emerged as the latest example of the widespread regulation failure that is undermining trust in business and politics.
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It happened in the banking industry, then the building industry was allowed to get away with dangerous substandard structures and more recently we learned our biggest aged care providers were ill-treating our oldest and most vulnerable Australians.
Our children deserve better.
It’s time to make it mandatory for after school care services to prominently display their quality rating at the service and on their website.
The Federal Government must reinstate its $20 million funding contribution towards enforcing standards so we can ensure services rated as working towards standards are checked within 12 months.
State and federal governments must draw up a long term plan for the sector to find enough space to cater for demand and build after school care space into new schools.
And centres must publish waiting lists for each after school care service and this should act as a spur to governments to provide more places.
Sue Dunlevy is News Corp’s National Health Writer.