Centres welcome end of free childcare

Parents might not be looking forward to having to pay childcare fees again but, for daycare centres, it cannot happen soon enough.

Centre director Alex Guan, back, back, with staff and students at Kids Planet Academy, Ryde, in Sydney. Picture: Nikki Short

Parents might not be looking forward to having to pay childcare fees again but, for daycare centres, it cannot happen soon enough, with operators insisting they will be much better off even if they suffer a drop in enrolments.

Kids Planet Academy owner Alex Guan said centres had been forced to shoulder the burden of the federal government’s free nat­ionwide childcare program, saying it had unfairly shackled their revenue stream.

Even though he expected enrolments at his centre, in Sydney’s northwest, would fall when parents had to pay fees again next month, Mr Guan welcomed the end of the scheme, saying it would give operators and staff alike greater financial and job security.

“We just can’t wait for the subsidy to end so we can charge parents as normal,” he said.

“Our numbers are now back to where we were before the pandemic in February ... (but) we do expect to lose some children when it’s not free anymore — we’re expecting about 15 per cent of children from families who have lost their jobs and reduce their days.

“Even if we lose 15 per cent of our children, we still are better off. With free childcare, we weren’t getting paid that much but still needed to retain the same amount of staff.”

Under the relief scheme announced in April, centres were paid up to 50 per cent of their pre-coronavirus fee revenue by the federal government, in combination with JobKeeper wage sub­sidies, as part of a plan to provide nationwide free childcare throughout the COVID-19 crisis.

From July 12, the scheme will be scrapped and parents will again need to pay for childcare and from July 20 the wage subsidies will be replaced with a fortnightly transition payment of 25 per cent of the pre-COVID fee revenue. The payment is conditional on firms maintaining employment levels and not increasing fees beyond pre-coronavirus levels. “We’re sitting at about 45 per cent of what we normally earn. JobKeeper was meant to subsidise our labour costs, but for us we have casuals who don’t get JobKeeper. So we haven’t really benefited from it. We are actually a making a loss at this point,” Mr Guan said.

Clovel Childcare operations manager Theresa Willet described the situation as a catch-22.

“There’s a lot of opinion that parents won’t be able to cope, but we have lots of families who are working who will continue to need the care,” she said.

Ms Willet who kept all her staff on JobKeeper during coronavirus said retaining them would be dependent on whether she could increase her centre’s attendance levels, currently at 60 per cent compared to pre-COVID.

“My concern is the children who are not in attendance, because once you have to pay they will need to claim absence days which they will run out of so I may need to take into account that I may lose these children,” she said.

“Hopefully once back to paying, the best outcome will be that our staff retain their full-time roles. The worst case would be I would have to cut staff hours to make sure business stays viable. Where we’ll be at the end of July, I’m really unsure.”

NSW Childcare Alliance chief Chiang Lim also welcomed the return of centres being able to charge fees at pre-COVID levels.

Meanwhile, Labor has slammed the rollback, its early childhood education spokeswoman Amanda Rishworth calling the scrapping a “snapback” approach.