Care operator backflips on plan for child-free day

A major childcare chain has abandoned plans for a ‘child-free day’ at its centres.

Guardian Early Learning Group has abandoned plans to introduce a ‘child-free day’ at its centres and charge ­parents more for staff training. Picture: Thinkstock

A major childcare chain owned by a Swiss-based private equity group with associated entities registered to a tax haven in the Channel Islands has abandoned plans to introduce a “child-free day” at its centres and charge ­parents more for staff training.

Guardian Early Learning Group, which runs more than 100 centres in six states, wrote to families on June 18 to advise them it could not afford to train its educators outside centre hours, despite increasing fees by more than 9 per cent to $120 a day.

The measure, revealed by The Australian yesterday, would have slugged parents $80 per child for a day with no care on top of public holidays, for which they are ­already made to pay.

Guardian Early Learning Group chief executive Thomas Hardwick yesterday backed down in a letter to parents.

“We pride ourselves on working in collaboration with our families, so a child-free day will no longer be happening at our centres,” Mr Hardwick wrote in an email yesterday afternoon.

“Since releasing our fee review letters last week a number of families have expressed concerns with the arrangements proposed for closing our centres for a day to enable us to undertake professional development with our educators.

“We apologise unreservedly for any distress this may have caused and thank those families who provided us with prompt feedback. We remain committed to the ongoing professional ­development of our educators and will continue to explore ways in which we can deliver this without impacting families.”

In his initial note, Mr Hardwick said the child-free day was necessary because training staff out of hours was “often taxing on our educators and typically unpaid, voluntary time as the cost of paying overtime rates for out-of-hours training is prohibitive”.

Guardian has been owned by three private equity firms since it was founded by Mr Hardwick. In early 2016 the business was bought by the Geneva-headquartered Partners Group for about $440 million. That represented a $300m profit for Malaysia-based Navias Capital Partners, which acquired the company in 2013 from Wolseley Private Equity.

Company searches reveal Partners Group has three associated entities registered to an ­address in St Peter Port, the capital of Guernsey, where the company tax rate is 0 per cent for almost all businesses.

Mr Hardwick said Guardian’s main operating entity was an “Australian company paying full tax” and so were its upstream holding companies.

The other companies form an “offshore pooling entity that holds the interests of a multitude of offshore pension/super funds, which then collectively invests into our Australian holding company”, he said.

When asked if the business used these entities to minimise tax, Mr Hardwick said this was “tricky tax territory” and referred questions to the Swiss group.

Labor assistant treasury spokesman Andrew Leigh said the Coalition and the PM were failing “to crack down on multinational profit-shifting”.