Flexibility key to reforming childcare sector

Australian families are crying out for more childcare places that suit their working needs and don’t break their household budgets.

So it’s mystifying that it’s taken so long for the government to come up with an eminently sensible option: allow childcare operators to introduce part-day places and charge by the hour.

How many parents job-share, work casual shifts, or — in fields such as hospitality, health care and retail — work to changing rosters? These parents are not well-served by inflexible billing practices that see them paying for 10- or 12-hour days at childcare when they need care for only part of that time.

And how many parents are finding themselves completely locked out of accessing a place for their child because that same inflexibility means they can’t effectively ‘share’ one full-time place? The normalisation of job-sharing has been a huge benefit to all kinds of workers, especially part-time working parents. It makes sense to apply the same logic to childcare places.

Of course, the childcare industry is caterwauling in response to this proposal. After all, parents pay the full-day fees and the taxpayer helps parents by subsidising fees with Child Care Benefit and Child Care Rebate — regardless of whether care is actually being used by parents. Childcare providers are obviously the beneficiaries of the current arrangement.

It’s very cheeky, and misleading, of the industry to whip out the Helen Lovejoy defence (“won’t somebody think of the children?”) in saying that part-day childcare is insufficient for children’s early learning.

However, research evidence shows that as far as early learning is concerned, part-time — two or three days of six-hour stints, or five days of three- to four-hour stints — is the most beneficial for kids’ learning and has the least negative impact on their emotional wellbeing and behaviour.

School-age children, who are older and have much better capacity to stay focused, have only six-hour school days. Adults generally work eight hours a day, and there are some studies that question how much of this time is used productively.

It beggars belief, then, that the learning of very young children could somehow benefit from 10-12 hours per day in childcare.

Some parents have no choice but to work the standard full-time working week. Others are more blessed, or their jobs require flexibility. These parents should not be punished for their needs by being forced to shell out for care they don’t use, and for which the taxpayer chips in as well.

The federal Minister for Education, Simon Birmingham, has made it very clear that no centre will be forced to charge for care by the hour. There is no suggestion that centres which cater predominantly or entirely for a cohort of parents who rely on the full day flat fee service will be forced to pay for multiple blocks at a higher price.

But there is no question that centres could be doing more to accommodate parents’ and children’s needs. At the very least, part-time blocks which fit neatly into the full-time day — four or six hours for centres open for 12 hours; five for centres open for 10 — have the capacity to better suit parents’ different work needs, as well as the early learning needs of children who may not be able to access a formal preschool program.

Governments could facilitate more choice by changing regulations to remove obstacles and disincentives, making it easier for childcare providers to organise their staffing and roster their childcare places to suit more people as a consequence. The government’s plan to greatly simplify the structure and administrative arrangements surrounding childcare fees starting in 2017 could play a significant role in this.

There is something to be gained by this proposal for parents, children, the government and even individual childcare providers. But the only interests being served by the status quo are those of the childcare industry, who enjoy the ensuing windfalls.

Trisha Jha is a Policy Analyst at the Centre for Independent Studies and author of Regulating for Quality in Childcare: The Evidence Base.