Submission to Senate Education and Employment References Committee

Despite good intentions, Australia’s Early Childhood Education and Care system has expanded well beyond its original purpose as a work support measure for families. The result is a framework that has become overly complex, costly, and administratively burdensome, without delivering commensurate improvements in child outcomes or value for taxpayers.

CIS argues that the federal role in ECEC should focus on enabling parental workforce participation and maintaining child safety, while avoiding the drift toward universal early education and entitlement-based funding. Regulation under the National Quality Framework (NQF) should be proportionate, risk-based, and evidence-led, centred on children’s safety and the quality of daily care interactions rather than costly structural mandates.
To restore purpose, affordability, and sustainability, CIS proposes:

• A tiered, family-centred funding model that maintains a universal safety floor but allows subsidies to
  be portable across approved forms of care, including home-based and informal settings, with
  regulatory intensity calibrated to risk.
• A simplified, proportionate NQF that retains essential safety and welfare provisions but reduces
  unnecessary documentation, qualification inflation, and uniform compliance burdens that drive up
  fees.

Together, these reforms would realign the system with its core aims: supporting parents to work, children to thrive, and taxpayers to receive value for money — without pricing care out of reach or embedding open-ended spending growth.