A small NSW town has one childcare centre. Now it fears tighter regulation may force it to close
The government is threatening to withdraw funding from centres that fail to meet national standards, but in regional Australia that can be a big ask
For years, on Mondays and Fridays, Marni Turner would spend two hours driving her boys to and from preschool. “I would drive a half an hour … to drop my kid and drive half an hour back to work, and then I would either have my mum pick them up in the afternoon or I would just have a short day and drive back again and pick them up.”
Turner, a psychologist, lives on a cattle farm just outside Guyra, a town 40km north of the New South Wales city of Armidale. Her youngest child started primary school this year, so the family’s mad childcare juggle is finally finished.
“It felt like chaos,” she says. “I couldn’t wait for it to be over.”
There is a single preschool and daycare centre in Guyra, but for many families it is not an option – not least because it’s completely full.
Guyra preschool and long day care centre is approved to educate 29 children, though it only has enough staff to have 25 at any one time. About 45 children are on the waiting list, with parents keen to get their child in or to increase their child’s number of days.
But the centre is constrained by staffing levels and the building’s size.
This means many people make the trek into Armidale each day to get care for their children.
“There are plenty of people in Guyra who bring their kids [to Armidale],” Turner says. “A lot of them work here, to be fair … [but] a lot of people have their kids down here in care because there’s not an option – it’s full.
“The issue in these rural areas is availability. There’s just not enough childcare centres. There’s not enough spaces.”
But there are fears that even the limited places in these tiny, over-subscribed and under-served childcare centres could disappear in light of new legislation that would pull funding for childcare providers that repeatedly fail to meet national standards, including those unrelated to child safety.
The legislation, announced as the government grapples with how to make the sector safer in the wake of the shocking allegations of sexual abuse by a childcare worker in Melbourne, will be introduced in federal parliament next week to allow the government to strip providers of the right to receive the federally funded childcare subsidy.
The details of the bill are yet to be released, but the federal education minister, Jason Clare, has said it would be used in cases where state regulators have identified centres that are repeatedly not meeting the national standard.
“This will give us the power to issue a condition to that centre and say that if you don’t meet the standards that we’ve set for you as a nation over the course of … a couple of months, then we will suspend your childcare funding or we’ll cancel it,” he told the ABC on Wednesday.
Clare has called the threat of withdrawing the subsidy, which makes up about 70% of funding for childcare centres, “the biggest stick that the commonwealth has to wield here”.
Experts have welcomed the move. Carolyn Smith, the early education director at the United Workers Union, which covers the early childhood education workforce, says it is “pretty shocking” the government did not already have the means to cut a centre’s funding if it was doing the wrong thing.
“Previously … they had no legal basis to withhold [the subsidy],” she says. “We really welcome that change to the legislation … There needs to be consequences for poor behaviour.”
But there are concerns in rural communities that a stick like this, wielded without an understanding of the challenges facing centres outside large cities, could have devastating consequences. And that real reform of the sector – one affected by a huge workforce shortage, complicated compliance measures, and state-based and sometimes ineffective regulatory processes – will be pushed aside in favour of simplistic measures like pulling funding from “failing” centres.
‘We’re not alone in this’
Guyra’s only preschool may be at risk of falling into that category.
Since its last inspection last September, it has been classified as “working towards” on the national ratings of childcare services – meaning it is failing to meet national standards, like roughly 10% of Australia’s early childhood education providers. Before this it was “meeting” quality standards.
“The primary reason for that – the only reason for that, really – is because we can’t attract an early childhood teacher,” says Aimee Hutton, the acting chief officer of corporate and community for Armidale council, which operates the preschool.
An early childhood teacher – or ECT – is the highest-qualified teacher in a childcare service, needing to have completed at least four years of tertiary study, including an accredited teacher education program like a bachelor of education or bachelor of teaching.
The Guyra preschool, says Hutton, needs an ECT for 10 hours a week to meet the regulations.
It has tried, desperately, to fill the gap: advertising the position multiple times; going directly to universities to see if a student could take on the job (a person can hold the position while working towards the requisite qualification); advertising the role as one that could be done remotely, with an ECT in Sydney developing the curriculum via phone and Zoom conversations with the educators in Guyra; and approaching primary school teachers about taking on the role as a side gig.
“We just can’t find anybody,” Hutton says. “So, until we find an ECT, we will remain ‘working towards’ because we just can’t meet that quality standard.”
It is unclear how a centre like Guyra’s – failing due to staffing shortages it is trying desperately to address – would be treated under the new law. Hutton says the NSW education department, which is responsible for inspecting and regulating the centre, has been “very good. They understand the predicament we’re in.”
Anecdotally, she says she’s heard other towns face similar challenges. “The indication I’ve been given by the department is we’re not alone in this.”
Clare’s office did not answer questions about how the standards would be applied to rural centres – which have higher rates of centres failing to meet standards than services in cities – or provide more detail about the way the law would be enforced.
It pointed Guardian Australia to comments he made to the ABC: “If we get this legislation right, it won’t mean that we’re shutting centres down, it will mean that we’re lifting standards up where centres aren’t meeting the standards at the moment.”
‘They’re doing the job of 10 people’
Lauren Hassett can’t imagine Guyra without a preschool.
“A preschool in a small town is a staple thing,” she says. “It’s the same as having a pub and a little grocer. It’s an essential part of the town.”
The youngest of Hassett’s four children finished up at Guyra preschool last year and she has only glowing things to say about the centre.
“The current staff of the preschool … it’s like they’re doing the job of 10 people. And I know it’s a small centre, they’ve only got the capacity for so many children, but it was a great centre for my kids.”
If it were to shut, she imagines people would initially seek alternate care in Armidale but eventually the long drive would become too frustrating.
“People would either pull their kids and either have them at home and no longer work, which would affect family finances, or they’d move into Armidale where it’s more expensive to live.”
Turner says this would be catastrophic for small towns: “The young families are really the backbone of the communities. They’re the ones that are in the school, they keep sporting clubs going, they’re keeping their local organisations going, they’re contributing, they’re going out to dinner at the pub. They’re the ones that are keeping little towns alive.”
For Alice*, a single mother who did not wish to give her real name, Guyra preschool has provided essential support and respite as she recovers from a traumatic family event.
Her daughter attends the centre a few days a week and the impact on her has been enormous. “At her age, education is so important … since going there she’s been developing so much, she’s made so many friends along the way and I’m so pleased with the centre, they’re the best.”
She adds: “It’s hard to be around the clock every day with a child. But to have that break, you need to set yourself back and recover and then go back into mum mode, that’s so important, you know?”
She cannot fathom what she would do if the centre were shut down, saying travelling to Armidale would cost her too much in petrol and it would cause her too much anxiety to have her daughter so far from her, in case she fell ill or experienced an emergency.
“It’s a small town and every small town should have a small little daycare,” she says.
‘The community is different’
Turner agrees. “I’m super passionate about this, because people sitting in some office in Canberra have no idea about the challenges of living in regional and rural Australia.”
She served on the parent management committee of her kids’ community preschool for years, including as president, and witnessed first-hand the challenges of running a regional childcare service – including attracting qualified staff, managing compliance requirements and finding casual workers, something she describes as “near impossible … Covid was a nightmare!”
Adding to the difficulties: there are fewer international workers – something the sector relies on heavily – in rural communities and younger people often leave the regions, drying up a trainee workforce.
“It’s just hard,” she says.
The solutions to making the sector safer and stronger need to factor all of this in, she says. “There are so many decisions that are made based on what the biggest population – in the cities – do and there’s no consideration and there’s no incentives or extras or anything for rural [communities].”
One proposal, which came out of a Productivity Commission report into early childhood education released last year, was that the federal government change its funding model for childcare provision.
Instead of providing funding solely through the childcare subsidy, the government could provide funding directly to centres in lower socioeconomic areas or where service provision was “thin” to boost the centres’ ability to meet need.
Such a model would be in line with the way that school funding is set up, providing additional money for schools that serve communities that are disadvantaged or have additional needs, and in line with the NSW preschool funding model, under which the state government provides additional funding to services in remote areas, as well as additional loading to support Aboriginal children, those from low-income households and children with English-language needs.
Karen Bramley, the director of a community preschool in Armidale, has been working in the sector for nearly 20 years and says the issues facing it cannot be fixed with quick measures.
“It’s just a whole network,” she says. “One thing causes another thing. You’ve got your funding issue, you’ve got your staffing issue, you’ve got the quality of staff coming through, you’ve got the pressures of changes in compliance that come through.”
What would she like politicians to know about the experience of running a centre in rural Australia?
“Maybe they all need to come and have a little look out in the rural areas and not just stereotype everyone as if it was happening in the big cities, because the community is different.”