Childcare challenges

Its a familiar story, sounds like a hassle that rings true with loads of people unfortunatly.

I had a similar scenario with staff not paying any attention to the children at our sons centres… we tried three.

So we took him out and started our own.

you just need a place that cares.

Good article. One of the main problems in the sector is that it has gone from child minding to “early learning” & jacked all the costs up.

We had 3 kids & all I wanted for them was they be fed, nappies changed & that they be safe we didn’t give a rats about assessments.

Best care we ever had was a home based Pakistani woman who looked after her own boy plus 2 of hours.

Later we had them in various childcare centres including early learning places. There is no guarantee that carers with high level qualifications are any good we found some very sloppy lazy staff had the highest quals.

Give me a granny or a mother with basic common sense anyday.

54-11 said :

If part of your problem is “high turnover of staff”, then think about what the carers are being paid. My wife is a childcare educator and earns just $20.20 per hour (and it’s been this way for some time and is unlikely to go up any time soon).

So who in their right mind would stick around in a job like that? They have to be qualified, are pushed around by the childcare operators, and are often unappreciated and unloved by the parents.

Until pay and conditions of service issues in childcare centres are properly addressed, then staff will keep leaving. As can be seen in the wider public service, often those who leave are just the ones who should stay (and vice versa).

Perhaps parents should show a bit more love and empathy to the underpaid and overworked people who are looking after your little ones.

Why would anybody put their child into the care of somebody who earns over $20.20/hour, so that they can go to work for only $25/hour to try and help pay the bills? It is counter productive and often cheaper to stay at home instead of having family benefit reduced.
That one carer often looks after not just one child but several, so each child is really only costing say $5/hour to be looked after. If this is the case, where is the $300-400 per week per child going to? Obviously it isn’t into the pocket of the carer as they might get $$600 per week after tax in wages for 40 hours work, for charging four parents somewhere in the order of $1600. My guess is the operators of these places are pocketing quite a nice sum into an offshore account somewhere.

If part of your problem is “high turnover of staff”, then think about what the carers are being paid. My wife is a childcare educator and earns just $20.20 per hour (and it’s been this way for some time and is unlikely to go up any time soon).

So who in their right mind would stick around in a job like that? They have to be qualified, are pushed around by the childcare operators, and are often unappreciated and unloved by the parents.

Until pay and conditions of service issues in childcare centres are properly addressed, then staff will keep leaving. As can be seen in the wider public service, often those who leave are just the ones who should stay (and vice versa).

Perhaps parents should show a bit more love and empathy to the underpaid and overworked people who are looking after your little ones.

jgsma said :

I think it is a genuine attempt to ensure that child-care centres provide the kind of learning experiences that good parenting would supply if the child is cared for at home. Many years ago when my children were small there was little regulation and some child-care situations were appalling, such as the lady I met whose idea of play was to put the children out in the back-yard with no play equipment or toys so that they could ‘just run around’.
Unfortunately, with bureaucracy often comes over-kill.

Haven’t you ever seen kids “stuck in the backyard without toys” picking up whatever is lying around and using their imaginations? I remember a bunch of kids turning the tanbark in a garden bed into toy cars and thing by rubbing the larger chunks on a rough footpath to shape it, and e.g. using sticks as axles.

Couldn’t agree more. Our childcare does an ‘assessment’ full of early years framework nonsense and very little about my children. Then they say they have a ‘school readiness program’ which consists of them teaching the children their abcs (probably incorrectly). I sent my son to our free preschool this year and could not be more happy with the result, and can’t wait to send my daughter next year. Learning through play should be the aim of the game for children in child care and while i think there does need to be some kind of framework and quality to the system, the early years framework seems to have made that harder than it actually is.

I think it is a genuine attempt to ensure that child-care centres provide the kind of learning experiences that good parenting would supply if the child is cared for at home. Many years ago when my children were small there was little regulation and some child-care situations were appalling, such as the lady I met whose idea of play was to put the children out in the back-yard with no play equipment or toys so that they could ‘just run around’.
Unfortunately, with bureaucracy often comes over-kill.

Amy Birchall said :

Until I read this article I wasn’t aware that kids in childcare were assessed against learning outcomes. They’re babies and toddlers, for goodness sake. I don’t have kids yet, but common sense suggests that it’s best to let kids be kids, and to let childcare workers do the work they’re trained to do (looking after children), rather than swamping them with meaningless administrative tasks that do little to improve a child’s development or wellbeing and provide no real insight for parents.

Even when you take into account the long hours and low pay, it’s no wonder that staff turnover is so high…

Best of luck with moving to the new centre, Emily!

They’re not assessed as such – not graded. It’s just a way to check that children have been exposed to the prescribed range of experiences and activities. Our experience has been that when our eldest started daycare at the beginning of 2010, our centre was already using the framework (or a very similar precursor) and had been doing so for some time. So we know that all of this is happening because we’re given info on it at the start of the year, the children are assigned a symbol for their learning group but other than that, it’s all very smooth and unobtrusive. We get a simple one-page progress report at the end of the year. We’ve probably been very lucky, and I can imagine that a centre implementing this would find it very unwieldy to begin with.

As for taking time away from caring for the children – our centre has always put programming time into the staff roster, and staffed the centre accordingly (after all, there are required ratios now, so I imagine that rather than staff being pulled away from childcare, they are rotating through a slightly larger pool of staff).

I absolutely agree that babies and toddlers should be playing without being “assessed” but even “just” playing takes a lot of organising and administration to make it happen. Instilling enthusiasm and love for learning in children takes a great deal of planning to allocate resources, rotate activities and keep it “fresh” for kids, developing learning experiences that draw on the children’s own experiences and environment at home (the reason for having the “observation groups”. To my mind, this is just a way of ensuring that a broad base is covered – otherwise children might find themselves in repetitive, uninspiring learning environments (I say learning, but of course at that age, playing=learning=”work”).

So the upshot of all that is that while I appreciate some centres might struggle to implement the framework, it can be done, and I think overall it’s a positive. As with all things childcare, it will come down to the centre and how well they manage the process and adapt.

Best of luck with the move, it’s a huge decision (we made a similar one regarding schooling last year) and I hope it all pans out for your family.

Until I read this article I wasn’t aware that kids in childcare were assessed against learning outcomes. They’re babies and toddlers, for goodness sake. I don’t have kids yet, but common sense suggests that it’s best to let kids be kids, and to let childcare workers do the work they’re trained to do (looking after children), rather than swamping them with meaningless administrative tasks that do little to improve a child’s development or wellbeing and provide no real insight for parents.

Even when you take into account the long hours and low pay, it’s no wonder that staff turnover is so high…

Best of luck with moving to the new centre, Emily!