The collapse of two childcare centre operators last month has left hundreds of parents stranded, affecting 15 Genius Childcare and HEI Schools centres in Melbourne and ten others in WA, Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra.
A number of the centres have closed permanently, while others were shut while administrators sought to sell them to another company.
Genius’s Taylors Lake centre in Melbourne closed its doors after almost 20 staff refused to turn up to work, having gone four weeks without pay.
It’s the result of a childcare system where more than 70 per cent of centres are now run by for-profit companies.
This is also leading to sub-standard care. A Four Corners report in March found 10 per cent of childcare centres had never been rated by regulators for safety and quality of care, with many others failing to meet the standards.
3 Bears childcare operated three centres for a decade before it was shut down following repeated safety failures, over-enrolments and abuse of staff.
In February, two of the Genius childcare centres were also forced to close temporarily by regulators before the company’s collapse, one in northern Adelaide for “operating in a manner that poses an immediate risk to the safety, health or wellbeing of children”, and another in Canberra.
The centres that continue to run on a not-for-profit basis have higher levels of staffing, and are more than twice as likely to exceed national minimum quality standards than the for-profit centres.
Instead of funding childcare centres directly as it once did, the government now subsidises parents for the cost of childcare fees. This has pushed up costs and failed to deliver childcare centres where they are needed.
The free market model in childcare has failed. Instead of simply increasing subsidies, the government should take the system over completely and run it as a public service.