When Sami Giri found out a few weeks ago that the fees at her daughters’ childcare centre were going up in three weeks, she had a “physiological response”.
“I remember it was a Friday afternoon, at a primary school event,” she tells Guardian Australia. “I was reading emails during the break when it came through. I could feel my blood boiling. I was shaking, getting really stressed, anxious, emotional.”
Giri and her husband’s two daughters, aged seven and four, have been in full-time care since the family moved from Sydney to Brisbane for affordability reasons six years ago. At the time, they lived near the city, and childcare fees were $100 a day.
Now, the family live further away from the city, in Brisbane’s north-west suburbs, and are expecting their third child. They pay $165 a day to send their four-year-old to daycare – “and that is the cheapest we can get”. Since joining their childcare centre 18 months ago, the fees have increased by 26% – an extra $100 out of pocket a week.
“The increase in cost hasn’t matched an increase in quality, yet we are in a position where we have to pay it,” Giri says.
She’s not the only parent to report that the cost of early childhood education is going up, even as government rebates increase this month. Two weeks ago, a report from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission found that over the past four years, childcare fees rose faster than inflation and wage growth – between 20% and 32%, depending on the type of care. Even with government subsidies increasing, out-of-pocket expenses increased between 7% and 15.8% over that time. At the same time, availability is desperately uneven: last year, a report from Victoria University found that 35.2% of the Australian population lives in a childcare “desert”, with a distinct correlation between wealth, availability and cost.
Combined, it’s a portrait of a sector in crisis, with patchy coverage, staff shortages and low pay crippling the ability of parents to find care, of educators to keep it together and make ends meet, and centres to provide properly for the children for whom they share responsibility.
Childcare centres stretched to capacity
For Wayne and his partner Brendan, who asked that their surnames not be used, going back to work was critical to managing the perinatal depression that Wayne suffered after the birth of their child, Hugo. For him to work, though, they required childcare.
Wayne says that many centres, upon learning that they were a gay couple having a baby via surrogacy, told them to come back when the baby was born. The family held off accordingly, only to find after Hugo was born there were no longer places available in their local area.
They put their names down on the waitlists for eight centres. Eventually, when Hugo was three months old, they were offered a single day at a centre a few suburbs away. But Wayne, a social worker, could not find a job in his field that was less than three days a week.
“I said to the centre, oh, is there any chance we can hold off a month? And they said no, the spot’s there, if you don’t take it someone else will have it. So we had to pay for the day, even though I didn’t really use it,” Wayne says.
A little while later, they were offered a second day, and they currently rely on Wayne’s 70-year-old mother who drives from inner-north Melbourne to where they live in the far-eastern suburbs to cover Wayne’s third working day each week.
Wayne says while he knows the staff at the centre are trying their best, he worries about their working conditions.
“One of the educators who we’re quite close with, I can see she’s quite burnt out,” Wayne says. “They work really hard, but you can tell they’re stressed. So, better pay or more leave would probably help.”
The pay issue: ‘educators deserve so much more’
Better pay is precisely what early childhood educators are campaigning for. On 6 June, the United Workers Union filed an application on behalf of thousands of educators to commence multi-employer bargaining under new laws that came into effect the same day. They are seeking the 25% pay rise that they lobbied for but did not receive in this year’s federal budget, despite salary increases in the sector being one of six key budget recommendations of the inaugural women’s economic equality taskforce.
Helen Gibbons, director of early education at United Workers Union, says low pay is the single most significant issue affecting the availability of childcare across the country.
“It doesn’t matter what else you do, it will pale in significance unless you can address the pay issue,” Gibbons says. “Educators can be paid as little as $23, $24 an hour for an experienced, qualified, stressful, difficult, important job. And they feel that lack of respect really keenly.”
It’s common for workers in the sector to have second jobs to make ends meet, Gibbons says. That increases the potential for burnout and exhaustion, and makes it more likely that they will leave the industry entirely – especially if they have children of their own. While many educators’ employers offer their own workers heavily discounted care places, those workers will still often leave after they have had a second child.
Gibbons warns against relying on an international workforce to fill the staffing gaps. International workers on visas “really add to the rich tapestry of early education” and contribute to raising children in a culturally and linguistically diverse environment, and face often unfair restrictions or obstacles to their work rights, she says.
“But [international labour] is not a solution to the workforce crisis in early education, because the workforce crisis in early education is being almost solely driven by low pay. There’s not a shortage of early educators in Australia, there’s just a shortage of people who want to work in early education.”
Rebecca Stiles, director of Hillbank Community Children’s Centre, a not-for-profit in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, says filling gaps left by people leaving the sector is nearly impossible. The lack of staff means it’s hard to backfill when her employees become burnt out or need a break. Combined with government mandated staff-to-children ratios, that means she has had to implement a system that allows her to send home some of the 56 children who attend the centre at short notice if there aren’t enough workers.
“Educators deserve so much more than what they get now for the work they do,” Stiles says. “We need people to actually recognise the professional work that we do here.”
Stiles says that in order for the pay increase to get to the workers without further stretching parents, that money has to come from the government.
“Parents pay enough as it is,” says Stiles. “Our fees would just go through the absolute roof [if the money had to come from the service]. No one would be able to afford it anyway and we wouldn’t need educators because there’d be no children here.”
The flow-on effects of a struggling sector
The lack of available places and the staffing shortage also affects the availability of essential services, such as healthcare.
Inês Baptista and her partner are both general practitioners who live on the Gold Coast. They have two children – a two-year-old and a one-month-old. Their older child has a place in a local childcare centre, but the youngest is on a waitlist. Baptista cannot return to work until they secure care for the youngest. She has no idea when that will happen.
On top of that, the family has been planning to move rurally, working with an agency to find jobs out of the major cities.
“The main challenge that we face all across the board is childcare,” Baptista says. “So even though there are hospitals that are willing to employ us and pay for our accommodation and pay for our travels, we can’t find childcare.”
They had particular trouble in the New South Wales town of Armidale, where Baptista’s partner has been working intermittently. The town has lost at least eight GPs in the space of a few months, with reports that about 6,000 patients have been left in the lurch. Baptista’s partner visited every centre in the town, she says. Only one could accommodate their elder child. None had space for the baby.
For Sami Giri, the childcare crisis is ultimately part of the cycle of gender pay inequity: “parents not being able to access childcare so they can’t go back to work, their financial position being impacted in terms of super and future work prospects.”
At the same time, it is “really important” to Giri that her two daughters “see me as a whole person”.
“My role extends beyond the role of a parent,” she says. “They need to see me doing things that are for me, and are contributing to society in a meaningful way, without feeling a sense of guilt or shame … It feels like an inequitable and inaccessible system, which has a real negative lasting impact on families. It’s not sustainable.”
• PANDA provides support for perinatal mental health. They can be reached on 1300 726 306 (9am to 7.30pm, Monday to Saturday AEST) or at panda.org.au. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. International helplines can be found at befrienders.org
