I receive emails from my daughter’s childcare centre almost daily. Usually they are administrative notes, reminders about dress-up days and warnings of gastro outbreaks. So when an email arrived at 5.30pm on a recent Thursday, I wasn’t expecting it to throw our lives into chaos.
Citing the national workforce shortage, the email said the nursery and toddler rooms would be closed from 8 May, but that the centre would continue to offer care for children aged three and older “at the reduced operating hours of 8am-5pm”. At 18 months old, my daughter, Zara, didn’t make the cut, so with just a week’s notice we would be without childcare.
We live in Cowra, a town of about 10,000 people in the Lachlan Valley, just over four hours west of Sydney. My partner, Mick, has lived here for many years but I only moved from Sydney recently. Having spoken to other parents, I knew that places in one of the three childcare centres in town were hard to come by. So I started planning early, putting Zara’s name on the waitlists at six months old. In November 2022, a few weeks after her first birthday, she began attending childcare two days a week.
Six months later and we are back at square one. The centre has assured us the changes are only temporary and they will reopen as soon as they can hire more educators. But they have been trying to recruit for months and centres all over regional New South Wales are fighting for staff. Soon could be quite a long way off.
We are luckier than most. I work for myself and my partner works from home, though he is often on the road. We have enough flexibility that we can juggle work and parenting, for now. But I know there are other parents who are nurses and teachers and police officers; people who provide essential services to a community that is already stretched thin. With their children at home, what options are there for them to continue working?
One mum I spoke to, with a son attending daycare five days a week, is going to take long service leave. But that’s a short-term solution at best. Her son turns three in a few weeks, tantalisingly close to the accepted age group. She was told to contact the centre again after his birthday, but there’s no guarantee of a place.
The waitlists at the other childcare centres in town are already overflowing. One has up to 30 children in our daughter’s age group waiting for a spot. We have no family here who can step in. Well-meaning friends in Sydney suggested I club together with some other mums for a nanny share, but the idea of finding a qualified nanny with availability in a town like this is laughable.
A fourth childcare centre opened in Cowra in April 2023, and a number of staff from our childcare centre left to work there. This is not surprising: there is a limited pool of potential employees to draw from in a small town. But surely it is a misstep to spend money building a shiny new centre if there is no practical plan to staff it. Instead of adding more childcare places to a desperate town, the new centre has shifted the problem to a different set of families.
And it’s not just childcare. No doctor in town is taking new patients. There is a critical shortage of vets, and the clinic I take our dogs to stopped accepting new patients last year. Almost every business in town is hiring and many have had to reduce their hours due to lack of staff. Even if people wanted to move here to work, there are so few rental properties, they would be hard-pressed to find anywhere to live.
I understood that moving to a small town would require some sacrifices. I can live without a cinema or a wine bar or a Kmart. But our family can’t survive without the most basic of services.
After many frantic calls and emails, I was able to enrol Zara in a new childcare centre in Young – an hour’s drive away. A one-hour commute in Sydney is unremarkable, yet in Cowra it takes no more than five minutes to go anywhere (and you can always park right out the front). So being forced to add four hours of travel time to our week is particularly painful.
The frustrating part is, some aspects of Cowra are booming. Heavy industry is growing and the hospital is undergoing a $110m expansion. There are significant opportunities for people to make money and build a life here. But the supporting services aren’t in place. How can people move to a town where they can’t get childcare or a doctor’s appointment?
We have begun to think seriously about moving. Mick has two older children who are in their final years of high school and, once they graduate, we have nothing that ties us here. Sadly, I’m sure many other young families feel the same.
G8 Education, which runs the childcare centre, said that temporarily closing part of the centre “is not a decision we took lightly”.
“Cowra, like a lot of regional areas, is feeling the full impact of sector-wide workforce shortages which means the recruitment of new educators and teachers is taking a lot longer than usual for our centre,” they said in a statement. “We are doing our upmost to recruit new qualified team members including offering competitive remuneration packages, access to our sector-leading assisted study program and team member recognition and benefit programs. We will increase our service again as new educators join our team, and we sincerely apologise for the disruption and stress this may have caused our families.”
Lucy Jones is a writer in Cowra, NSW
