EXCERPTS
Childcare and education costs have soared up to six times faster than inflation in the past year, hitting families hard.
Many childcare centres jacked up their fees this month to cover the cost of extra staff required from January 1 next year.
Parents are now paying 8.5 per cent more for daycare and 5.4 per cent more for schooling than they were charged in June last year, Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows.
Sydney parents have been hit with the biggest price hikes, as education costs jumped 9.1 per cent and childcare 8.9 per cent during 2014-15 — six times faster than the general inflation rate of 1.5 per cent.
In Melbourne, childcare costs soared 8.8 per cent — double the rate of education cost increases.
Parents’ out-of-pocket childcare costs — the amount they pay after taxpayer subsidies — ballooned by 8.5 per cent in Brisbane, 8.6 per cent in Perth, 7.9 per cent in Canberra and 7 per cent in Darwin.
The cost increases were lower — but still far higher than inflation — in Adelaide (5.9 per cent) and Hobart (3.5 per cent).
Australia’s biggest childcare chain, the not-for-profit Goodstart Early Learning, raised fees by about 5 per cent across its 644 centres this month.
Melbourne City Council increased its fees from $98 to $106 a day — an 8 per cent increase.
Goodstart spokesman John Cherry said the fee hike would pay for the cost of hiring extra childcare workers next year.
From January 1, all daycare centres must have one carer for every five two-year-olds and one for every 11 children aged three to five. The change will double the number of childcare workers required in toddler rooms in South Australia, which now has just one carer for every 10 two-year-olds, and in NSW, where one carer looks after eight toddlers.
Australian Childcare Alliance president Gwynn Bridge said the federal government’s freeze on rebates and subsidies for childcare fees had fuelled parents’ out-of-pocket costs.
“While we really do feel that education and the quality of care has increased, we are disappointed that governments have never put funds in to assist families to meet the cost of this new legislation,’’ she said.
Ms Bridge said centres were already hiring extra staff to deal with the extra paperwork required by the National Quality Framework, a federal-state agreement to improve the quality of childcare.
The NQF has already forced daycare centres to hire university-qualified early childhood teachers, and requires that half the staff hold a diploma of childcare.
The Abbott government plans to boost daycare subsidies in 2017, when it streamlines the payment system. It will increase funding from $6.5 billion this financial year to $11bn a year in 2018-19, as a reward to families with both parents in paid work.
-reprinted from The Australian