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Your child care business provides an important community service. We all remember the panic when ABC Learning went into administration, as parents – many of them working full time – desperately needed to secure continued child care. Because of this, if your child care centre is struggling due to certain circumstances, there may be government help available. The Federal Government offers information and support to child care services, and this includes grants and financial assistance.

Avoiding late payments and bad debt in the first place is far better than getting stuck in a difficult situation. Creating a culture of prompt payment at your child care service will help avoid some of the issues. Bear in mind that you may be one of the lowest priorities for a family struggling financially, despite the important role you play in their life. After all, how can they go to work and earn an income if they don’t have child care? But the reality is that families tend to expect more time and understanding from a business such as a child care provider than from a bank or electricity provider.

Are you opening a new child care service? Have you thought about the Child Care Benefit (CCB) and Child Care Rebate (CCR)? Currently all parents are entitled to CCR, this can be paid directly to the parent instead of the service (as can CCB however not many parents request lump sum payments of CCB).  These schemes are definitely something every child care service should be a part of. In this blog I’ll explain what the benefits of being an approved CCB service are, what you need to do to become eligible and what other government funding opportunities are available to you.

Child care is an intensely customer-facing business and one built on trust. You are looking after people’s children, and you have extensive face-to-face contact with parents. This makes it all the more challenging when parents don’t pay. You still have to greet them each day in a friendly way, and discuss their child’s progress, while knowing that behind the scenes you’re having to escalate measures against them. No one wants to get to the stage of having bad debtors. You should of course do everything you can to avoid it. But at some point, you may have to call in your debts in a more formal way.

In a national strategic review the Australian Skills Quality Authority (ASQA) revealed that some registered training organisations (RTOs) offering early childhood education and care training are producing ‘graduates’ in 25 weeks. This is half the minimum length of time recommended in the Australian Qualifications Framework. Not only does this create a potentially unsafe environment for the children in their care, it leaves the ‘graduates’ heavily under-qualified and inexperienced, undermines other RTOs that are offering high-quality courses and places child care services in a compromising position for when they are hiring a child care worker. Child care training is competency-based training and certificate III courses should take one to two years to complete, not 25 weeks.