In July 2018 there will be significant changes to the way the Federal government funds child care in Australia. The details are still being sorted out and may change but I am getting asked a lot of questions by Child Care centres so I thought I would share what I understand at this point. In this blog I will try to tackle the changes affecting Attendances.
If you read my previous blog you will know that parents will need to confirm fee agreements to the department before any benefit is paid. Additionaly the department intends to discontinue providing benefit estimate information on enrolment.
Taken together it could be a number of weeks into an enrolment before you find out what benefit, if any, a parent will be receiving and therefore what their gap will be. The department's view is that parents will be expected to pay the full amount until then and services shouldn't be billing in advance anyway !
Many services have taken a lenient attitude to parents struggling to get CRNs out of centerlink. This approach will be even more problematic under the new system.
Possibly the biggest change from the perspective of day to day operations is the requirement that sign in and sign out times must be reported for every child every session.
For many centres the extra workload of entering this information from attendance sheets just wont be practical, so if you havent already started thinking about digital sign-in for your parents you probably should.
Will your families be better off or worse off under the new system ?
Invite them to try the government's Child Care Subsidy Estimator and find out.
