The Federal Minister for Education, the Hon Simon Birmingham MP, announced $43.7 million of nett annual administrative cost savings by way of reducing 'red tape' as part of the review that began in 2014 of the National Partnership Agreement on the National Quality Agenda for Early Childhood Education and Care. The announcement also foresees an increased oversight of Family Day Care providers on top of increases in compliance check from just 523 in 2012/2013 to 3,100 in 2015/2016.
According to the Australian Children's Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA) today, the envisaged key changes to the National Law are:
- a revised National Quality Standard (NQS) to strengthen quality through greater clarity, remove conceptual overlap between elements and standards, clarify language and reduce the number of standards and elements from 18 standards to 15, and 58 to 40 elements;
- improved oversight and support within Family Day Care to achieve better compliance and quality across the whole sector;
- removing supervisor certificate requirements so service providers have more autonomy in deciding who can be the responsible person in each service, and to reduce red tape; and
- introduction of a national educator-to-child ratio of 1:15 for [predominantly out-of-school-hours (OOSH) care] services providing education and care to school-age children. A 12 month transitional period will apply in NSW to allow the sector time for introduction of this new requirement.
These recommended amendments are to be implemented in two stages:
- the National Law and regulation changes to come into effect in NSW in October 2017; and
- a revised National Quality Standard to come into effect on 1 February 2018.
Such a long timeframe will give the government regulators and sector time to transition.
Naturally, the Australian Childcare Alliance (ACA) NSW is extremely keen to examine the detail of these new proposed changes. However, ACA NSW is somewhat pleased that this announcement confirms what it has been advocating for years, that is the sector is in significant need for a more streamlined and cost-effective regulatory framework if the Government and the sector want to achieve both quality and affordability.
Theoretically, the reduction from 18 to 15 standards and 58 to 40 elements represent reductions of between 16.7% and 31% in terms of compliance to the NQS. ACA NSW's immediate interests are what these 15 standards and 40 elements are and what does compliance now mean under the new NQS in terms of the quality of early childhhood education and care and the corresponding cost to achieve them.
ACA NSW will be consulting members about these changes at its upcoming Network Meetings and webinars. It will also be communicating to both Federal and State Governments, parliamentarians and their Departments about our findings.