The Australian Childcare Alliance (ACA) NSW President, Lyn Connolly, will be attending a meeting with the Early Childhood Education Advisory Group Meeting to discuss rorting and other issues in Family Day Care.
"As the President of your industry peak body, I am a participant at the NSW Department of Education’s Early Childhood Education Advisory Group and as such I will be meeting with this group on Tuesday 4th April. Information collected at this meeting will then be taken to the NSW Minister for Early Childhood Education in preparation for the next Council of Australian Governments (COAG) Education Council meeting on Friday 7th April," said Mrs Connolly.
Leslie Loble, Deputy Secretary, will be hosting the meeting and one of the topics on the agenda is a discussion of the options to address fraud and other issues in family day care.
ACA NSW urgently needs your members' assistance in the collection of any information services have related to fraud in FDC.
"We need you to tell us anything you think we need to know about FDC fraud or any other issues you know of in FDC in your area," said Mrs Connolly.
Some members have told Mrs Connolly there are FDC Educators who approach people with young children in the street and ask them to sign up their children to their FDC scheme and it won’t cost them a cent as the FDC Educator only collects the CCB with no charge or gap fee to the parent.
Some members have told there are other FDC Educators who approach people with young children in the street and offer to pay them half the CCB weekly in return for completing the necessary paperwork. The FDC Educators then help the parent to complete the forms – although these parents are paid 50% of the CCB weekly they never take their children to the FDC Educator.
Some members have told there are sets of 3 or 4 FDC Educators who band together and hire an apartment or house and work out of these premises meaning that there can be 12 to 16 young children plus 9 to 12 OSHC children all being cared for in the one house – in other words a quasi-long day care centre that operates without approval or licence by the NSW Department of Education and potentially the local council.
All this is happening while more and more long daycare centres are facing oversupply issues which are also affecting their occupancy levels and whilst we are currently collecting data regarding oversupply I now need you to urgently tell me what you know about FDC fraud or any other issues you know are occurring in the FDC sector in your area so I can best represent your interests at this meeting.
Members are invited to provide feedback to https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/FDC-rorts by COB Monday 3 April 2017.