A$3.6 Billion Pay Bump Left Them Out: Australia's Family Day Care Sector Shrinks Under One-Size-Fits-All Regulation

According to ABC News, the Australian federal government agreed in June this year to extend funding for a 15% pay rise for early childhood education workers by a further 18 months, totalling approximately A$3.6 billion and covering around 200,000 practitioners — but contract-based family day care educators have been excluded. Regulatory data also shows that the share of approved family day care services among all approved early childhood education services has dropped from 7% in 2016 to 2% in 2025.

Behind these figures are individual families and individual practitioners. At the home of Debbie Macleod, who has worked in Melbourne's west for 37 years, the entrance is lined with neatly arranged learning materials and building blocks, the dining room has been converted into a toy kitchen, and the backyard features a slide and seesaw. She told ABC News that she engages in specialised work planning children's learning journeys and promoting their development, but administrative and compliance pressures keep growing. "I want to give 'family' back to family day care," she said, "we are qualified, we do huge amounts of paperwork, program planning, observations, reflections, and we have to keep journals for inspection." According to ABC News, she earns less than centre-based childcare workers, partly because, as an independent operator, she handles administrative work for long hours without pay.

Family day care educators typically work from their own homes, caring for a maximum of four preschool-aged children at a time — they are either employed by approved services or work under contract with them. But according to ABC News, they must meet exactly the same national regulatory requirements as large institutions. Macleod states bluntly: "When they wrote the rules they had centres in mind, where there is more than one staff member."

A nationwide study of 200 family day care educators led by Deakin University chief investigator Professor Andrea Nolan corroborates this structural problem: all respondents are women, generally older and with more extensive industry experience, but most feel professionally isolated and misunderstood by the wider world. According to ABC News, Nolan said: "They are independent operators, doing everything themselves. When the children leave, the work is not finished — it might not be until six o'clock at night, and only then do their own family members come home."

Treating this profession as work that women are "naturally suited to" is the core issue repeatedly identified by Nolan and several practitioners. Nolan states bluntly: "Society assumes this is women's work, something women are born to do. They are nurturers — it's innate." Macleod, meanwhile, insists repeatedly: "We are not babysitting aunties."

Policy action has not been entirely absent. Following the exposure of multiple childcare centre child abuse cases last July, a Victorian government review found delays in revoking Working with Children Checks, inadequate cross-departmental information sharing, and insufficient regulatory funding. The federal government subsequently agreed to establish a national early childhood educator register and mandated national child safety training from February this year.

Meanwhile, in 2024 the federal government launched a "Capability Trial" in 860 regions, operated by Family Day Care Australia, providing support and resources to educators; it is due to conclude at the end of this year. Family Day Care Australia chief executive Andrew Paterson acknowledged to ABC News: "The sector has lagged in funding from both the federal and state/territory governments, and this has placed pressure on the sustainability of the entire sector." He emphasised that family day care is "often the only viable option" in regional, rural and remote areas.

"We have been lumped into the same framework as centre-based care," Macleod told ABC News, "but it is a completely different business model."