What needs to be done: moving towards a better ratio.
1. The Regulation needs to be amended
Part 4, Division 1, Clause 53, (1) (a) of the Children’s Services Regulation 2004 needs to be amended to read as follows:
The licensee of a centre based or mobile children’s service must ensure that the ratio of primary contact staff to children being provided with the service is: 1:4 in respect of all children who are under the age of two years.
This requirement should apply to all new services from 1 January 2008. To enable currently licensed services to smoothly transfer to the new ratio, the amendment should be made subject to the following transitional provisions:
- compliance for services currently licensed for more than 60 places from 1 January 2008;
- compliance for services currently licensed for 30–59 places from 1 July 2008; and
- compliance for services currently licensed for 29 or less places from 1 January 2009.
Part 5, Clause 58, (2) (a) of the Children’s
Services Regulation 2004 must be amended to read as follows. The maximum
number of children that may be so specified is 90, of whom:
(a) no more than 32 may be children under the age of two years.
This increases the number of children under two years a service may have by two children (from 30to 32). 32 being divisible by 4, this maximises the number of children a service could care for with staffing that meets the new 1:4 ratio.
2. Small services need to be supported
The Department of Community Services must fund a 12 month assistance project to support children’s services licensed for fewer than 40 places that do not currently meet the 1:4 ratio from January 2008.
This project could be auspiced by an existing children’s services peak organisation and should provide time-limited business support to services via:
- group workshops;
- online training material (e.g., case studies with sample budget and staff deployment); and
- access to individual consultations where needed.
The business support will enable individual services to explore options such as:
- gradual increase of fees;
- differential fees for under two year olds;
- staffing of services across opening hours based on actual demand;
- effective employment of casual staff; and
- realistic budgeting such as staff on-costs.
3. Some services will need their licenses amended
The Department of Community Services will need to amend some existing service’s licenses, and more widely implement a licensing approach to allow for variations in the maximum number of children in each age group, while ensuring services don’t exceed their total licensed places, based on the physical capacity of the service.
This licensing approach will assist services in implementing a 1:4 staff–child ratio, and is currently applied successfully in a number of licences.