Childcare worker Sherry used to wake up every morning unsure of how to keep the 11 children in her care safe.
“It hurts me as a teacher that you can’t keep the children in your care safe,” she said. “It’s stressful and overwhelming.”
The 30-year-old, who asked not to use her surname to speak openly, said challenging behaviours, a one-to-11 ratio and little support from management made it an impossible job and inherently risky.
A report from Victoria University’s Mitchell Institute found the push to expand childcare had created workforce churn, provider turnover and growing risk.
Since 2013, 40.7 per cent of for-profit centres have changed operators, some as many as five times, the report shows.
Analysis of the workforce found the median hourly wage for educators is akin to cleaners – $34.30, compared with $62 for schoolteachers. It is below the median hourly wage of $42.40.
The most recent data from the Australian Taxation Office (2022/2023) shows 52 per cent of jobs in the childcare sector were held for less than a year.
To compound the lack of continuity, large for-profit private providers (with more than 25 centres) were more than three times as likely to have an enforcement action recorded than centres run by not-for-profit or community providers.
Mitchell Institute director Professor Peter Hurley said using markets to boost childcare places while keeping prices down had come at a cost.
“These approaches bake-in the deficiencies of low pay and high turnover and put enormous strain on the sector. They end up rewarding those providers who can produce an hour of care in the cheapest way possible while meeting the minimum standards,” he said.
Childcare centres receive childcare subsidy payments from the federal government ($16.9 billion in 2025-26) on behalf of families to deliver reduced-cost services. Closures and new centres are driven by the market.
Hurley said the report, The price of a place: Instability, risk and the hidden cost of Australia’s early childhood education and care system, showed that the market had reduced barriers for operators to easily open or close centres.
“[Providers] can trial the market, and if it doesn’t work, they can leave,” he said.
“That can work with something like an airline industry. When it comes to children, they’re extremely vulnerable. One of the things that really struck me with these horrible cases that’s been going on is just how many places they’ve worked,” he said.
“That’s prompted us to look at this. The shorter nature of the employment and educators.”
Major changes have been introduced since the childcare sector was plunged into crisis in July last year when horrific allegations of child sex abuse surfaced across Australia.
In Melbourne, accused childcare rapist Joshua Dale Brown is facing more than 100 charges, including sexually penetrating multiple children he was employed to care for. In Sydney, daycare worker Hamish Tait, 35, is facing more than 320 charges over his alleged abuse of more than 150 children.
There’s since been a Victorian parliamentary inquiry, a shift in the Working With Children Check, tightening of market entry requirements, and the ability to suspend or cancel subsidy payments for serious breaches.
The Front Project chief executive officer, Caroline Croser-Barlow, said recent measures to improve quality, such as stripping centres of the childcare subsidy for ongoing breaches, and worker-retention payments, had produced improvements. “Do I think we’ve done enough? Absolutely not.”
The worst operators were those seeking to flip centres and profit, she said.
The amount of childcare places has almost doubled since 2013, from about 400,000 to about 730,000 – almost entirely by private for-profit providers who account for 74 per cent of long daycare places, the research shows.
The Parenthood’s Georgie Dent said early education should be funded more like schools, as core public infrastructure, not a market to be left to its own devices.
“That means funding that reflects the actual cost of delivering high-quality education and care: fair wages, stable staffing, professional development and safe facilities,” she said.
Mother-of-three Lauren Treweek said for parents, long daycare continued to be “unbelievably and astronomically expensive” amid “quite honestly terrifying stories”.
“It seems like every time you get a break, in terms of the rebate being changed, the private centres just end up putting their fees up, or to be honest, centres in general,” she said.
Treweek tried to get two of her children into the same childcare centre but couldn’t, so now has to do three separate drop-offs: one-year-old Gus at long daycare, Xavier, 3, to kindergarten, and Sienna, 5, to school.
She said the short tenure of educators was concerning, as was a lack of transparency from operators.
“How can you build trust in educators when they’re not even at the centre for a year, or the minute you drop your child off, you’re hoping for this great relationship, as they have with your family, and then, you know, six to 12 months later, they’re not there?” she said.
“I think the visibility that parents are being provided with is terrible. It’s shocking,” she said.
Minister for Early Childhood Education Jess Walsh said the government was consulting on a national early education and care commission, which could help guide a path towards universal early childhood education and care, address undersupply and oversupply, and build a stronger system.
Education ministers are due to meet to discuss its development in October.
She said a 15 per cent pay rise for educators was stabilising the workforce, and states and territories were investing about half-a-billion dollars to support a package of reforms to lift safety and standards across the sector.
Hurley said it wasn’t for-profit centres that were the issue, but the childcare model itself, which required more research into alternatives.
Childcare worker Sherry has moved to a sessional kindergarten. “It’s different. It’s not-for-profit, so I feel like the service is actually putting effort into supporting children,” she said.
“Every service will say it’s children-centred, but in practice, it’s not. It’s profit-centred.
“We put children at risk. We put educators at risk as well.”
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