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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 5 Hansard (8 May) . . Page.. 1322 ..

MR CORBELL (continuing):

I believe this inquiry will assist the ACT to work towards retaining our child-care workers and enhancing their professional standing. Given the critical role child-care professionals take in caring for our children, it is important that we understand the issues facing child-care services in recruiting and retaining staff. It has always struck me that our community demands more and more child-care services. Patterns of employment and choices of lifestyle parents make demand that this option be available for them. Yet the industry has traditionally been seen as predominantly made up of women, and it is perhaps a little surprising that as a result the rates of pay have been lower than they perhaps would have been had men been involved in the work.

Given the critical role child-care professionals take in educating and caring for our children, it is important that we understand the issues facing child-care services in recruiting and retaining staff. It is also important that strategies to assist services address these issues and options for improved work force planning to meet the demand for child-care professionals are also considered and explored.

This issue is a serious one for the ACT, with child-care services, particularly centre-based services, experiencing difficulty in recruiting and retaining qualified staff to fill positions and the capacity of individual services to fully comply with the conditions of their licence being affected.

On that point, there is currently an exemption process to permit services not to engage qualified personnel if there are none available and they can demonstrate that. The rate of exemptions currently is extremely high right across the ACT. That is an indicator of the pressures services face.

The territory is taking positive steps to increase the number of places available in community centre-based care. Following the election in November, the new ACT government committed to an additional 30 places at Ngunnawal and 25 at Nicholls for the shortage faced by child-care providers in that growing area of the city. We are also committed to following through on the development of a new child-care facility in the Gungahlin town centre. But we cannot do one without the other. We need a commitment to improving the number of places available, but we also need to respond to the key issue of staffing those centres and those services when they have an increased level of demand.

The ACT centre-based children's services conditions for approvals in principle and licences require that one in every two staff in a child-care centre be qualified. That is an important requirement, but I stress that simply because an employee is not qualified in accordance with those conditions it does not necessarily mean they do not have the experience or the expertise needed to work in a child-care centre. Many workers in this industry have years of experience, frequently 10 to 15 years, but they have never received any formal accreditation. With the exemptions under the conditions of licence, the government takes those issues into account.

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