Childcare is like a game of Tetris for Prue Barlow. Two days a week she drives her four-year-old son, Max, and two-year-old daughter, Audrey, from the family’s farm in northern Victoria to the nearby town of Rushworth, where Audrey is dropped off at the local daycare centre. There the family meets another local mother, who drives Max and her own child to kindergarten in the town of Colbinabbin, 20km in the opposite direction.
After school there’s a similar reciprocal scheme: Barlow’s friend takes Max after kinder for an hour and a half until the work day ends, while Barlow ferries her friend’s younger child home from daycare.
This complicated arrangement allows Barlow to work two days a week as a teacher at the Rushworth school. It’s begging for staff – Barlow says she could easily work close to full time just doing relief teaching, but can’t due to the lack of childcare. The local daycare centre is only open two days a week.
“I wish I could say yes because the money is so good, but I can’t, because I can’t get the kids looked after at the drop of a hat,” she says.
And unless she can work something else out, Barlow will have to cut back to one day next year, as her friend’s child is moving on from daycare to kinder and the reciprocal arrangement will no longer be viable.
“While the kids are this age, I can’t progress in my career,” she says. “I’m trying to be fully registered this year but I can’t find that time.”
Many parts of the region where Barlow lives, Loddon Campaspe in northern Victoria, are what the Mitchell Institute at Victoria University calls a “childcare desert”: where there are at least three children under five for every available childcare place.
In Loddon that number rises to 33 children per place.
In Campaspe, which includes Colbinabbin and Rushworth, the female workforce participation rate is 53.4% – significantly lower than the national rate of 62.1% for all women over the age of 15. In nearby Loddon and in Gannawarra, which abuts the Murray River, it’s even lower at 46.5%.
The region desperately needs workers. Council representatives from Campaspe and Gannawarra told Guardian Australia they had worker shortages in healthcare and social welfare services, emergency services and all levels of education. But with a huge shortage of childcare, too, parents who want to work often can’t.
The local children are also affected by the scarcity of early learning opportunities. A report submitted by Regional Development Australia Loddon-Mallee to the Productivity Commission review of the childcare sector said one in three of the region’s 19,000 children arrived at the first year of school not ready to learn.
Numbers alone don’t tell the story of the extraordinary hurdles that families in the rural area have to overcome to access childcare.
Jacinta Sutton lives in Boort, 30 minutes’ drive south of Kerang, in Loddon shire. Since moving there a year ago she has secured one day of long daycare for her three-year-old daughter, Molly, in Kerang. It’s in the opposite direction to where she works in Charlton. Her husband takes Molly to daycare on his way to his work as a diesel mechanic at a large local farm but he is then late to work because the centre doesn’t open until 8am, which is when he is supposed to start.
Two days a week Sutton’s mother- and father-in-law, who live locally, help out. On the fourth day, her mother drives 120km each way to look after Molly at their house.
Sutton says she feels guilty having to ask for help from Molly’s grandparents. And the intellectual and emotional juggle of managing precarious care is a huge burden, she says: if one element of the system fails, the whole lot collapses.
“It makes your working life so much harder,” Sutton says. “You end up doing your work life, personal life, family life – everything – very inefficiently, because there is just so much in your head.”
Paul Fernee, the director of community wellbeing at Gannawarra shire council, says a significant amount of the workforce pressure in the region could be alleviated with more childcare options.
“Getting people to move here and find a house is almost as hard as getting childcare, but people who are already here can’t get childcare and can’t get back into work,” Fernee says.
“A great example is our Kerang police station. It has five vacancies we’re aware of that they can’t fill. We’ve got schools crying out for teachers. Our hospital in Cohuna and community health service in Kerang are crying out for nurses, hospital workers, doctors.”
Fernee says he knows of one candidate for the police roles who couldn’t come back to work because they couldn’t get childcare.
Promises but no follow-through
In Gannawarra, the council is the only provider of early childhood education and care, as commercial operators do not see it as a viable market. Fernee says different, non-market-based models are needed to make childcare in rural and regional areas viable – such as co-locating services with kindergartens, primary schools and maternal child health centres.
Higher subsidies would also be required from the government to offset the running cost shortfalls, Fernee says, but it is hard to get the state or federal governments to prioritise investment or to understand the potential positive flow-on effects.
Jo Bradshaw, communities director at Campaspe shire council, says occasional care options that would allow parents – such as Barlow – to work casually or on shifts to fill staffing gaps at schools or the hospital at short notice do not exist.
“There certainly would not be the spaces in any of our childcare centres to do that because it’s all taken up by permanent users,” Bradshaw says. She says she understands the local secondary school is paying relief teachers to travel up from Melbourne.
State and federal governments appear to be listening to the challenges they face, Bradshaw says, but they haven’t yet seen any material follow-through.
“People are happy to come to the table. We had minister after minister after the floods late last year. But in terms of actual things happening, we don’t have anything about to come to fruition.”
The minister for early education, Anne Aly, said the Albanese government was “ensuring Australian children have equitable access to affordable quality early childhood education and care no matter where they live”.
“Through the $575 million Community Child Care Fund, we’re supporting over 900 services open and stay open, with around 60% of funding supporting services located in regional and remote communities,” she said.
