Government must focus on out-of-school-hours child care to get women back into the workforce

To improve women’s workforce participation more effectively, t he Commonwealth Government must enhance the availability and accessibility to families, of before and after school care for school-aged children, says the National Foundation for Australian W omen (NFAW ), a leading independent women’s advocacy group.

“The debate over childcare reform has been dominated by an emphasis on care arrangements for pre-schoolers. W hile this is an important focus, it has unfortunately also led to a corresponding neglect in policy, understanding and services in the equally important school-aged child care sector”, said Ms Marie Coleman, chair, NFAW Social Policy Committee.

“There continues to be a substantial gap in the workforce participation of mothers compared with fathers of school-aged children. To illustrate, the participation rate of mothers with children aged 6 to 14 years was 78 percent . But for fathers of children in the same age band, it was as high as 92 per cent. This suggests that accessible school-aged child care has an important role to play in clos ing that gap.

“The shortage of before and after school care programs is now at crisis point in many densely populated parts of the country and particularly in Sydney. This must be treated as an urgent issue for policy-makers and also for the Productivity Commission which largely overlooked the matter in its interim report on childcare – a gap we hope will be addressed when the Commission delivers its final report on 31 October 2014,” Ms Coleman said.

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