Child care quality in Australia

Recent public debate about the child care system in Australia has focused primarily on the availability and affordability of child care. Drawing on the results of a national survey of long day care centre staff, Emma Rush considers the quality of the care provided. For all the aspects of quality care investigated, results show that community-based long day care centres offer the highest quality care. Independent private centres offer a quality of care that is usually similar to the high quality offered by community-based centres. Corporate chains offer the lowest quality of care on all aspects of quality surveyed, and in some cases it is markedly lower than that provided by community-based long day care centres. A summary of the report is available online