For most parents of school-aged children, it is the school holidays, and not the federal election campaign, that is top of mind at the moment. Parents are currently patching together plans for kids with spouses, grandparents and vacation care programs. And that’s in addition to the daily juggle during school term.
We need a national conversation that gives improving outside school hours care (OSHC) the economic, social and health attention it deserves.
With classes finishing around 3pm and most workplaces continuing until at least 5pm plus a commute, we face a three-hour gap between school and work five days a week. Family members can only do so much to help bridge the gaps while outside school hours care is great when you can get it, but services aren’t everywhere, particularly in regional areas, and places can be hard to come by. Even then, OSHC is unaffordable for some families in a cost-of-living crisis.
This isn’t the whinge of a few poorly organised parents. The disconnect between the end of the school and work day is a big practical problem affecting a large proportion of Australian families – at least the two million or so primary school students, their parents and grandparents, and employers. It adds significantly to the economic and social pressures parents face.
The knock-on effects go beyond the wellbeing, development and mental health of children who now spend more time home alone. The before and after school runaround pushes adults to work outside regular hours, taking over time for exercise and socialising needed for their own mental health.
It’s also an indisputable drain on productivity, forcing many to work fewer hours or days to sync up with school time. In a country that hasn’t seen productivity growth in a decade, helping families in the hours around school is the obvious way to improve opportunities for our kids, increase female workforce participation, and jump-start productivity.
Taking a serious look at how we help families before and after school stands to help with other growing problems.
We’re now more aware than ever of the importance of giving kids time to play outdoors with other kids, of all ages and backgrounds, independently without constant adult oversight, but there seems to be little collective action to enable this.
As Melbourne University Professor Pasi Sahlberg and William Doyle argue in their book Let the Children Play, for as long as there have been children, they’ve learnt through play. But as a society, we are increasingly depriving them of the opportunity at home and at school.
We’ve seen how community ties weakened and social norms changed as families began to have both parents working. Kids are spending more time online. They do so at the cost of experiencing the physical world, where they can build capabilities and confidence for increasingly independent exploration.
Neighbourhoods are now less used to seeing kids out and about doing what used to be normal things like catching the bus, walking the dog, buying milk and playing in the park. Understandably nobody wants to be, to adopt Richard Louv’s phrase, the “last child in the woods,” when everyone else has gone home to devices.
There’s no one solution to these challenges or the work-school gulf, but many kids are already learning through play in a safe environment at quality before and after school care services. Ensuring primary school kids and their families have reliable access when they need it is the right place to start.
Recent broader reform of early childhood education and care has been essential and so hard-won. Getting real in this election campaign, when school holidays are in full swing, about improving the options available for all families in the gaps between school and work hours will gives us a chance to find solutions – taking the pressure off parents and helping kids thrive.
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