Out-of-the-School Care in the Australian Capital Terrority: The Views of Children and Parents

The Children’s Services Sub-Committee of the Consultative Committee on Social Welfare has recently examined the adequacy of out-of-school programmes in meeting the needs of families in the ACT. The sub-committee initially consulted with several organizations that provided holiday care and afterschool care programmes. Child-care workers expressed the view that there is a high level of dissatisfaction amongst users of out-of-hours care programmes. On the basis of this consultation the subcommittee discovered that:

• (a)

  some holiday care programmes reported recent changes in enrolment patterns, especially that children who had been attending in the past were no longer doing so, and that the average age of the children attending had declined;

• (b)

  some programmes had ceased to operate through lack of enrolments after the first two or three days;

• (c)

  many after-school programmes had developed slowly and existing programmes were often under-utilised. Some child-care workers reported that it had taken twelve months to build up enrolments to economically viable levels in after-school care programmes; and

• (d)

  there was an awareness by organisations that in most suburbs there were significant numbers of 5 to 12 year olds returning to empty houses after school and that there appeared to be resistance on the part of children to attending programmes, not just reluctance on the part of parents to send their children to such programmes.