Its a brave new world of universal free childcare !!!!

LAST UPDATED : 4th April 2020 - 10 AM AEDT

Question: From 6/4/20 until 28/6/20 we as a Centre have no choice but to go with the new ECE Care Relief Payment and not submit care to access CCS and not collect any gap fee from families?  Will we only receive the 50% weekly payment from now on after this current week ending 5/4/20 CCS has been paid to Centre? Until now we were still running as normal.

So how do we keep the doors open ?

Basically you are right, the ECE will more or less cover the normal CCS you would have received and now you cant collect the gap from the parents, however there are a couple of brighter notes.

  • You will receive the ECE for this week and last week in addition to the CCS you have already received and will receive - if you have submitted this week already. If you didn’t we will submit anything lying around loose on Saturday (Sunday for FDC) as a ‘best guess’.

So that gives you roughly 2 weeks more at ‘normal’ to get ready.

The government is expecting centres to also sign up for ‘Job Keeper’ and hoping that as a result it will plug some / all of the gap.

If you haven’t already done so do register at your earliest opportunity

Job keeper does cover long term casual & part time as well as full time.  

And there is also the PAYG relief announced earlier.   Then there is the Community childcare fund , sorry the link in our earlier email doesn’t work any longer but this one should.

UPDATE : We’ve had reports that once you get through the submission process for CCCF you get a message that applications closed at 9AM on 3rd April !

Its a rat’s nest but between these they are hoping that will do it.

There will also be mechanism to seek a review of your ECE if its not ‘fair’ but we don’t have the details yet.

The final option would be to opt out of CCS for the duration , receive no CCS or ECE and then be free to charge parents as you wish. Apparently that’s a thing. I’m not recommending this one just adding it in reluctantly for completeness.

There really are a lot of details missing but this is happening from 6th April 2020.

Yikes !!