Ensuring quality in child care

A stronger and streamlined quality assurance system for long day child care was launched today by the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Larry Anthony.

“The introduction of the Quality Improvement and Accreditation System (QIAS) for long day child care will help to improve Australia’s already world-class child care services.

“We have worked hard to make child care more affordable and accessible. We are now ensuring that the thousands of children using more than 4,000 long day care services will benefit from high standards of care.”

Key features of the revised system include:

• Streamlined criteria against which child care services measure their quality;
• Fixing the term for the renewal of accreditation for all services;
• Lengthening the time for accreditation visits for child care services with 30 or more licensed places from one day to two days.

“The revised Quality Improvement and Accreditation System was developed by the Commonwealth Child Care Advisory Council in consultation with the long day care sector. It will be implemented by the National Child Care Accreditation Council.

“All long day care centres in Australia were required to participate in the system from January 2002 in order to get Commonwealth funding.

“Over the last four years we have spent $4.7 billion on child care – a 36 per cent increase on Labor’s child care spending in their last 4 years – and we’ll spend a further $6.7 billion over the four years to 2004-05.

“The Coalition is doing much more than just providing unprecedented funding. Parents now have more high quality and child care options than ever before,” Mr Anthony said.