Australian childcare centres are telling families their children are 'too complex' — and to find somewhere else. The children in question have autism, cerebral palsy, developmental delays, and other complex needs. The reason, according to a Guardian Australia investigation, is simple: the federal government's Inclusion Support Programme does not adequately fund the additional staffing costs that caring for these children requires, and centres cannot make the economics work.
What this means in practice is that parents of children with complex needs — already among the most stretched and stressed families in the country — are being left unable to work while their children miss out on early intervention at precisely the age when it matters most. Early childhood is when the brain is most plastic, when therapy has its greatest effect, when investment in a child with disability pays its highest long-term dividend both for the child and for the public systems that will support them across their lifetime. Turning these children away from childcare is not just a cruelty to individual families. It is a policy failure with a price tag that will be paid for decades.
The Inclusion Support Programme provides supplementary funding for childcare services to support children with additional needs, but advocates and centre operators say the funding rates have not kept pace with actual support costs, particularly as the complexity and number of children presenting with assessed needs has risen. The programme was designed in a different funding and staffing environment. It has not been substantially overhauled to reflect current reality.
Families interviewed by the Guardian describe experiences that are both individually devastating and systemically patterned. A parent is told their child requires one-to-one support that the centre cannot provide without additional funding they cannot access. They are advised to apply to the programme — a process that takes months — or find a centre that can accommodate their child. The next centre says the same. And the next.
The National Disability Insurance Scheme intersects with this picture in complicated ways. NDIS plans can fund some support workers, but the coordination of NDIS funding with childcare operating arrangements is administratively complex and inconsistently applied. The result is that families navigating the overlap between the NDIS and the childcare system face a bureaucratic maze that consumes the energy they need to care for their children.
Australia's childcare debate has been dominated, rightly, by questions of affordability and subsidy rates for the majority of families. The systematic exclusion of children with disabilities from the system is a smaller but arguably more serious failure running in parallel. These are the families for whom childcare access is not just a work enabler — it is a therapeutic necessity. The funding gap is not large relative to the total childcare budget. The political will to address it, ahead of an election in which disability policy is not a primary vote-mover, appears to be the binding constraint.
The children being turned away from childcare today will show up in school systems, health systems, and social support systems for the rest of their lives. The cost of early exclusion will be borne by all of us. The decision not to fund inclusion properly is, in this sense, not just unfair. It is also extraordinarily bad economics.
