ACA National call for feedback about CCS hiccups

The Australian Childcare Alliance (ACA) national body has called on early childhood education and care (ECEC) providers to share their feedback about the performance of the Child Care Subsidy (CCS) system during the peak period of the new year enrolments, describing it as “a real test” for the system.

ACA National President Paul Mondo said the enrolment process for families joining new ECEC settings in 2019 was made more arduous by a “complicated administration process”.

In communications shared by ACA New South Wales, Mr Mondo is quoted as saying “These administratively burdensome procedures in their own right, combined with the need to educate families on how to complete the activity test and engage with Centrelink, compounded with the peak enrolments time of year, have provided significant stress for centre directors.”

The process of navigating new year enrolments has highlighted a range of issues affecting payments to parents and services, with Mr Mondo reporting that ACA has “received a whole range of enquiries from members dealing with specific cases and problems”.

He said the Alliance had received “many contacts” about families having CCS adjusted back to July 2018 levels, “often leaving the centre director in the position of having to chase a potential debt and/or families having to call Centrelink due to the unexplained change in their subsidy amount”

Mr Mondo described the example above as being “one of several problematic scenarios brought to our attention. In some circumstances, these reported issues can be explained, but in many cases they seem to be anomalies which took service providers by surprise, resulting in increased work for those administering the system, in trying to ascertain why these problems were occurring.”

In assuring ACA members that the Alliance had been “actively engaging with the Department of Education and Training (DET) almost daily, to seek solutions to these problems and determine whether they are individual problems or systemic problems,” Mr Mondo encouraged members and the broader ECEC community to share their issues and feedback with ACA through their member channels, or by completing the online feedback form.

What do you think? Has there been issues with CCS at your service? Leave your comments below.