Have they grown out of OSHC or has OSHC stopped growing with them?

It can enter a team conversation when an older child begins attending less often, resists coming or seems less connected to the program. The words make the change sound almost inevitable: the child is older, so OSHC no longer fits.

Sometimes that is what is happening. A family’s care arrangements may change. Grandparents or older siblings may become available, extracurricular activities can take up more afternoons, or the family may decide that a child is ready for greater independence. Several shifts may occur at once.

What interests me is how quickly a change in attendance can become a complete explanation. Children change as they grow. Has the service continued to change with them?

What the attendance figures leave unanswered

Australian longitudinal data show that use of formal OSHC was lower as children in one national cohort grew older. Almost one in five attended at age six or seven, compared with one in ten at age ten or eleven. This establishes a pattern in participation, but it cannot explain why an individual child attended less often or left.

The same analysis gives us more of the context around children’s afternoons. Informal before- and after-school care was more common than formal care. Care by a sibling under 18 increased with age, and extracurricular participation was high across the age groups. These may be parts of a family’s changing arrangements, although the data cannot tell us which mattered for a particular child.

“Growing out of OSHC” may be how a child or family describes a decision that makes sense for them. The difficulty comes when a service accepts the phrase as a complete professional explanation. There may then seem little left to examine.

Keeping the explanation open makes room to ask what the child is experiencing while they are still attending, without assuming that the service caused the change.

An attendance record shows when a child is present. It cannot show how easily they find a place when they return. A child who comes once or twice a week may re-enter relationships and projects that have continued in their absence. How easily they find a place again is part of their present OSHC experience, even when the reasons for the attendance pattern sit elsewhere.

Listening to children who still attend

Bruce Hurst’s small Australian study draws attention to the way older children encountered age-coded spaces and resources, challenge and the expectations attached to being ‘older’ in school age care. He is also careful not to treat any one response as the answer for every child or service.

Lina Lago and Sanna Hedrén’s recent Swedish study involved 50 children aged ten to twelve who attended open leisure programs. In group interviews, the children spoke about wanting new or more advanced opportunities and described autonomy as negotiated alongside care, responsibility and trust. The setting differs from Australian OSHC, so I read the study as a source of questions rather than a ready-made program for older children here.

Both studies draw on children who were still attending. Their accounts make parts of the experience visible, but they cannot speak for children who had already left or explain those children’s decisions.

Read together, I think the studies make age visible as something children experience within a setting. A standard list of “older children’s activities” would miss much of that. What matters is how age is being lived within this service. A demanding project can absorb one child and feel like more adult-led work to another.

Has the service changed too?

We often ask whether today’s program responds to today’s children. I am also interested in the longer view: has the service continued to change as those same children have grown?

I think of this as responsiveness over time. By that I mean asking what has changed for children and what has changed, or remained the same, in the OSHC conditions they encounter.

Educators respond constantly within an afternoon, adjusting a plan, a space or their own involvement. Across several years, however, a child can experience many thoughtful responses while the program’s wider possibilities remain largely unchanged. This longer view can be easy to miss because continuity may also support security and belonging.

A child who began at the service in their first year of school may still be there in Year 5. Resources that once absorbed them may now offer little room for growing complexity. Educators may know the child well, yet still respond to assumptions formed when they were younger. A rule that once supported safety may remain unchanged while the child’s capability, relationships and need for privacy develop.

A child who once invited an educator into every game may now want to negotiate with friends without adult involvement. Another may still seek familiar routines after a demanding school day while wanting more privacy within them. Growing capability rarely arrives evenly across every part of an afternoon.

Chronological age is a blunt basis for deciding what should happen next. A fixed “older children’s program” may simply exchange one set of assumptions for another. A more useful starting point is what these children are showing us about the current arrangements.

MTOP’s guidance on environments supports this longer view. It describes environments as flexible and responsive to each child and young person’s strengths, cultures, interests and capabilities, and says that resources should reflect a breadth of age groups, interests, curiosities and capabilities. MTOP provides a professional basis for this inquiry. It does not predict whether a particular change will affect attendance.

Asking once what “older children” want captures only one moment. Services may learn more by noticing patterns over time: what children return to, avoid, modify or leave behind, alongside what they and their families say. Those patterns offer a stronger basis for professional discussion than age alone.

While children are still with us

Some children will leave because their family no longer requires formal care, or because greater independence is the right next step. Participation is also shaped by circumstances well beyond the program.

Lower attendance, on its own, tells us little about an individual service’s quality. What a service can examine is the experience children have while they are there and whether it continues to recognise who they are becoming.

The next time “they’ve grown out of OSHC” enters a team conversation, it may be worth leaving the explanation open for a little longer and asking what has changed for this child, and what has changed here.

The next article, Mixed-Age Grouping Is More Than a Challenge, stays with the question of age and looks at what happens when different ages share the afternoon. What becomes possible in a mixed-age group, and what might be decided on the basis of age before anyone has asked the children involved?

Author: Belinda Wright is an Australian OSHC practitioner-researcher, instructional designer and sector leader with extensive experience across Outside School Hours Care, educator capability development and professional learning. She is the Founder and Director of Learning at Learn OSHC and a PhD Candidate, with doctoral research focused on Outside School Hours Care and educational leadership in Australian school-age care contexts.