Who took the play out of before and after school care. The street children lost and the OSHC they need 

There was once a familiar sound in Australian neighbourhoods at the end of the school day.

I know this picture through my husband’s stories of growing up in Australia: school bags dropped near the front door, bikes appearing on footpaths and children gathering in the street, in backyards or on any patch of grass where they could create a game. Someone invented the rules. Someone disagreed with them. Someone threatened to go home, changed their mind and returned five minutes later.

There were no learning outcomes displayed nearby. No adult had prepared a themed activity. Nobody was measuring whether the game had developed STEM skills.

Yet children were learning constantly.

They were negotiating, disagreeing, problem-solving, taking manageable risks and deciding who would go first. They learnt how to enter a group, cope with being left out, repair a friendship, adapt the rules for a younger child and continue playing when things did not go their way.

We should be careful not to romanticise the past. Not every street was safe, not every child was included and not every childhood was carefree. Research also does not allow us to claim that every previous generation was simply “more resilient” than children today.

What the evidence does tell us is that children’s independent mobility and opportunities for unsupervised outdoor activity have declined. Australian research has warned that increasing restrictions on independent outdoor experiences may affect children’s mental, social and physical development. More recent Australian evidence also connects child-led outdoor and nature play with cooperation, decision-making, conflict resolution, confidence, agency, self-regulation and social competence. (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare; Australian Institute of Family Studies)

This leads me to a question:

Could Outside School Hours Care be the modern extension of the neighbourhood street?

Not literally, of course. Today’s services carry serious responsibilities for child safety, supervision, inclusion and accountability. But perhaps OSHC can preserve what was most valuable about that time: space, friendship, freedom, belonging, play and the trusted presence of adults who care without controlling every moment.

A second childhood space

Children have already spent approximately six hours within the structures and expectations of school. When they arrive at OSHC, they do not necessarily need another timetable of adult-directed learning.

They may need food.

They may need to move their bodies, sit quietly, talk endlessly with a friend, build something that takes several afternoons, make up a game with no obvious educational purpose or simply do nothing for a while.

They may need an educator who notices that they are unusually quiet and sits nearby without demanding an explanation.

This does not make OSHC “just babysitting”. It makes it a distinctive and important childhood space connected to school and home, but not required to become either one.

The NSW Government’s review, OSHC: More than ‘just convenient care’, describes OSHC as a significant place of care, play and learning. It also identifies fun, friendship and wellbeing as central to its value. Australian research examining children’s right to passive leisure asks an equally important question: do children also have the right to do nothing? (NSW Department of Education; Cartmel et al., Childhood)

When the program becomes a catalogue

Across the sector, we increasingly see services promoting long lists of activities: coding, homework clubs, science workshops, and externally delivered programs.

These experiences are not inherently wrong. Children may genuinely enjoy them, request them and benefit from them. The concern begins when the number of advertised activities becomes evidence of quality in itself, particularly when programs are designed to impress adults, strengthen a tender submission or compete commercially.

A glossy activity calendar may photograph well. It does not automatically tell us whether children feel relaxed, loved, known or free.

When OSHC attempts to prove its value by looking increasingly like an extended school day, it risks losing the very qualities that make it valuable.

Quality should not be measured by how constantly children are occupied. A busy program is not necessarily a responsive program. Sometimes the most meaningful experience is not the activity an educator organised, but the game children invented beside it.

Families should be genuine partners in OSHC, but partnership does not mean responding to every adult anxiety by adding another instructional program. What adults think makes an impressive OSHC service might not always align with what children may actually need after six hours of school .Homework support can be available where children and families want it. Coding, sport and creative workshops can enrich a program. However, they should remain invitations not become the identity of the service or expectations imposed upon children after an already demanding day.

What our real offer should be

Perhaps the most valuable things an OSHC service can offer are not impressive when written in a tender. They are, however, deeply important to children:

• sufficient time that does not feel hurried
• indoor and outdoor spaces children can shape and inhabit
• loose parts and open-ended resources
• opportunities for movement, manageable risk and exploration
• long periods of uninterrupted play
• friendships across different ages
• permission to rest, watch or temporarily withdraw
• educators who listen, notice and respond
• warmth, humour, affection and emotional safety
• support when play becomes unfair, unsafe or excluding
• confidence that children can solve many problems without adults immediately taking control.
• A space to laugh and cry, to make mistakes and learn from them, sometimes feel bored and creative, to have the freedom to simply be!

Educators still have an intentional role. Intentionality does not always mean leading an activity. It can mean knowing when to introduce a resource, when to ask a thoughtful question, when to help a child enter a game and when to step back.

The skilled educator is not absent from children’s play. They are attentively present without becoming its director.

MTOP supports this vision but it also leaves us with questions

This reflection is not a criticism of My Time, Our Place or of the National Quality Framework. In fact, MTOP V2.0 explicitly recognises play and leisure, children’s agency, collaboration, relationships, wellbeing and responsiveness to children.

ACECQA explains that through play children create social groups, test ideas, challenge one another’s thinking, solve problems and develop friendships. The framework therefore gives services strong permission to protect child-led leisure. (ACECQA: Play, leisure and intentionality)

However, a framework can be interpreted through the pressures surrounding it. Some challenges remain:

1. Intentionality can be misunderstood as constant adult direction.
   Educators may feel that every experience must be planned, led and attached to an outcome.
2. Visible activity can become confused with quality.
   Busy program boards are easy to evidence, while relationships, emotional availability and uninterrupted play the quieter elements of quality, are harder to capture.
3. Documentation pressures can shift attention away from children.
   When educators feel compelled to prove every interaction, documentation can begin serving the system more than the child.
4. One framework covers a wide age range.
   A five-year-old and a twelve-year-old may need very different forms of space, privacy, challenge, independence and adult involvement.
5. The framework cannot create the necessary conditions by itself.
   A strong framework can guide quality practice, but the conditions surrounding educators determine whether that practice is actually possible.
6. Compliance can be assessed; quality must be lived.
   A&R can determine whether standards are being met, but the deepest measure of quality must also be understood through the lived experiences of children and families, the people who experience the service every day. 

Swedish fritidshem are generally more formally integrated into the school system and national curriculum. Through my work, I have observed similar approaches in some Australian OSHC services, although I will not identify them here, as this is based solely on my personal observations rather than formal research. The difference is that in Sweden this connection is embedded across the national system, while in Australia it depends largely on who operates the service and the strength of its relationship with the school. Integration can help with safeguarding, inclusion, transitions, shared facilities and understanding children’s needs. However, I fear we are moving down a path where OSHC is becoming even more regulated and compliance-driven than the school system itself. In trying to demonstrate safety, quality and accountability, we may unintentionally allow institutional expectations to take over the leisure time we are meant to protect.

This is quality under the National Quality Standard

A less crowded, more relational and child-led program is not stepping away from quality. It can strengthen it.

It supports:

• Quality Area 1 when the program is based on children’s ideas, agency, interests and genuine participation
• Quality Area 2 when children’s wellbeing, movement, rest and emotional regulation are protected
• Quality Area 3 when environments provide choice, challenge, flexibility and open-ended resources
• Quality Area 5 when children develop friendships, negotiate conflict and experience respectful relationships
• Quality Area 6 when educators understand each family while still protecting children’s right to leisure
• Quality Area 7 when leaders resist performative busyness and create a clear, vision for OSHC.

Returning to our roots

Australian OSHC did not begin as a commercial catalogue of extracurricular activities. Its early services were created to meet children’s recreational and social needs, while also supporting women’s participation in the workforce. In NSW, community-minded women such as June Jeremy and Judy Finlason connected local services around a vision of making children’s time outside school count. (AIHW history of Australian OSHC; Network of Community Activities)

Those beginnings should never be dismissed as “just mothers looking after children”. They were acts of community leadership. Without the insight, advocacy and unpaid labour of women and families, the OSHC sector we now regulate, research and professionalise may not have existed.

Professionalisation should honour those beginnings, not erase their wisdom.

Perhaps children do not need us to recreate the streets of the past. They need us to preserve what those streets once made possible: time that belonged to children, relationships that were not organised for them, challenges that helped them grow and nearby adults who cared without controlling and documenting everything. 

Perhaps the greatest value of OSHC is found in the things that are hardest to make impressive on paper, but matter enormously in the everyday lives of children.

The question for our sector may not be, “How many activities can we provide?”

It may be:

Has our fear of getting something wrong become greater than our courage to give children the freedom to play, relax, build friendships and make their time at OSHC truly their own?

The answer is not less safety, it is smarter safety. Children need protection from unacceptable harm without being protected from every challenge, disagreement, risk or mistake.

This is not a finished argument. It is an invitation to educators, families, researchers, providers and children themselves to add other perspectives. OSHC was born because people looked at children’s lives and imagined something that did not yet exist.

Its future will depend on our willingness to keep doing the same.

Author

Elena Zdravkoski, Executive Director of Child Care Australia United Ltd

Elena holds a Bachelor of Early Childhood Education and has 12 years’ sector experience. A reflective, transformative leader, she manages seven OSHC and two long day care services. Committed to learning and sharing knowledge, she advocates for the profession to preserve its identity, honour its purpose and remain centred on children.