Occasional Care - CareforKids.com.au®

Occasional Care
We all need the occasional day off

Families across Victoria are hoping to reinstate funding for over 220+ community-based occasional childcare centres that have been subjected to funding cuts and are now in the middle of a blame game between two parties over $1.9 million.

The Take A Break Occasional Child Care program provides occasional care at neighbourhood houses and community centres across Victoria, including rural areas. It helps many families across the State who often have no alternative care for 40-60km and many families who cannot afford full time childcare.

Occasional Care helps mums to get the odd day or just a few hours of time without the kids to go to medical or dental appointments, meetings or just to get chores done without the kids.

It's also a huge help with the increasing numbers of parents who work from home, part time or in casual jobs with irregular hours, when child care can be very difficult to organize with most long day centres needing parents to sign up on an annual basis and stick to certain set days.

It has been announced that funding will stop on the 31st December 2011 for the Take a Break Occasional Child Care program.

This program provides a valuable service for carers to take a short break, they are affordable to all and encourage stronger, closer more caring communities.

Between 9,000 -10,000 children attend these centres across the State, some will close as soon as September and the ones that remain open need to increase fees by 33-55% to stay open.

The petition started by concerned parent, Vicky Weatherlake aims to gather as many signatures as possible in order to pressure the government into reinstating funding for the centres.

Well over 1000 parents have already signed the petition and joined the Facebook cause. To register your signature, click here and their Facebook page has about 900 following.

If you have experienced similar difficulties in finding occasional child care we'd love to hear from you on Careforkids Social.

For more information about child care services that offer Occasional Care in your area – go to CareforKids.com.au select Vacancy Super Search where you can enter your postcode then select Occasional Care.