Quality Early Education for All

• About 43 per cent of Australian children aged 0-5 years old now participate in ECEC in Government-approved
services, up from 36 per cent in 2006;
• In March 2015, there were 16,966 Australian Government Child Care Benefit-approved childcare services in
Australia and 273 state and territory government-only funded children care services (PC, 2016).
This growth has largely been driven by the expansion of female workforce participation, but the expansion of
preschool also reflects a growing recognition of the importance of early education as well as explicit crossgovernment
policy goals.
Size of the investment
Australia’s public and private investment in ECEC has grown significantly, driven primarily by increases in the
number of children in care and an increase in hours (PC, 2015, p. 116).
• Combined public funding is projected to increase to $11 billion a year in 2018-19, if proposed legislation is
passed, but $8.5 billion under current arrangements.
• The Australian Government’s expenditure in the ECEC sector has increased by over 250 per cent in ten years,
to $7.2 billion in 2014/15. 5
• State and territory government spending has increased approximately 150 per cent since 2009-2010 to $1.2
billion in 2012/13. 6
• Average fees for childcare and preschool services have increased by around 50 per cent between 2007 and
2013.
Combined public and private expenditure per child in preschool in Australia is $13,421, among the highest in the
OECD, compared to an average of $10,432 (OECD, 2015, p. 2), converted to AUD. However, Australian public
investment in ECEC as a proportion of GDP remains well below OECD averages, especially in terms of programs
that deliver a strong educational component. The Melbourne Graduate School of Education notes that:
“In international terms Australia is not yet providing sufficient threshold investment in quality early
learning provision: Australian children do not yet have sufficient access to ECEC programs of
internationally comparable quality and duration” (MGSE, 2015, p. 3).
There is a substantial discontinuity between investment in early education and primary and secondary education
(Figure 1). While governments spent an average of AUD$6,100 in 2012-13 on ECEC for every child in formal care
(Productivity Commission, 2015, p. 128), in 2014 the school resourcing standard was a fixed amount of
AUD$9,271 per primary school student and AUD $12,193 per secondary student (Australian Government, 2013a).
Heckman (2008, 2010) suggests that public investment in children should follow the opposite pattern:
frontloading investment from the antenatal period.
5 Eighty seven per cent of Australian Government funding is in payments to families to offset fees, with 7 per cent supporting
the National Partnership Agreements and 6 per cent on quality assurance.
6 State and territory funding goes to a range of regulatory functions, direct provision, capital investment, planning and
capacity building, with significant differences across jurisdictions.
Quality Early Education for All 13