Page 1: 10 questions to ask your daycare. Take it on your tour. Already enrolled? It’s never too late to ask these questions.

Page 2: Is your daycare a good one? The checks you do yourself, because you only see 5% of their day. Most take only a few minutes.

You don’t need to do them all. Even three or four will give you a feel for a centre very quickly. You’ll either be impressed or running for the door.

Why each one matters is in the full articles:

• The Daycare Audit, Part 1 · Part 2

• How to tell if your daycare is a good one

Our children can’t leave a review, tell us about their day or ask for more staff. So we have to ask for them.

Take this on a tour, keep for reference or share with a friend who’s choosing a daycare.

— Christina

I spent 15 years in business and eight of them auditing companies. This is just how businesses work. Roughly 70% of a for-profit daycare’s costs are staff, so it’s often the first thing to cut when they’re facing profit pressure. It’s also the most damaging thing to cut for our children because it translates into underpaid staff, less qualified staff or the legal bare minimum of supervision required (and often below that).

Not all daycares are unsafe. Some are good, some are bad. The challenge for parents is figuring out which is which when we only see 5% of their day at drop-off and pick-up and from the outside, they all look relatively the same.

Here are the simple checks you can do to make sure yours is a good one.

At your laptop

1. Look up your centre on Starting Blocks — who owns it, the NQS rating, any enforcement actions, and the financials.

All providers must disclose their National Quality Standard rating and enforcement actions, and large providers must also disclose their financials (revenue and profit data). A large provider is one with 25 or more centres. Large for-profit providers are more than three times as likely to have an enforcement action recorded against them as other large providers (Mitchell Institute, 2026). When you combine scale with cost pressure, the result is profits before children. But it’s hard to know if your lovely little daycare with the cute name is part of a big chain, private equity backed or part of a publicly listed company. So look it up on Starting Blocks to be sure.

If you go to a non-profit, they do not have the same financial incentives as for-profits. Non-profits are becoming increasingly rare (about a quarter of all centres in Australia), but you’ll know if you go to one, because it’s a selling point they’ll highlight.

2. Request the name of every educator in your child’s room, what days they work, and how long they’ve been there.

These people are changing your child’s nappy. You should know who they are. To make this easy, shoot your director this draft email.

Hello [Director],

I’d like to get a better picture of who’s caring for [my child] day to day. Would you please provide me with the names of every educator in [my child]’s room and include the following:

1. Are they full-time permanent, part-time or casual?

2. What days do they work?

3. How long have they been employed with the centre?

Thank you,

[Parent]

When you evaluate their response, what you want is:

1. Majority full time and permanent staff to ensure consistency of care

2. Alignment to your child’s days, which also impacts consistency (i.e. the same person, every day).

3. Long tenure and low turnover

That’s the dream, but we also need to understand that turnover in the sector is high. 52% of childcare jobs are held for less than one year, against 25% in the school sector (Mitchell Institute, 2026).

So if you get a response that every single person has been there less than a year, that is a red flag that warrants further questions. One or two familiar casuals are typical, but a revolving door is a problem. If the majority are long-tenured permanent staff (3-4 years) – that is actually quite good for the sector.

3. Put your name on another centre’s waitlist for next year. You don’t have to take the place – it’s just an insurance policy that doesn’t hurt.

One of the biggest barriers to switching is lack of availability and access when you need it. If possible, get on a waitlist elsewhere so you have options if you need them. It usually costs between $0-$50 and a few minutes of your time. It’s always helpful to have options so you don’t feel stuck if the time should come. And vet those centres properly too using the questions I outlined here.

At the centre

4. Ask about the cameras and go take a look. Where they are, how long footage is kept, and what the process is to request it.

CCTV isn’t mandatory in Australian childcare. So the first thing to establish is whether your centre has cameras at all, and where they point. A government trial is running CCTV across up to 300 small and medium operators.

Find out which rooms are covered, how long footage is kept before it’s overwritten, and what you have to do to request it.

Most centres won’t show you footage for privacy reasons (since other people’s children are in it). But if something awful happens, you want to know whether you can view it instead of finding out on the worst day of your year. At the very least, you want to know that it’s captured on video, so the centre or a regulator can view it if the incident wasn’t observed.

Also, cameras aren’t permitted in nappy change areas or toilets, which is why you need to check the layout yourself.

5. Take a look at the nappy change area, the bathrooms and the sleep room, and check the lines of sight.

These are the only times someone will likely be alone with your child, but you don’t want them to be completely alone.

What good looks like: a change table and toilets in an open flow room, so anyone walking past can see in. No space where an adult and one child can be behind a closed solid door.

Sleep rooms are the one to pay attention to because they’re dark, quiet, and it’s the one room you will never see while in use. Ideally there’s a monitor with the feed visible in the main room. Ask your centre how often sleeping children are physically checked.

6. Once in a while, turn up unannounced, or change the time of your drop-off or pick-up.

Don’t make this a habit, but do it at least once when it works with your schedule. Can you take a half day off and pick them up at lunchtime and see what they are actually eating compared to the menu? Let them be that lucky kid who gets a surprise early pick-up.

If you always drop off at 7am, you might be surprised by what the centre looks like at 9am, when every child has arrived and it’s running at maximum occupancy.

Under Regulation 157, a provider must allow a parent to enter the premises at any time their child is being educated and cared for. The only exceptions are if there is a court order, or a genuine safety risk in being there. The centre’s penalty for breaching it is $3,300. You have every right to do this.

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What to watch for:

7. Do a headcount at drop-off and pick-up.

We do not have to wait several years for a regulator to assess whether supervision is adequate. We can do it ourselves every day, and it only takes two minutes.

In NSW the ratios are:

0–2 years, 1:4 (the same nationally)
2–3 years, 1:5 (1:4 in Victoria)
Over 3 years, 1:10 (1:11 in most other states)

Count the children. Then count the educators. If the room is below ratio, flag it immediately and put it in writing to your centre. If they’re relying on counting ratios across the whole service rather than per room (known as the “under the roof” rule) that’s perfectly legal, but inadequate supervision is not. Ask your centre whether they count ratios across the service or room by room. You want a centre that prioritises supervision and safety, not legal loopholes.

8. When an educator leaves, ask why — and ask more than one person. The director, the owner, and the staff.

You may get a different version depending on who you ask, and it tells you something about the centre.

When an educator suddenly left at our old centre, the director told me she was returning to university, but another staff member told me she was stressed and burnt out in the role.

At the next centre, the director left, and the owner said it was because of the commute, but the director told me herself she felt unsupported in the role.

I’m sure they were all telling the truth, but the different versions painted a fuller picture of the place I was entrusting with the care of my son. If I’d only asked one person, I wouldn’t have had that.

9. New face in the room? Ask for a profile, whether they’re permanent, and if they’re casual, why.

This is why you asked for the full list in #2. You already have the names, the days and the tenure of the staff, which is your baseline. Keep track of how often new people are coming in and how much change is actually happening in the room.

10. Notice when children disappear.

At my son’s old centre, I slowly watched what was once a room full of little boys turn into a room full of girls. Where did all the boys go? So I started remembering faces. I observed a slow, complete turnover of children over about six months. I realised I was being left out. These parents knew something I didn’t. And I had to learn it the slow and painful way because I wasn’t talking to enough of them. This makes #15 even more useful – get to know the other parents at your daycare.

Many parents aren’t fully transparent with their daycare about why they’re leaving. And many directors will not openly share if they left because they were unhappy or had repeated issues. So just pay attention. A revolving door of staff is a bad sign, and so is a revolving door of children.

11. Look at the photos closely.

Staged or candid? Does your child look happy?

This one is hard to notice. For myself, it was only obvious in hindsight when I moved centres and could actually compare two sets of photos side by side, which makes my tip #17 on how to trial a new centre even more important.

At my son’s first centre, I almost never saw a genuine smile. He looked engaged in the activities, but they were usually advanced for his age, like science experiments or cooking for 18-month-olds. Each baby separately photographed pouring a tablespoon of flour into the same bowl. In hindsight, it seemed like a setup. The photos and activities appealed more to parents than the children.

When I switched him, on his very first day I got so many candid shots of him laughing. I couldn’t believe it. I had never seen him so joyful. They weren’t doing complex activities, they were just left to explore on their own. I never would have noticed the difference if I hadn’t switched. I would have assumed all daycares were doing science for babies.

Look at the photos carefully, how many show your child doing something impressive, and how many show them just being a kid, laughing and having fun with their friends?

They will never post the moments where any child is crying or upset and of course those do happen. So take a critical look at all the others and you might find a pattern worth following up on.

Get it on the record

12. Never sign an incident report you haven’t read.

They tend to hand it to you at pickup while your child is pulling your arm and you’re in a rush to get home. So instead take a copy and ask your questions the next morning.

13. Give feedback in writing, professionally and politely.

The most helpful feedback is rooted in facts, supported with examples and devoid of emotions. Cite the number of incidents and the dates, keep a log. If they don’t take action, that’s a data point.

And know this before you start: if it’s a serious problem, the director may not be able to help you even if they want to. In a corporate structure, staffing budgets are set at the top and implemented across centres. So if it’s a big corporate chain, this will be challenging if there are multiple layers between you and a decision maker. In an independent centre, you’re more likely to have a straight line to the owner.

If it’s a breach or safety concern, report it to the regulatory body in your state. You can do so anonymously. In NSW that’s NSW Early Learning Commission.

Talk to People

14. Build real relationships with the educators.

Why wouldn’t you, really? If your child attends full time, they may spend more of their waking hours with them than with you.

Remember, 95% of your child’s day you will never see, but the educators see all of it. An educator who trusts you and likes you will tell you things. It was an educator I’d built a relationship with who told me about some of the centre’s bad practices. I was lucky to have that. Without it, I’d probably have stayed longer.

Realistically, we cannot expect educators to whistleblow or report their employer. The ones that do are incredibly brave. There is a tremendous power imbalance between the underpaid childcare worker and the multi-millionaire daycare owner. So instead just be the parent they’d want to tell privately.

15. Make friends with the other families at your daycare and share notes.

There is always power in numbers. Your centre can ignore feedback if it’s just coming from you. But it’s harder when six parents are requesting the same thing. Also if someone chooses to leave, that is information you’d like to know. What did they experience that you haven’t yet?

Introduce yourself, and exchange numbers. As a bonus, you can have more playdates and get to know more awesome families. Some of my best friends are ones I’ve met through Lando’s daycare.

Pay attention to whether your centre makes this easy or hard. A centre that connects families is one that isn’t worried about what you’ll compare. One that keeps you apart knows that six separate complaints are easier to manage than one shared one.

When I asked my old centre repeatedly about parent social events or exchanging numbers, I got a polite nod and zero follow-through. At the next one, I couldn’t keep up with the monthly daycare family events.

16. Ask educators questions about your child - how do they describe them? Does it line up with how they are at home?

Something was off when they’d tell me how quiet and shy my talkative social baby was. Of course we are all a bit different in public than at home, but the discrepancy shouldn’t be night and day. At his current centre, when they tell me stories about his day, it’s exactly how he is at home.

If every day is a "good day", ask follow-up questions once in a while. What did they do? Who did they play with? Any stories to share?

If you aren’t getting much back, either they don’t know your child or they haven’t observed their day, which tells you how much attention they’re getting.

And if it’s still not working:

17. Trial another centre one or two days a week before you commit to leaving.

If it gets to the point where you are considering switching, trial a new centre by moving your child only one or two days a week and compare. But keep your existing spot. It’s much easier to decrease or increase days, instead of withdrawing completely and re-enrolling if you change your mind.

Do a side by side comparison. You might be surprised at the difference in energy at drop-off, how warm the staff are, how receptive the director is, or generally how much better a centre can be run. But you’ll never know unless you try.

When I told the parents at my daycare I was leaving after a string of safety incidents, serious ratio breaches and lack of supervision, I got one of two responses:

The first was: thank you for telling me. I thought I was the only one. Several of those families withdrew their children too.

The second was: that’s not my experience. Sorry that happened to you. Please say no more.

I don’t blame the second group. I might have said the same thing eight months earlier. But you and I were not looking at the same centre.

If you drop-off at 7.30am every morning, you never see 9.30am when all the children have arrived, and you have no idea whether the staffing kept up.

If you’ve never dropped in at lunchtime to see what the kids were actually eating, all you’d see is the menu in the app, which looks great.

When incidents happened, I requested the video footage, and I saw the gap between what I was told and what happened. Not many parents get to see the CCTV recording.

I documented and escalated every ratio breach. But if you don’t do the headcounts, how would you know if they were short an educator?

It wasn’t a difference of opinion. It was a difference in what we observed.

The uncomfortable truth is that none of us can ever really know what happens in the hours we aren’t there.

Most of us only see 15 minutes at drop-off and another 15 minutes at pick-up. If your child attends a typical 7am - 5pm day, that is only 5% of their day you are actually observing. If you do pick-up and drop-off at the same time every day, as most of us do, you are actually just observing the same 5% over and over again.

And both things can be true at once. The staff can be warm, know your dog’s name, and genuinely adore your child — and there can still be too few of them in the room.

When there are too few of them, the downstream issues inevitably follow. Feeding and sleep instructions get missed, dirty nappies sit unchanged and burnt-out staff leave. On the floor, a lack of supervision turns into safety incidents that nobody saw happen.

Worse yet, a lack of oversight creates blind spots where bad actors can move in and stay under the radar. Predators can also be nice. Which is disgusting to say, but charm is the tool they use. The Royal Commission’s own research found grooming targets not just children, but parents and staff too.

Why ‘Not My Centre’ is the normal psychological response

When we hear horror stories in the news, or even bad experiences from other parents, defending our centre is the normal reaction. We can’t help it. Our brains are wired to believe that bad things happen to others more than us.

Psychologists call it optimism bias. When people are asked to rate their own odds of something bad happening against everyone else’s, almost all of us put ourselves below average. But statistically, most of us are wrong.

I caught my own optimism bias earlier this month. It was during a conversation with my financial adviser on personal insurance. We were going through the whole list — life, income protection, trauma cover. “I’m healthy and young, I don’t need much,” I said. “That’s what everyone says,” he replied. “But I’ve been doing this for 20 years and no one expects to get heart disease or cancer. Ordinary bad things happen to everyone, all the time. No one thinks it will happen to them.”

When it comes to the first group of parents – the ones who said “I thought I was the only one” before withdrawing, there was a different psychological phenomenon at play. It happens when everyone privately has doubts, but everyone assumes they’re the only one, so nobody says anything. Since nobody says anything, the silence becomes evidence that everything is fine. Psychologists call this one ‘pluralistic ignorance’.

I knew something was off within a few weeks of enrolling. But I didn’t have any friends at the centre to validate me, so my first-time parent brain let self-doubt creep in. Back then, I didn’t understand I was navigating a multi-billion dollar industry full of problems operating under a completely broken economic model. And of course — I wanted to trust my centre.

Breaches happen every day. We only find out about a fraction of them.

In the for-profit childcare marketplace, operators are financially rewarded to cut costs. When nearly 70% of a childcare centre’s total expenses are labour (ACCC 2023), they are incentivised to staff it at the bare minimum of legal requirements. And sometimes even below that, with far too little consequence.

In the three months to June 2026, the NSW regulator recorded about three breaches a day for inadequate supervision, and six a day for failing to protect children from harm and hazards. And those are only the ones the regulator found.

My centre has no enforcement actions against it. I complained to the Department of Education with dates and details, and it still has a clean record. They didn’t say it didn’t happen. They told me they lacked documentary evidence to support it.

What it tells me as a parent is that there is a large gap between what is technically legally compliant on paper and what anyone with common sense would say is a good standard of care.

So when parents check the register and see nothing, that doesn’t mean nothing happened. It means nothing was recorded.

Trust, but verify

When I worked in corporate audit, we had a saying: “Trust, but verify.” You don’t wear a seatbelt because you expect to crash your car. You do it because the risk would be catastrophic if you were unprotected. You don’t do these checks because you’re trying to ‘gotcha’ your centre — you check because you aren’t willing to accept the risk of having blind trust in a business that has your pre-verbal child, completely unobserved all day.

And it helps the educators too

When we do these checks, we aren’t just making it safer for our own children. We’re making it safer for every other child at that centre, current and future. And for the educators. Yes, even them.

When I flagged understaffing to my centre’s leadership, one educator actually thanked me. It surprised me at first, and then I understood it — she didn’t want to work in an understaffed room any more than I wanted my son in one. Another educator used to urge me to keep advocating for my child.

Educators can’t easily ask their employer for more staff. There is an enormous power imbalance between an underpaid childcare worker and a centre owner who might be a multi-million dollar corporation. We’re the ones paying the bills, which means we have leverage they don’t. So when we check, and when we say something, we’re advocating for them too.

What you can do

Here are the things you can do to keep your child safe and your centre accountable. Most take no more than a few minutes. Many you need to check only once.

At your laptop:

1. Look up who owns your centre, its rating, and whether it has enforcement actions.

2. Request the name of every educator in your child’s room, what days they work, and how long they’ve been there, by email.

3. Put your name on another centre’s waitlist as a back-up. You don’t have to take the place.

At the centre:

4. Ask about the cameras, and go and look at where they are.

5. Take a look at the nappy change area, the bathrooms and the sleep room, and check the lines of sight.

6. Once in a while, turn up unannounced, or change the time of your drop-off or pick-up.

What to watch for:

7. Do a headcount at drop-off and pick-up.

8. When an educator leaves, ask why — and ask more than one person: the director, the owner, and the staff.

9. New face in the room? Ask for a profile, and whether they’re permanent or casual.

10. Notice when children disappear. Ask why they left, and ask more than one person.

11. Look at the photos closely. Are they staged or candid?

Get it on the record:

12. Never sign an incident report you haven’t read. Ask your questions first and request a copy.

13. Give feedback in writing, professionally and politely.

Talk to people:

14. Build real relationships with your child’s educators.

15. Make friends with the other families at your daycare and share notes.

16. Ask educators questions about your child. See if it matches how they are at home.

And if it’s still not working:

17. Trial another centre one or two days a week before you commit to leaving.

Next week

I’ll break down exactly how to do each one, why it matters, and the red flags that should sound the alarm. Subscribe to get notified when it drops.

I had a mum friend who told me she’d only send her daughter to a centre that was “Exceeding” on the National Quality Standard (NQS). After all, it’s virtually the only metric parents have to evaluate a daycare centre.

Seems logical, but is it a good strategy?

I’ll save you the suspense: it’s not. That’s because the rating they have framed on the wall, that multi-coloured scorecard they have laminated at reception, it might describe a single day that happened five years ago, at a centre that has since changed owners, changed the director and has a completely different set of educators in your child’s room.

In this article we’re breaking down what the NQS is, what it actually assesses, where it falls short for parents, and how to tell a good centre from a bad one.

Whether you’re touring centres or perfectly happy with the one you’re in, this is for you.

What the rating actually is

The National Quality Standard (NQS) is Australia’s national benchmark for early childhood care. It assesses seven quality areas, which are further broken down into 15 standards and 40 elements.

Assessment is done by your state or territory regulatory authority (e.g. in NSW, that’s the Early Learning Commission), not by ACECQA. ACECQA oversees the system and publishes the results.

The ratings

An assessment can produce four ratings. I’ve included the nationwide averages below.

A rating of “Excellent” occurs when a service was already rated Exceeding and applies to ACECQA for it, and it lasts five years. Only ~25 services in the entire country are rated Excellent.

How it’s scored

If one element is not met, while all other 39 are met, it can drag down the standard, then the quality area, then the entire service down to Working Towards. In that way it punishes any failure harshly.

On the other hand, to be rated Exceeding, a service needs every element met and at least four of the seven quality areas rated Exceeding. Three areas can sit at Meeting. The assessor also has to judge three things: that good practice is embedded in daily operations, reflected on, and shaped by families. It’s a subjective bar made by the assessor on that particular day or two that is observed. It seems fairly robust on the surface.

But here’s what nobody tells you:

1. “Meeting NQS” does not mean the service is good.

It only means that on the day the Assessor visited, nothing was found to be unmet. It is the absence of a finding, not the presence of quality.

It’s a bit like being told a restaurant passed its food safety inspection. It’s the default state of not having been caught at anything.

Centres also get a heads up that an assessor is coming, they receive up to five days’ notice of most assessment and rating visits.

2. Assessments are often outdated

Regulators have a loose commitment to reassess a centre every three years, but in practice some centres are going five to seven years between visits.

That means your child technically could go through the centre, from baby to preschool, and never have the centre assessed once in that entire period.

Also, since for-profit centres change owners often, the rating you are reading may describe a centre with a different owner, a different director and a completely different set of educators

Tip: Check the rating’s date of your centre here. If it’s older than two years, it’s hardly relevant. And if it was before your child attended then it tells you nothing about their experience.

Tip: You will also see the date the centre was “last visited by regulatory authority”. If your centre was visited more recently than the rating date, that visit wasn't an assessment, meaning something else brought the regulator out. Ask the director what the visit was for.

3. The rating doesn’t cover staff ratios — and doesn’t change when they’re breached

At my son’s old daycare, the centre was regularly out of ratio and there was rarely enough supervision. I filed a complaint with the Department of Education. They kept their “Meeting” rating the entire time we were there; and they still have it today.

How can that be?

Educator-to-child ratios and minimum qualifications are not NQS elements. They’re set by the National Regulations and enforced through a separate process, although still managed within the same organisation. In NSW, the Early Learning Commission assesses centres against the NQS and handles ratio complaints.

A rating is a formal determination the provider can appeal, so it can only be changed by running the whole assessment process again. A breach can make the regulator more likely to reassess sooner, but it does not change the rating on its own.

Given the daycare gets up to five days’ notice of a visit, they’d have to be completely incompetent not to adequately staff on assessment day.

4. Nearly every centre has the same rating

92% of centres rated under the NQS are rated Meeting or Exceeding. That’s roughly 15,800 services — with completely different staff, culture, philosophies, physical spaces and leadership — falling into only two categories. If every centre near you has the same rating, it doesn’t help you choose between them.

I’ve enrolled across three centres, all rated Meeting.

• One was exceptional.

• One was good.

• One was borderline neglectful.

It is also worth noting the split by ownership. The ACCC found 34% of not-for-profit, government and school-based services exceed the National Quality Standard, against 13% of for-profit services. The not-for-profit group includes most of Australia's preschools, which rate higher across the board, lifting that average. But because not-for-profits reinvest surplus revenue back into educators and centre resources rather than paying dividends to owners, they are more likely to invest in the things that lift quality above the minimum.

5. It doesn’t tell you anything about what is most important to parents

What shapes your child's experience more than anything is continuity of educators, and whether someone responds to them warmly and consistently. Great playgrounds and activities are nice to have, but it's the people who matter most.

That is assessed in Quality Area 4 (staffing arrangements) and Quality Area 5 (relationships with children). Element 4.1.2 requires that “every effort is made for children to experience continuity of educators”. However more than half of childcare jobs (52.4%) last less than a year, against 24.5% in schools.

A centre with experienced, calm and caring educators just shy of exceeding, and one sitting right above “working towards” with burnt out staff will get the same rating.

And even a centre that gets “Exceeding” may not necessarily perform well on staffing arrangements or relationships with children. It’s much easier to prop up the non-people categories and get “Exceeding” with things like a renovated outdoor space, a statement of philosophy, clean policies or current records. Those are also all things a service can prepare with five days’ notice.

6. The NQS rates the service, but your child lives in a room.

The baby room and the pre-school room can have different leads, different ratios, different turnover and a completely different energy, but they share the same rating. Any parent whose child has moved up a room knows this.

The NQS compresses an entire service into a single rating, when your child’s experience is based on their individual room.

If not the NQS, what are the signals of quality?

The main areas that predict quality according the research are:

1. Responsive, sustained interactions between educator and child. This is what collapses first when a centre is short-staffed or has frequent turnover.

2. Continuity of carer. The same person, over time, who knows your child. A centre can be Exceeding and still have replaced every educator in your child’s room since the assessment.

3. Ratios and group size. Smaller ratios mean more quality time with your child. If you have one educator to two babies, that’s obviously better than one educator to four (the legal minimum) or more. According to a 2025 United Workers Union survey, 77% of workers reported their workplace operated below minimum staffing at least weekly.

4. Qualifications and educator wellbeing. A burnt-out, underpaid, predominately casual workforce cannot deliver sustained responsive interaction. Median wage for long daycare educators is $34.30/hr vs $42.40 national median and $62 for schoolteachers.

This list really boils down into a small subset of what the NQS assesses (roughly a fifth of the assessment).

Why I’m not waiting for Government reform

Regulation moves slowly and almost none of it is in our control. The reform happening now is progress, but I know it won’t make any difference to my own son, who will outgrow the system in a year. So I’m not going to wait for it.

As parents, we don’t have to wait years for a regulator to check whether staffing is adequate or consistent on a random day. We can assess that ourselves every day, and much more effectively.

Do a headcount at drop-off and make sure there’s enough staff for the number of children. If there’s an unfamiliar face in your child’s room, ask the director who they are and whether they’re permanent. If someone leaves, ask why. If something isn’t safe, say so — in writing. If anything feels off, raise it. If it doesn’t get resolved, then leave.

If governments won’t hold centres accountable, we still can. Share this series to help other parents be informed, ask the right questions and choose a great daycare.

Figures current as at September 2026.

They both had a kitchen, servers, a chef, patrons and they both had to pass the same health inspection. But passing tells you nothing about whether the food is any good. The price on the menu is not connected to how delicious it is either. Childcare works the same way.

Daycares are just businesses. And like any industry, the range in quality between businesses is enormous. Not all restaurants are the same, and not all daycares are the same. The difference is in the details, and a standard tour will never show them to you.

These questions are how you find out what's really going on.

If I had asked even one of the questions I outlined in Part 1 of this series, I would never have landed my son in a bad daycare. Because red flags would have emerged all over their answers.

I’d spent eight years auditing businesses professionally and I was still blindly optimistic when it came to the daycare business. Informed would have been better, and it’s one of my biggest regrets as a parent. It’s why I audit daycares now.

Now let’s dig into the next five, on sickness, safety and what’s actually happening in the room.

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6. Who is ever alone with my child, and how do you check who you hire?

It’s actually five questions I’ve wrapped into one:

• Where do nappy changes happen, and is that space visible to the rest of the room? (Take a look while on tour)

• Who is in the sleep room, how often are sleeping children physically checked, and is that written down?

• Does your screening cover everyone — educators, assistants, kitchen and admin staff, students and casuals?

• Do you check references? If so, how?

• Do all staff get first aid and CPR training, or just the minimum? The legal minimum is one qualified person in attendance at any time. But many centres train everybody, which is why it’s worth asking. CPR has to be redone every year.

Everyone working with children is legally required to hold a Working With Children Check, so there is no point asking whether staff have one. It also gives you much less assurance than you would think.

In NSW, the check lasts five years, and is continuously monitored, even if the holder changes jobs. But monitoring only catches what reaches the authorities. So if a complaint never becomes a charge, it doesn’t show up. In the case I covered in my last piece, accused child sex offender Joshua Dale Brown held a valid check. The ABC reported that authorities did not review it even after a complaint was made. The Royal Commission warned a decade ago that these checks give parents a false sense of comfort.

So the better question to ask is about references, which centres are not obliged to check at all. Ask if they actually call up previous employers. Someone who has moved through a lot of centres in a short time is a red flag.

7. What is your procedure for biting, pushing and hitting, and do you have children doing it now?

My son was bitten five times, by several different children, in the space of five months, and the daycare tried to tell me that was normal. The marks were so deep, it would often take 48 hours to fade. Sometimes they would even blame my child because he wasn’t sharing toys. He was only 18 months old.

We normalise biting, pushing and hitting in daycares, but the frequency, severity and circumstances make all the difference. Some of it is developmentally typical, but constant incidents are not. Children also don’t go from zero to a hundred. There are usually triggers and a build-up, and somebody is meant to be watching for it. When it happens over and over across a room, it is usually a symptom of overstimulated children and not enough supervision.

It may feel awkward to ask, but it’s worth knowing: are there children in this room biting at the moment, and how many? You aren’t asking anyone to be named. A centre that answers honestly is one you can work with.

If you get “we can’t discuss other children”, ask it a different way. Every incident has to be documented, so ask how many incident reports were written for that room last month.

Under the regulations all incidents must be documented and you have to be told within 24 hours. You should never be discovering a bruise yourself at bath time, or hearing on Friday about something that happened on Tuesday. So ask what happened the last time a child was hurt in that room, and how those parents found out.

8. How do you prevent the spread of illness and ensure your sickness policy is actually followed?

Every daycare has basically the same sickness policy on paper, so asking for it is much less helpful than asking about how the spread of illness is prevented and how sickness policies are actually followed — a much harder part for a daycare to uphold.

Here are the specific questions worth asking:

• How often do you sanitise the toys, and who does it?

• Do the children wash hands with soap and water before every meal, and is it supervised to make sure it’s done properly? The CDC is blunt about hand sanitiser not being a substitute for handwashing. Hand sanitiser does not protect you from norovirus (the common cause of gastro).

• How are drink bottles kept separate? Is there a system that stops toddlers drinking out of each other’s?

• How do parents report illness back to you, and how do you encourage them to do so?

• When and how are parents told about an outbreak?

• When are children sent home, and who makes that call?

I am continuously horrified by the sickness stories I hear from friends. Hospitalisations, breathing tubes, a child who nearly died — all from something picked up at daycare.

My son had 16 different viral and bacterial infections in his first 10 months of daycare, and my doctor assured me this was normal. He was right, because the Royal Children’s Hospital says a healthy child gets up to 12 viral illnesses a year, and doctors estimate a child in childcare can reach 20.

Somehow, we have collectively accepted that a small child being sick 20 times a year is simply the cost of childcare and there is nothing we can do about it.

But a centre that is thoughtful about reducing the spread of illness will have fewer sicknesses than one who does not. When I moved Lando to a centre with fewer children, more open space, proper handwashing and real time outdoors, the illnesses dropped away drastically.

I’ve seen some daycares accept children when they look half-dead. I’ve seen others be much more conservative, pay close attention and will call you to come and get them the moment they are unwell.

9. How many hours a day are the children outside, and what happens when it rains?

This one sounds soft, but it is the best proxy I have found for whether a centre has enough staff.

The Australian Government’s movement guidelines say children aged one to five need at least 180 minutes of physical activity spread across the day. So “we go outside after morning tea” isn’t a good answer.

At Lando’s first centre, if the ground was even slightly wet they stayed indoors all day. It was never a policy, it was understaffing. Taking a room full of toddlers out onto wet grass means muddy clothes, and muddy clothes mean changing them, and changing them takes hands they didn’t have.

At his second centre they were outside four and a half hours a day, every day. They did water play and let the kids get filthy. The children were happy, and he’d go through at least one outfit a day. He also got sick less, which made sense to me — they were spending far less of the day breathing the same indoor air.

So ask for the number of hours. Ask what happens when it’s wet. A centre that keeps children inside because it’s easier will give you a vague answer about the weather.

10. Tell me about something you changed in the last six months because a parent raised it.

This question gets to the root of how a centre responds to feedback. They all say “we welcome feedback”, but that is lip service if they can’t give you a single example of acting on it.

A good centre will act when the feedback is a genuine concern or a good idea. It will have a culture where parents raise things directly with the director as they come up, rather than once a year in a formal survey.

Lando’s first daycare heard my feedback plenty of times on safety and understaffing, and they did absolutely nothing about any of it.

His next centre actively sought parents out. When a parent said the rocks in the outdoor area were becoming a hazard, the director removed them. When another requested blinds for nap time, she installed them.

If they can’t come up with a single example, or they get defensive at being asked, you have your answer.

The one thing you don’t ask

If your child is already attending daycare, drop by unannounced and see what’s really going on. Regulation 157 says the provider must allow a parent to enter the premises at any time their child is being educated and cared for.

Swing by at midday because you forgot their hat, and have a look at what they’re eating for lunch. Or turn up late in the afternoon for an unexpected early pickup, when rooms are being consolidated, staff are changing over and everybody is tired.

I’m not saying make a habit of it, but do it at least once. These businesses have your children completely unobserved all day.

Every tour you will ever be given is at mid-morning, when the centre is fully staffed, the children are fresh, the room has just been reset and the director is on site. It is the best hour of that centre’s entire week, not a typical one.

It’s never too late to ask these questions — or to switch centres

I met a dad in the lift at Lando’s first daycare, not long after we enrolled. I asked him what he thought of our centre. He sighed and said, “Well. It’s the devil you know.”

That perfectly summarises what I see all the time in my parent community. We assume all daycares have turnover and sickness so we might as well stick with what we know. Add the fear of adjusting to a new centre, the possibility of worse tears at drop-off, the waitlists and the paperwork, and we’d rather stay somewhere we’re not happy with for months or years.

I’m sure that dad thought about switching centres — after every sickness, every incident, every bad drop-off. But he never did it, even though that daycare would have taken him back in a heartbeat if it didn’t work out.

Well I didn’t take his advice. Instead, I recognised switching daycares is a two-way door. So I experimented.

I moved Lando to a new centre and discovered that much better daycares actually do exist. I moved him from his large provider to a small independent centre he loved. Then when my schedule allowed for a small, low cost non-profit with short hours, I experimented again. This time by just moving him one day at first to see how he liked it.  I told myself I would give it a try, and if he was unhappy, I could always just put him back in his original daycare. Enrolling him across two centres gave me the best perspective to compare and contrast experiences. My experimentation not only saved me $12,000 a year, it resulted in a much happier child.

Many of these questions I didn’t ask until my son was already enrolled — I didn’t have this checklist then. But it wasn’t too late because their answers gave me the information and validation I needed to switch. Sometimes it was uncomfortable to ask. Daycares seem to hold all the power with their long waitlists and I didn’t want to be labelled a Karen and have that reflect badly on Lando. So I understand the hesitation, but even asking three or four of these questions will likely give you a vibe so quickly, you’ll either be impressed or running for the door.

Read Next

I break down the daycare rating system, why it tells you much less than you think, and what to look at instead.

If I missed any questions in this week’s article, please pop them in the comments below so we can share with our parent community and make daycares better for everyone. In case you missed Part 1 - here it is:

— Christina

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The gap between the best and the worst daycare centre within a few streets of your house is enormous, and almost none of it is visible on a tour.

When my son Lando was close to moving into the 2-3 year old room at his old daycare, I decided to visit his new room at 9:30AM unannounced, intentionally choosing a time very few parents observe.

I counted 21 children and two completely overwhelmed educators. There should have been five educators for that age group. I saw three toddlers crying and not being attended to. One was face down on the floor sobbing. One toddler struck another for crying (as the educator clarified, this was because the children find the sound of crying distressing). One educator was trying to read a book to this chaotic room of 21 children, nearly yelling to get the story across since there was so much background noise. The other educator was wiping tables — a job that looked like it could wait.

I withdrew Lando that day. And my heart broke for those children and their parents who were at work and didn’t see what I saw.

You might think this was just a one-off. But according to a 2025 United Workers Union survey:

• 77% of workers reported their workplace operated below minimum staffing at least weekly.

• 75% reported children being left without emotional support.

• 72% reported increased self-harm or peer aggression.

It’s a more common scene than any of us would like, and I saw it all first-hand.

I spent eight years auditing businesses, then I had the real experience of being a parent navigating the broken daycare system. So now I audit daycares to correct this and help parents make more informed choices. With the benefit of hindsight and the knowledge I’ve accumulated in business, these are the ten questions I ask a daycare.

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1. Who actually owns this daycare?

The reason why this matters, as I explained in my last piece Daycares: The Business of Children, is because the more profit driven the centre, the more incentivised it is to cut costs. And since labour makes up 69% of the cost of running a centre, it is by far the most effective place to cut. It is also the most damaging thing you can cut for your child because it translates into fewer staff, less qualified staff, or underpaid staff who leave.

You cannot easily tell who owns your centre from the outside. G8 Education runs more than 350 centres under a range of different brand names, and that is intentional, so a first time parent cannot easily tell that their local daycare with the nice logo is in fact part of a publicly listed company. Affinity runs 250 centres under several different names, is backed by private equity, and was bought by Quadrant in 2021 in a $650 million deal.

The clearest example of why this matters is the case of Joshua Dale Brown, who is before the Victorian courts charged with more than 150 offences relating to alleged child sexual abuse across multiple centres, including alleged offending at G8’s Creative Garden Early Learning Centre in Point Cook. Over eight years he worked at 23 different centres. Thirteen of them were owned by Affinity and four by G8. The daycare names changed constantly, but the owner changed far less often.

Two things to look up:

Are they for-profit or not-for-profit?

74% of long day care places in Australia are for-profit, so the odds are yes. Not-for-profits usually say so on their website because it’s a selling point. For-profits generally don’t, so you can verify it yourself on the ACECQA National Registers. If the provider name ends in “Pty Ltd” it is very likely for-profit. If you aren’t sure, you can always ask them to confirm.

Not-for-profits are not incentivised in the same way as for-profits. And not-for-profits consistently rate higher on the National Quality Standard (NQS) than for-profits, about 40% are “exceeding” for not-for-profits vs 15% for-profits (e61 Institute).

Are they independent, or a large provider?

Any provider running 25 or more services is classed as a large provider, which means they have to report their revenue, profits and leasing arrangements to the government, and you can see all of them on the Starting Blocks website.

Note the list of large providers is by owner only, not by the name on the door. For example, you'll find Affinity Education Group on it, but not Milestones — which is one of their daycares. So figure out who owns your centre first.

If it’s a single independently owned centre, or a chain with 20 centres, it won’t be on that list and it doesn’t have to tell anyone anything, but you can still search it there for its rating and any enforcement actions.

Large for-profit providers are more than three times as likely to have an enforcement action recorded against them as other large providers. (Mitchell Institute, 2026).

Scale and profit pressure together make breaches more likely, which is a good reason to check your specific centre’s enforcement history on the Starting Blocks page.

2. Will my child have the same educator every day?

Everyone knows to ask about turnover, but what is equally important is consistency.

A centre can have low turnover but your baby can still be cared for by multiple different educators each week.

This is because staff get moved between rooms and if they are working part-time, their days may not align perfectly with your child’s. They may have someone exceptional in your child’s room, but if they are working Monday to Wednesday when your child attends Wednesday to Friday, that is not very beneficial for you.

For-profit centres rely mainly on part-time staff, while not-for-profit centres employ far more people full-time. Part-time educators are often wonderful, but a heavily fragmented staff roster is more susceptible to operational cracks.

So ask who the primary educator for your child will be, how long they have been there, and what days they actually work.

While on tour, actually speak to your child’s educators privately. Ask them about themselves, how long have they been here, what did they do before, and if they enjoy working there. You are not looking for a particular answer so much as a vibe. If a centre steers you away from talking to the people in the room, that is its own answer.

Ask when room transitions happen and what the process is. A good centre transitions gradually, starting with a couple of hours a day and building up; and it happens when a child hits certain milestones rather than simply on their birthday or if they have new children starting that need their spot.

3. How long has the director, and each educator in this room, been here?

With turnover, you want to be specific. Because if you just ask “what is your turnover like?” — that leaves the door open for a vague answer like “it’s good” or “it’s low” which tells you nothing.

Ask which educators are in the room your child would be in, and then ask how long each of them has been there, name by name. That may seem overkill, but there shouldn’t be many. If it’s a laundry list of people in that room, it means they have plenty of part time or casual staff which is another problem already covered.

Ask how long the director has been there. A centre that has had three directors in two years has an issue somewhere.

Turnover across early childhood is high: it runs between 17 and 32% a year, against 12 to 20% for the Australian workforce generally. 70% of long day care educators have been at their current centre for three years or less.

So the bar is low, but the benchmark helps you determine a good centre from a bad one. If anyone in that room has been there for three years, that actually puts them in the top third.

I knew I had struck gold when I found a not-for-profit for Lando where the newest educator had been there for four years, with the rest over a decade.

If they are all new because it is a new centre, that is a different type of risk. It means the centre is unproven, which doesn’t necessarily mean bad, but you will have to ask yourself if you want to be the guinea pig.

4. Do you staff above the minimum ratios, and do you count room by room or across the service?

In NSW the rules for child to educator ratios are:

• Babies under 2: 1:4

• 2-3 years: 1:5

• 3 years and over: 1:10 (nationally it’s 1:11)

I don’t know about you, but if someone handed me four babies I would find it very challenging to ensure all their needs are met at all times. If more than two are crying, I have a real problem on my hands. That is why especially for babies, if they staff above the ratio that is a good sign.

Legally, ratios are calculated across the whole service, not room by room. The industry calls this the “under the roof” rule, and it means a centre can be perfectly compliant on paper while your child’s actual room is short staffed at that moment, as long as there are staff somewhere else in the building. In the example I opened with — 21 toddlers and two staff – technically they may have been compliant because of this rule. But common sense will tell you that it was a clear breach of adequate supervision. If the daycare is an open-flow, small centre that’s less of an issue. But if it’s a large centre with closed separate rooms, having your child’s educator on the other side of the building is a problem.

If you ask this and get a vague response “we’re always above ratio”, there are a couple things worth following up on:

• Are those extra staff regular, either full or part time? Keep in mind that if that extra set of hands is unfamiliar float staff, it affects consistency.

• How do they cover breaks? All educators are entitled to breaks. In NSW, educators on planned breaks cannot be counted in ratio, but they can in some other states, including Queensland, Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia. A centre that has thought about this will have a real answer for you. A centre that hasn’t will give you a jumbled one.

5. Do you always operate at full occupancy? What is your occupancy goal?

Under the regulations every child must have at least 3.25 square metres of unencumbered indoor space and 7 square metres of unencumbered outdoor space. Unencumbered means it does not include spaces like storage, toilets, nappy change rooms or staff rooms.

If a centre runs at full occupancy, it means every child may get as little as 1.8 metres by 1.8 metres (3.25 m²) inside. That’s not a lot of space.

This is a question I asked Lando’s old daycare, but several months too late. Their answer told me a lot about what the place was all about and it would have been helpful to know it upfront. “Yes, our goal is to operate at full occupancy.” She understood they were a business. Every absent child is money lost and every enrolment is money gained, so the room is full every single day of the year. That centre invested heavily into marketing, with frequent sign up offers and lots of ads to ensure it was always full.

Occupancy is also how some staff are rewarded too, through their bonus calculations. At a NSW parliamentary inquiry last year, G8 Education's bonus scheme for centre managers was described as a 10 per cent bonus, largely based on occupancy rates.

Keep in mind, operating at full occupancy is different to having a waitlist. A waitlist is an indicator of a daycare with a good reputation. A daycare can have a goal of 80%-90% occupancy, but still have a long waitlist because once they hit that threshold, they aren’t willing to go over.

It’s not inherently bad to run at full occupancy, but a centre aiming for 100% has no slack anywhere. A centre that deliberately runs below it has decided to spend money on breathing room instead, and your child is the one who gets to breathe.

Daycares are strange businesses

You are the customer, but your child is the one receiving the service, and for the first few years they cannot tell you anything about it. They can’t leave a Google review, they can’t recommend it to friends or family. If you enrol five days a week, they will spend more waking hours at this business than with you as their parents. That’s why it’s so important to ask the right questions and be as informed as possible.

The Daycare Audit — Part 2

Here are the remaining five questions which focus on sickness, safety and what is actually happening in the room. I also cover some helpful strategies to stay vigilant once already enrolled.

— Christina

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In February 2026 it was reported that the managing director of Little Zak’s Academy, a large Australian childcare provider, purchased a $56 million house in Sydney’s Vaucluse. He plans to knock it down and build a luxury harbour-view mansion for millions more.

About six months before that, a parliamentary inquiry heard that a child at the Newcastle Little Zak’s centre was found in a washing machine cupboard. Children at the Wollongong location fell out of cots because the rails were fitted wrong. In October 2025, two workers at the Doonside centre were charged over the alleged assault of a toddler.

Little Zak’s recorded $142.5m in revenue and $17.1m in profit (12%) in FY25, yet more than half of their centres (56% or 24 out of 43 services) have enforcement actions against them. Both figures are published by the government, on its Starting Blocks website.

Tip: You can search for your own daycare here

How can this be? Unfortunately, it’s just the business model functioning exactly as designed.

In childcare, everything that makes a centre better for your child – more educators, more experienced educators, better food, more space – is a cost.

And as a society, we have decided to hand over the care of our youngest children to businesses that profit by spending less on them.

I have, regrettably, experienced this first-hand.

But as a first time parent, I didn’t know the questions to ask on a tour, I didn’t know the warning signs to look out for, I didn’t understand how important it was to know who owns your centre, how they operate and how they make money. I had blind optimism and no friends to tell me otherwise, because they didn’t fully understand it either.

That is why I am using my 15 years in business including eight as an auditor, plus all the mistakes I’ve learned first-hand to help parents make more informed decisions about childcare.

Why is daycare so expensive?

Australian childcare used to be substantially community-run: by councils, churches, parent committees and non-profits. Childcare services were subsidised based on staff wages (i.e. you only received the subsidy if the centre spent it on staff). Then a major funding change happened in the 90s. Instead of subsidising the services, the government changed to subsidise the child (the system that today is the childcare subsidy, or CCS).

So for the first time, money was attached to the child.

Private businesses could now claim it and the government stopped controlling how many centres opened. With more money in the pockets of consumers instead of centres, fees have grown faster than inflation and wages. Daycare fees rose 20–32% between 2018 and 2022.

Roughly 95% of the growth in childcare centres has been for-profit (Australia Institute) and 74% of long day care places in Australia are held by private, for-profit providers (Mitchell Institute, Aug 2026). Meanwhile non-profit numbers have barely moved because capital grants to non-profits ended in the 90s and unlike for-profits, they can’t raise money from investors to open new centres.

How for-profit daycares work

It’s pretty simple: Profit = Revenue - Costs. The only way you improve profitability is by increasing revenue or decreasing costs. In the case of daycares, that means more children attending more often, or higher fees. Cutting costs is harder, because rent is fixed. Which leaves staff, food and consumables as the main levers. Here’s a simplified daycare profit formula:

Profit = (Children × Fees) − (Staff + Rent + Food + Everything else)

On fees: daycares charge a daily rate. In Sydney that’s roughly $150–$210 a day and it is standard to increase rates annually. You also pay for public holidays, your own holidays, and days your child is too sick to attend.

On children: daycares are naturally incentivised to run at maximum capacity. They prioritise children who can attend five days a week, and many set a minimum, like three days. Some push you to enrol at least one Monday or Friday. Mondays because that’s where most public holidays fall and Fridays because that’s the day everyone wants off.

On staff: Labour represents ~70% of total costs for centre-based day care (ACCC, 2023), which makes it the most effective place to cut.

That can be done through:

• Less competitive wages, or underpayment

• Less experienced, more entry-level staff

• Fewer staff altogether, running at the minimum required ratios or below them

In a 2025 United Workers Union survey of 2,100 educators, 77% said their centre operates below minimum staffing levels at least weekly. A shocking finding. Ratio breaches show up in the public enforcement register regularly.

Tip: One of the fastest and most effective things you can do as a parent is a quick headcount every time you visit. It only takes two minutes. Count the number of kids and the number of educators to see if they are meeting ratios. In NSW it’s 1:4 for under 2s, 1:5 for 2–3s, 1:10 for 3–5s. So for example, if there are ten babies in the baby room, they must have three educators to uphold the 1:4 ratio (10 ÷ 4 = 2.5, rounded up to 3). If they aren’t, report it to your centre (in writing) and the Department of Education to investigate.

Although technically under National Law (Regulation 123), ratios are calculated across the whole service at any given time, not strictly room-by-room. However, centres must ensure adequate supervision (Section 165) in every room. I used to do this at my son’s old centre. More often than not, they were out of ratio. It is a clear signal of a bad daycare you should not ignore.

On rent: Rent is the second biggest cost after wages, but it’s not a lever a centre can do much about, which puts pressure on cutting costs on the ones that can move, like staff and food.

On food: Lower quality ingredients and smaller portions are both effective ways to cut costs. A whistleblower told Four Corners that some Affinity centres were spending about 42 cents per meal, across four meals a day. At some centres it was as low as 33 cents. Research from the Queensland Brain Institute found 80% of children in audited centres weren’t getting adequate protein or vegetables.

Tip: If you can swing it, even just once, drop in unannounced at lunchtime and see what your child is actually eating. Under the National Law you have a right to enter the service at any time your child is there. I did this once when we were heading away on holidays and once when Lando was sick and I got a call for pickup. I could see why they’d report him eating three or four “servings” at lunch. A serving was more like a big spoonful from what I could tell.

On safety: Conducting proper background checks, interviews, reference checks, security cameras - it all takes time and money.

Not all centres are equally motivated to maximise revenue and cut costs. There is a big difference between a large multi-centre group and a single centre run by an owner-director who is there every day. Understanding who owns your centre, and how they make their money, tells you a lot about how it will be run.

Not-for-profits operate on an entirely different model.

Non-profits are run by parent committees, churches, charities and councils, which includes most community preschools. The ACCC found they face lower land costs and put the savings straight into staff, and 34% of not-for-profit, government and school services exceed the National Quality Standard compared to 13% of for-profit ones. But they’re becoming rarer, and their hours often don’t work for full-time working parents. I’ll come back to them later in the series when we explore alternative options.

Why the market can’t fix this

Daycares are unusual businesses that are not subject to market corrections the way other businesses are. There are three reasons for this:

• The consumer is a child, mostly pre-verbal or barely verbal. If a typical business has consistently bad customer experiences, Google reviews would sort them out pretty quickly. But children can’t leave reviews, or recommend their centre to their friends and family. Of course the parents can, but all you see is 15 minutes at drop and pickup. The other 7-10 hours a day are completely unobserved.

• The costs of switching are high. In a typical business, if you don’t like the product or service, you can cancel or switch fairly easily. Daycare placements can be limited, so you may have to navigate waitlists, sibling considerations, work schedules, paperwork and disrupt your routine. You cannot easily walk away or pull them out of care temporarily to find another centre when you are working.

• The quality signal is broken. 73% of services are “Meeting NQS,” and they are only reassessed roughly every three years. It’s a blanket rating that doesn’t tell you much and becomes out of date quickly. Centres also get one to five days’ notice before an assessment visit, so it’s not a typical day they are observing, it’s a polished one.

Australia is the outlier

Across the OECD, early childhood education and care is overwhelmingly public: on average, about two-thirds of children attend public or community institutions. In Australia, we have flipped the model. Over 74% of our long day care places are run by private for-profit businesses.

While we do have public preschool in Australia, it’s about 15 hours a week and mainly for four-year-olds. That is not a system designed for working parents.

In Sweden, every child is entitled to a place from their first birthday, it’s open all year, full working days, and there’s a legal cap on what any parent can be charged. It works out to approximately $11–12 AUD a day for full-time care. That’s the maximum any family pays, no matter what they earn.

Other than googling “how to move to Sweden”, there are two useful things we can do: advocate for change, and learn how to work within the system as it exists.

The advocacy part is slower than any of us would like, but it is a right we often forget. You can email your MP and complain to your state regulator when something is wrong at your centre. You can share this post with other first-time parents to educate them and raise awareness. Regulators do investigate complaints, and it’s one of the few levers a parent actually has. I have done both of these things and it was easier than I expected. But it was also slow, frustrating and the outcome was out of my control.

Learning to work within the system is what this series is for. It’s faster and fully in your control.

Read Next

The top questions to ask your daycare, whether you’re enrolling for the first time or thinking about switching.

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When I was pregnant people would ask me what school I’d be sending my unborn child to. In Sydney, that is not an unreasonable question. If you don’t get on the private school waitlist before your child is walking, you won’t get in. Whether that’s clever marketing, fear-mongering or just reality, it fuels anxiety for parents all the same.

Hormonal, stressed and socially pressured, I agreed to $5,000 in non-refundable fees across five elite private schools to hold a high school placement for our one-year-old. It was an expensive way to feel better.

Well, we’re no longer planning to send him to any of those schools.

What changed is that I eventually sat down and analysed the decision properly. I set aside emotions, bias and social pressure and leaned on my fifteen years of solving strategy and numbers problems at work.

Businesses make complex, high-stakes, no-obvious-answer decisions constantly. They’ve built proper tools and frameworks for it, because the cost of getting it wrong is enormous. But our family decisions get none of that, even though the stakes are much higher. We so often let our emotions decide for us (my own cost us $5,000).

So I built DRIVE (a slightly embarrassing acronym I’ve made my peace with) to make better decisions. It’s five questions I ask before making any big family decision. Not all five are needed for every decision; they each serve a different purpose.

1) What does the data say?

Data — D in DRIVE

Data is about finding out what the evidence actually says, before you decide anything.

That sounds obvious. But in an era of misinformation, social media, old wives’ tales and no time to check any of it, it’s harder than it sounds. We also have a habit of racing to a decision before we’ve clearly stated the problem we’re trying to solve.

For example, most Sydney parents I speak with believe private school is worth it. Not one of them has evidence beyond their own experience, usually some version of the network argument.

A strategist would start somewhere else entirely. Not with “is private school worth it?” but with the questions underneath it that data can actually answer:

• Are private school graduates better prepared for university?

• Do they perform better throughout their degrees than public school graduates?

• Does private school buy you a higher-earning network, and therefore greater opportunities?

• Do private school graduates have better life outcomes — more money, success, titles, friendships or happiness?

I’ve now done that research. I’ll show you what it says in a few weeks, and how it changed my mind.

2) Is this decision reversible?

Reversibility — R in DRIVE

Reversibility separates the decisions you can undo from the ones you can’t.

It is used to triage decisions and determine how much mental energy a decision is worth. As I wrote about last week, in this complex age of modern parenting, giving every decision equal mental energy will lead to burnout.

In his early shareholder letters, Jeff Bezos split decisions into one-way doors and two-way doors. Most decisions, he argued, are two-way: if you walk through and don’t like it, you can walk back out. His warning was that decision paralysis comes from treating a two-way door like it only opens one way.

Having another child, buying a house, moving countries, starting private school — those are true one-way doors. You can’t undo them without significant pain and cost. They deserve the full DRIVE analysis.

But changing your baby’s sleep routine, hiring a babysitter, trying a meal delivery service or switching daycares are all two-way. So don’t overthink them. Move fast and experiment, because you’ll learn something either way.

To be clear, experimenting isn’t being reckless. You’re considering the change in the first place because something isn’t working, and that’s your signal to move. Understand the safe sleep guidelines, vet the babysitter or daycare properly, then decide quickly instead of wasting further time. If it’s a two-way door, the cost of being wrong is small and easily corrected.

3) What could go wrong, and what can I actually do about it?

Insurance — I in DRIVE

This question is for decisions with high uncertainty and low control. It does two things: it shows you what’s in your control, and it makes you plan for what isn’t.

You can’t control whether someone runs a red light into your car, but you can wear a seatbelt and insure your car anyway.

Businesses understand this so well that most large ones have an entire function dedicated to it. My first job at Google was in risk assessment, where asking that question was our entire mandate.

In parenting we do the opposite. We plan for the ideal and assume it’ll unfold that way. We overestimate how much control we have, given our children arrive with their own will and no interest in our plans.

Birth is the first time we experience this illusion of control as parents. Nearly every first-time mother I speak to is planning a spontaneous vaginal birth with no interventions and minimal need for pain medication. But about 43% of first-time mothers will have a caesarean (AIHW, 2023).

You can’t control what happens in birth, so focus only on what you can: your expectations, and the conversations you have with your care provider before the day.

Throw out your birth plan — it’s a wish list. Instead, ask your care provider questions and understand the various paths birth can take, not just the ideal one, so you know how your care provider will respond when something changes instead of trying to figure it out in your most vulnerable moment.

That preparation is shown to reduce the odds of a traumatic birth, which affects around one in three women (Birth Trauma Australia).

4) What do we value?

Values — V in DRIVE

This one is for when you’re choosing between options that can’t easily be compared.

A nanny, long daycare, an au pair, grandparents, or extending your leave. Five options with very little in common, which is why a pros and cons list leaves you with five separate lists and no way to evaluate them.

The way out is counterintuitive: stop looking at your options. Figure out what your family actually values first, prioritise that list from dealbreaker to minor preference, then score each option objectively against it. It’s an exercise I call the ‘Values Matrix’, based on a management consulting tool I learned.

Most of us do this backwards. We evaluate the options and never reflect on our values at all, sometimes because we haven’t taken the time to think about them or get on the same page as our partners.

In the same way a company has a mission statement to guide its decisions, so should we have a Family Mission Statement that clearly articulates our values and acts as the compass for all our life decisions.

5) What is the true cost?

Economics — E in DRIVE

Economics is for the large, multi-year financial commitments, and it exists because the sticker price is almost never the real cost.

Back to our example of private school. The cost isn’t the tuition. It’s the building levies, the uniforms, the tech fees, the excursions, and the hidden one nobody talks about: the lifestyle inflation that comes with a high-consumption peer group.

A friend of mine recently spent nearly $2,000 on a mani-pedi birthday party for her six-year-old. She didn’t want to, but another mother at the school had set the benchmark with a $20,000 party a few months earlier.

Then there’s what that money would have done elsewhere over twenty years. That’s called the opportunity cost. It’s the number almost nobody calculates, but the one that gives the greatest perspective. For example:

• How many years can we shave off our retirement if we don’t choose private schooling?

• If we invested the fees in the stock market instead, how large a deposit could we provide for our child’s first home?

It sounds complex to run this analysis, but you don’t need a finance degree. I’ll use mine to break it down simply in the coming weeks, including the AI prompts that will model it all for you in seconds.

There’s no universally right answer to family decisions.

But these five questions lead you to ones that are informed, values-aligned and made with confidence.

We know exactly why we’re not sending Lando to an elite private school now. We can confidently articulate the data, numbers and family values that back it up, and we couldn’t before.

Another family could run the same five questions and land on private school. That’s the point.

Read Next

Each of the decisions I’ve used here — birth, daycare and private school — will get their own series and full DRIVE analysis soon.

I’m starting with daycare and asking “what could go wrong, and what can I actually do about it?” We all have high hopes for the place we entrust our children to, and it’s another perfect example of what we cannot control. So let’s focus on what we can. I’ll use my audit background to share the specific questions to ask a daycare, and how you can vet them properly when all you see is a tour and 15 minutes at drop-off and pick-up.

If you’re choosing a centre for the first time, or wondering whether to switch, the next few weeks are for you. Subscribe below.

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I looked at the data to figure out if it really is harder today or if it just feels that way. The answer is not what I expected.

The financial strain of parenting today

Let’s start with money because it underpins everything else.

In the 1990s, the average Australian home cost around four times household income. Today it’s more than eight; in Sydney it’s closer to 14x. Our parents’ generation could buy a family home on one income and a normal job, which meant one person’s job was the home. Today, over 70% of families have two working parents, compared to only 40% in the early 1980s. For most families two incomes are not a choice, it’s what your mortgage or rent requires.

And because we have to work, we need more childcare. Today that is a cost, quality and availability problem. Around 35% of Australians, about 9 million people, live in a “childcare desert”, a neighbourhood with more than three children for every available place. My friends got on a daycare waitlist in Sydney’s Inner West when they were pregnant, only to be told they don’t have any chance of getting in, two years later.

Many of these problems have arisen because the childcare sector itself completely changed in a generation. It used to be substantially community-run: by councils, churches, parent committees and non-profits. Today roughly 95% of the 300 to 400 new centres opening each year are for-profit. It’s the business of children, and businesses have to make money. In high-demand metro areas, full-time care can reach $36,000 a year for one child in full-time care, before subsidy. In Sydney and Melbourne it runs well above that; and the subsidy is not for everyone.

We are parenting MORE, on top of work

Despite more mothers being in paid work, mothers today spend more hours actively parenting than mothers did in the 1960s.

In the United States, where this data goes back furthest, married mothers’ time on hands-on childcare rose from about 10.6 hours a week in 1965 to 14.3 hours in 2011. Over the same period, the amount of mothers in paid work roughly doubled.

According to sociologist Suzanne Bianchi, mothers in the past were in the home, but they weren’t necessarily focused on the children. Kids were sent outside to entertain each other. I don’t have any memories of playing with my own parents. I played with my siblings and the neighbourhood kids, and occasionally we rode our bikes down the street to visit our grandparents, who were always home and happy to see us.

Grandparents today are not as available, although they still make up the largest source of unpaid help in Australia. The share of Australian children in informal care, mostly with grandparents, fell from 31% in 1996 to 19% in 2017, while workforce participation for 55 to 64 year olds climbed from roughly 45% to 67%. Many of them are still working. They are also healthier, busier and have lives of their own.

Additionally, nearly a third of Australians were born overseas, including myself having been born in Canada. This is up from a quarter two decades ago which means many grandparents don’t reside in the same city or country as their grandkids. My own mother would love to help out more, if she didn’t have to travel 20 hours on a plane to do so.

The job description changed

The goalpost of parenting has also moved. It used to be pretty simple: keep the kids fed, clothed and alive.

Now we’re expected to understand nutrition, development, behaviour and mental health. We know that responsive, consistent care in the early years shapes how a child handles stress for years afterwards. We have to be calm at all times because small children can’t regulate themselves and co-regulate with us. So we’ve had to re-parent ourselves at the same time as parenting our children, to stop whatever we inherited from being passed onto the next generation. It’s the part of the job nobody warns you about, because you can’t see it until you’re already in it.

On the other hand, we take for granted the ways in which parenting got much easier

We quickly forget that Australian infant mortality has more than halved since 1990 and SIDS deaths have dropped roughly 85% since the safe sleeping campaigns began in 1991. Vaccines that didn’t exist in our childhoods are now routine, and childhood cancer survival has been transformed.

Cars are safer and consumer products are strictly regulated. We have rear-facing car seats, ISOFIX, mandatory Australian standards for cots and prams and button battery regulations.

A child with ADHD, autism or dyslexia actually gets a diagnosis and support now instead of being called naughty or difficult.

Fathers are much more involved now too. Paternal childcare time has roughly tripled since the 60s. It means a child now has two adults paying attention instead of one, and a mother who is not the sole point of failure in the household.

And family life got more convenient. My mother used cloth nappies for her first child and spent the entire day grocery shopping and cooking for our family of six. I have disposable nappies, online grocery and meal kits.

So which is it?

The answer is more nuanced. It got safer and more convenient, but emotionally, financially and mentally it got a lot more complex and expensive.

But what complexity actually looks like, day to day, is decisions. More of them, and more expensive ones.

The loud decisions

Because of advancements in medicine, safety standards and research, we have to make a lot more parenting decisions about feeding, sleep, screens, safety, health and behaviour. I call these loud decisions because they are everywhere and well talked about in parent forums and group chats. This is where the information overload can drown you.

I had an allergen roadmap stuck to my fridge when Lando was a baby. Each of the nine allergens, how many times he’d been exposed, how often he was meant to have it again, ticked off one by one: shellfish, sesame, egg. I asked my mother when I’d had my allergens introduced and she said, “I have no idea. We didn’t have to do this.”

I also had to make sure I was giving Lando his probiotics, iron-rich foods and vitamin D supplements. And because we know so much about pesticides and microplastics, the grocery store has become a minefield. We need organic food but not when it’s wrapped in plastic. We need to read all the labels and know better than to trust marketing claims. I recently replaced all my non-stick pans with stainless steel, so I now spend twenty minutes every night scraping food off the bottom of them, in the hope that Lando doesn’t get cancer in his forties.

Sleep is the same overwhelm in a different flavour. Should we do Ferber, the chair method, or nothing and never sleep again? Blackout curtains or white noise machines? Wake windows or let them lead? If we want to co-sleep, there’s a ten-step process to make sure it’s safe. Should I pay for the premium subscription of my baby monitor so I can get detailed sleep reports and obsess over his weekly average? Obviously, yes. Meanwhile our parents got to enjoy the blissful ignorance of a room down the hallway and a closed door.

The loud decisions exploded in our generation. But they have one thing in common: there is usually good evidence pointing to an answer. Safe co-sleeping rules are documented, vaccine schedules are clear, allergen guidance is published. You just have to spend an enormous amount of time finding and reading the right sources.

The quiet decisions

Then there are the quiet decisions. These didn’t change in a generation. They are the same questions, but with 10x the consequence, largely because economics changed so drastically.

• Nanny, daycare, or one of us stays home?

• Do we keep renting, buy or rent-vest?

• Do I step away from my career, and for how long?

• Is private school worth it?

I call these quiet decisions because they drain your bank account silently, and because money isn’t very comfortable to talk about.

These are the decisions we often give the least mental energy to, because we’ve spent it all on the loud ones and we’re exhausted. So the quiet ones often get made by default instead of with rigorous analysis and intention, and they can slowly erode your family’s financial position and your future options if you aren’t careful.

I didn't run the numbers on my quiet decisions until much later. Often after I made the wrong call and needed a do-over. Which is ironic because running numbers was my job. But I didn't have time, I was too busy reading Lando's sleep reports.

That’s what I’m writing about here. Not whether you should quarter the grapes, but how to think about the decisions that will shape your family’s next twenty years. I run the numbers for you and give you the frameworks to make the most values-aligned decisions for your family.

Herbert Simon, who coined the term “attention economy” in 1971, put it best: “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

The loud decisions need information, and you already have too much of it.

But the quiet decisions need something else. They need a method.

Next week I’ll give you the framework I use. Then we’ll take these big parenting questions apart, one at a time, with the data, numbers and analysis they deserve. Subscribe and I’ll send it to you Wednesday :)

So we went back to the drawing board and found what we thought was a solid second choice. On the surface it looked great. But in hindsight, we didn’t know what to look out for. We were dazzled by the bright, clean rooms, fun play equipment and polished director. The policies were great. I still think, if only Lando could have gone to that daycare I was sold on paper, that would have been amazing! But the reality was very different.

It’s been over a year since we withdrew Lando, but I still feel guilty about the care he received when he was so young and vulnerable.

I realised that trying to juggle a full-time, demanding career while also navigating a for-profit, billion-dollar childcare industry (and every other big, daunting financial and logistical parenting decision in those first five years), with absolutely no guide — was a total setup for failure.

It was such a breaking point for me that I quit my career to be the mother I wanted to be, run the hardest business I’ve ever run (my own family) and share family strategy, so other parents wouldn’t have to suffer through the same lost time, money and unnecessary guilt I did.

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Why maternal intuition is not enough

Before I had my son, I knew nothing about babies and children. Everyone told me not to worry because once my baby arrived, my maternal intuition would kick right in. Just trust your gut, they’d say. You’re the mum, you’ll just know what to do.

But parenting today has become so phenomenally complex.

As it turns out, my gut could not properly audit a daycare’s ownership structure and business incentives.

It could not model the lost income and superannuation of my five-year career break and determine if it was worth it.

It could not tell me whether $40,000 a year in private school fees would buy a better outcome for my child than the same money in a house deposit.

Then I realised these are not intuition problems. They’re strategy problems. And like me, Australian parents are drowning in them. We have five-figure childcare bills, the worst housing affordability on record, career decisions with six-figure consequences — all to be faced while sleep-deprived, emotionally overwhelmed, and buried in information overload. It’s become a breeding ground for decision fatigue and paralysis.

I had spent fifteen years in business solving strategy problems. It just hadn’t occurred to me to use those skills in my parenting.

What I actually do

I qualified as a Chartered Accountant and hold a Master of Professional Accounting. I started in Big Four audit at KPMG in Canada, moved into enterprise risk consulting, and then spent eleven years at Google across internal audit, value consulting and commercial strategy roles in the US and in Australia. I built financial models and ROI cases for some of the largest companies in the world. I also run a private property portfolio across three states, which means the housing decisions in my writing come from a practitioner rather than a theorist.

The Gap

When I was pregnant, I couldn’t find strategic parenting advice anywhere. What I found is that parenting books generally come in two flavours:

1. Medical and physiological — sleep, feeding, development. Very useful (although often overwhelming), and completely silent on money and logistics.

2. Personal finance — also genuinely helpful, but written cold and technical, ignoring the time-poor and emotional nature of parenting.

Nothing existed in the middle. Nothing took the emotional weight of these decisions seriously and ran the numbers, analysed the data and came up with a thoughtful strategy to help you make them.

What you'll get

A weekly essay, every Wednesday morning, sharing the best of business, applied with heart to the high-stakes parenting decisions that ambush you in the first five years. (Well, that’s my elevator pitch anyway.)

The basis of it is a framework I built called DRIVE — five tools from business, which I adapted for family life:

We’ll cover the big decisions the way a strategist would. Over birth and postpartum, childcare and schooling, parental leave and career pivots, household finance and property. Every framework in here has been stress-tested on my own family first, including the decisions I got wrong and wish I could do over.

Why Subscribe

Because if you are family planning, expecting, or somewhere in the first five years, at some point you’ll be faced with a decision worth tens of thousands of dollars and several years of your life. It’s better to have the data, numbers and a framework ready than to make it emotionally, on the brink of exhaustion. You don’t need more parenting advice. You need a strategy.

— Christina