00:00Next year the Minns Labor Government is introducing a new funding model for pre-schools across
00:05New South Wales. Now this is going to have a detrimental impact on the way in which these
00:10pre-schools operate. Now our pre-schools provide an important facility in our local communities
00:15but this funding model is going to see severe cuts that is going to occur at a lot of our
00:21pre-schools across New South Wales and we're talking about cuts here in the local area
00:25anything from $30,000 up to over $400,000 a year. Now these facilities they cannot afford
00:33these funding losses. If we see these funding losses we're going to see facilities potentially
00:38closed and if they close there is no options there available for local families.
00:43The starts from funding that we receive from the state government will still offer fee relief to our
00:47families but it will no longer offer a programming portion. That programming and development portion
00:53was to allow our pre-school educators to be upskilled trained to hire extra educators.
00:58As we all know ratios do not currently meet the need of children so minimum ratios do not give
01:05children the ability to thrive. Extra educators on the floor meeting the needs of those individual
01:12children was covered by that funding and now it's gone. The funding from Start Strong allowed us to
01:17train, upskill, develop those quality educators to meet those children's needs in each
01:23year of their pre-school. Without this funding it's unsure of how we're going to upskill, employ
01:30extra educators, do we have to look at putting educators off? It really makes a big difference.
01:34We knew this funding change was going to happen in Universal Funding when it was released. It was
01:41quite daunting. We didn't expect it to be so severe, the cuts to our service and to 700 other community
01:48preschools and long day care services. A huge loss is expected for us financially and will be a major
01:56impact on our service. We've been very lucky with our funding in the previous years to give us a quality
02:01service and now it looks like we will probably have a loss of over $120,000 for the next financial
02:08year.
02:09That will impact us significantly in terms of the number of staff we can employ
02:13and the quality of care we can provide to our children and our families.
