Learning through play and connection
Our purpose
The Family Day Care Alliance is one voice for educators, approved providers, and parents and carers who want Family Day Care to remain a distinct, home-based way of educating and caring for children.
Family Day Care is home-based early childhood education and care under Australia’s National Early Years Learning Framework. Children learn in small groups, in a family and community setting, with an educator who knows them. That continuity is not a by-product. It is the point.
In Victoria, regulatory pressure is pushing services toward sanitised, centre-like environments. Early learning cannot be risk-free, and should not be. Children need developmentally appropriate risk to navigate the real world. Wrap them in cotton wool and the cost shows up later.
The Alliance exists for two reasons. First, to protect and promote what is unique about Family Day Care: learning through play and connection, in home and community. Second, to advocate through evidence-based engagement with regulators, experts, and the people who live this work every day.
The draft constitution sets the Alliance’s objects: to protect and promote Family Day Care as a distinct, home and community-based model of early childhood education and care; to advocate for educators, providers and services; to support professional development and standing; to inform and represent parents and carers; to support reconciliation with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples; to promote child safety, including Victoria’s Child Safe Standards; and to do anything incidental to those objects.
Why three voices, not one
Parents in the room make advocacy credible. A regulator can dismiss an industry group. It is harder to dismiss families who chose Family Day Care and still stand with it.
Educators, approved providers, and parents and carers each see a different part of the system. The Alliance puts those views in one place so regulation is built on evidence, not on fear of anything that could conceivably go wrong.
Joining any category makes all three louder. Every parent who joins makes Educator and Manager memberships harder to ignore. Every educator and manager who joins gives families a body that can actually carry their experience.
Join a membership. Read the draft constitution, Code of Conduct, Privacy Policy, and Diversity Policy.