Govt boosts funds for family day care

Press, 29 June 1985, Page 9

Govt boosts funds for family day care

The future of Barnardo’s family day care programmes is no longer in jeopardy after the Minister of Social Welfare, Mrs Hercus, announced yesterday an increase in Government funding of the projects. In opening Barnardo’s Opawa Day Care Centre in Christchurch yesterday, Mrs Hercus said that Government support for family day care, where people look after children in their own homes, would increase by $250,000 a year. The rise in funding came after the second stage of the Government’s review of the funding of child care. Other measures increasing childcare funding were announced after the Budget. The increase in spending on the projects would include a rise in co-ordina-tors’ grants from $6OOO to $9OOO a year; a rise in the administration grant from $2OOO to $4OOO a year for each project; and a further allocation of up to $2OOO a year or each project for care-giver support. The measures would take

effect from October, she said. The rise in funding would be subject to an agreement that family day care projects be linked to the monitoring of childcare by the Social Welfare Department’s specialist childcare social workers, Mrs Hercus said. The announcement means that the 32 family day care projects run by Barnardo’s throughout New Zealand would have their funding increased from $6400 a year to up to $15,000. The idea of family day care was started by Barnardo’s. Similar programmes are run in Hamilton by the Hamilton Day Care Trust. The national director of Barnardo’s, Mr lan Calder, said that the announcement meant the projects could now continue. “They were under threat of closing because they had been running at a deficit of about $lO,OOO a year for each centre,” he said. The rise would reduce the annual deficit to about $l5OO, which the centres could cope with.

Mr Calder said that the projects still had to try to recover their losses from the last two years. Throughout New Zealand that loss totalled about $360,000. Mr Calder said that the rise was not as much as Barnardo’s had sought. “We asked for $30,000 for each centre, but this will certainly go a long way.” The regional director of Barnardo’s, Mrs Anna Cullen, said that the five family day care projects cared for about 200 children. The childcare centre opened by Mrs Hercus yesterday was expected to cater for about 50 children by the end of the second school term, said Mrs Cullen. The centre, in Ensors Road, was moved last August to its present site from one nearby. Since August, the centre’s ’ refurbishment had had $50,000 spent on it. The car-park and playground facilities have yet to be finished. The work was the result of many years of hard work in fund-raising by local Barnardo’s supporters.