1 in 10 long daycares don’t provide food – this means some kids might be going hungry

Résumé détaillé

A new report looks at daycares across Australia to see how many provide kids with at least lunch.

Some long daycare services provide children with breakfast, morning and afternoon tea and a hot lunch. But others do not provide any food all. This means the onus is on families to provide meals.

Good nutrition is essential for children’s learning and development, particularly in the first five years when the brain is developing rapidly.

Yet, around one in six Australian children experience food insecurity. This can mean turning up to daycare hungry, running out of food during the day or not having regular access to nutritious meals.

Because most Australian children attend some form of early childhood education and care before school, these services could play an important role in ensuring children get adequate food.

Despite this, Australia’s early childhood services are not required to provide food to children. Whether centres provide meals is largely left up to individual services.

In a new report, we asked: are the children who most need reliable access to food actually getting it? Until now, no national data existed to answer that question.

We examined long daycare services across Australia to see which ones provided food, meaning at least lunch.

There are nearly 9,700 registered long daycare services in Australia. In our study, we examined the 9,200 services with available data on whether or not food was provided.

We did this by searching publicly available websites, including the national register of approved services. We compared this with other national data on disadvantage and child development to identify what was provided to children in higher-need communities.

Début de l'article, extrait de The Conversation AU. Pour lire la suite, ouvrez l'article chez le média.