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

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.

Our research

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.

We also explored how food provision differed by location, service size, fees, provider type and quality rating under national accreditation standards.

What we found

About 91% of all daycare services in our study provided at least lunch.

Access dropped sharply in small rural towns, where only 58% of services provided meals. Tasmania, where there is higher disadvantage, had the lowest rate of any state or territory, with only 66% of services providing meals. This compared with 87-94% of other states and territories.

We also found larger centres are much more likely to provide food than smaller centres. For example, 67% of centres with fewer than 30 places provided food, compared with 98% of centres with 100 or more places.

Higher-fee centres were more likely to provide food than lower-fee centres. In other words, children are more likely to receive food if they attended a larger or better-resourced service, regardless of how much need existed in their local community.

For-profit services were also more likely to provide food than not-for-profit, with 94% of for-profits providing at least lunch, compared to 85% of not-for-profits.

While our study did not look at the reasons behind these gaps, previous research indicates many services struggle to meet nutrition recommendations due to limited food budgets, workforce pressures and inconsistent access to nutrition support.

Is it a regulation problem?

Another striking finding was services with “excellent” (the highest) quality ratings were slightly less likely to provide food than other services.

This suggests current quality assessments may not encourage services to focus on nutrition. Food provision – and whether that food is healthy – is largely outside how quality is currently assessed.

Study limitations

We note this study measured only whether food is provided, not its quality or nutritional adequacy. This is an important area for future research. We were not able to include preschool and kindergarten services in the analysis due to lack of adequate data.

We also note the study did not look at what food children actually had when families needed to provided it. However, research shows it tends to be nutritionally poor, especially in low socio-economic areas.

What does this mean?

Our findings suggest Australia is missing a significant opportunity when it comes to nutrition and young children.

Early childhood education and care is one of the few services that reaches almost all children before they start school. But at the moment, access to food often depends on a centre’s ability to absorb food costs rather than the needs of local children. This means many who need meals most could be missing out.

This does not not mean simply requiring centres to provide food. Many services, particularly those in rural and disadvantaged communities, already operate under significant financial pressure. Any reform must be backed by extra government funding and support to ensure food is adequate and nutritious.

What can we do?

A practical next step is a federal government-funded demonstration project in select communities facing the greatest need – to look at what works and then how to expand it to other communities.

As a starting point, we can also look at the United States, which has a program to provide specific nutrition funding to services that provide care to high proportions of disadvantaged children.

In Finland, services have to provide food that meets guidelines. Here, nutrition is considered an integral part of the early childhood system.

Karen Thorpe from the University of Queensland and Emma Sydenham and Stephanie Chiang from Social Ventures Australia contributed to the research on which this article is based.