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Become a family day care educator

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Start a career in family day care

Build a flexible, sustainable and rewarding early childhood career by becoming a family day care educator.

Educators manage their own family day care service from their home, with the support of the family day care team.

Starting a family day care service combines your experience in early childhood education and passion for nurturing and inspiring young children with the flexibility and work life balance of running a home-based service and setting your own hours.

If you have your own children, you can combine your career as a family day care educator with caring for your children by including them in sessions.

Educators can care for up to 7 children in total, with a no more than 4 children under school age.

You will have the support of a Department for Education coordinator and the family day care business centre, plus networking opportunities allowing you to connect with other family day care educators at events like pop-up playgroups and other networking events.

Complete this form or give us a call, 0427 637 272 to enquire.

Learn about the educator recruitment process.

Download the brochure on the benefits of being an educator with family day care (PDF 641 KB) .

How to start your family day care business video

If you’re passionate about caring for children...

...seeking to inspire young minds…

...and keen to work from home…

Discover the rewards...

...of being a Family Day Care educator.

Manage your own business...

...and enjoy the flexibility…

...the connection...

...the career development...

...and the satisfaction of Family Day Care.

Your qualifications and skills...

...as a valued educator...

...can help shape a child’s future...

...in Family Day Care.

www.education.sa.gov.au/familydaycare

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Educator case study in Para Hills video

I am in my seventh year of being a family daycare educator, but I've worked with children and families for about 25 years now. You are able to have four under school age, so four preschoolers, whether that's birth to five, and then you can have three school children.

We are drawing pictures of people that are important to us in our family, and so I'm working through with the children particular features and details. Do they have arms? How many legs do they have?

One of the most rewarding things about family daycare is the autonomy for me as an educator and the autonomy for children to drive their own curriculum. Rhythms and rituals are a really important part of family daycare, such as eating lunch together, those things promote togetherness.

Being out in nature really grounds children, and we rarely have behavioural issues. Even though we have diverse learning needs, we have diverse abilities and disabilities in our group, but I think that when you are out in nature, you can just feel and feed off the elements and have a real sense of wellbeing.

It's been a great financial move moving into family daycare and the work-life balance is certainly better and you can choose your own hours. Any person that really enjoys children and is enthusiastic with and about children would suit family daycare. The benefits the limitless.

End of transcript.

Educator case study in Port Lincoln video

I am Stephanie Hoy and I live in Port Lincoln. Um, I'm a family daycare educator and I work Monday to Thursday. And across that working week I have 10 different children come into care, I nanny and put myself through uni looking after kids and then went off and did other things and when it was time to move away from the corporate world and retrain.

I've been a family daycare educator for seven years now. The children that I look after range from nine months old through to four. They're also uniquely different, but also amazing in their different ways.

I really do like the morning drop-offs. You get to know the families so well and it becomes a lot more meaningful. Over a week, we will run through a number of different activities and each day we'll have specific ones. So on a Monday we'd go to Kinder Gym.

Most days we will have a music session where we will jam or we might be doing dancing or something. And most days we will do yoga in the afternoon as well.

I wanna get a koala walk Today, we've come to the local library. The children can look at books. We've come to story time, we've craft at the end, and it gets us out into the community. To be a family daycare educator, you really need to be a strong person that can work on their own.

You do have supports with your coordinators coming in, in your service that will come and assist you. You also need to be very organized. Choose the things that you're passionate about, that you are good at, and make that your service.

You can throw it through. For the chickens, I'm quite sustainably minded. So we've got chickens and veggie gardens and we have a sustainable setup set up in rural communities. It's really important to have family daycare.

We're in a town that's got a huge demand. It's all about the quality of your service and what you provide. So if you do a really good job and love what you do, the families will find you.

End of transcript.

Qualifications and skills required

The family day care team can assess your current skill set and help you bridge any gaps to set you up for long-term career success.

To be a family day care educator, you need:

  • Certificate III (or higher) level qualification in Early Childhood Education and Care, or another ACECQA approved education and care qualification
  • experience as an early childhood educator
  • experience or knowledge in planning, implementing and evaluating children’s learning
  • a high level of business practice and administration
  • an appropriate house for children to participate safely in play-based learning
  • current certificates in first aid and cardiopulmonary resuscitation, asthma and anaphylaxis
  • child-related employment screening (also required for anyone aged 18 and over living at your home)
  • an understanding of child protection in South Australia and your role as a mandated notifier
  • responding to risk of harm, abuse and neglect – education and care (RRHAN-EC) training
  • a medical clearance
  • public liability insurance.

To start your journey to become a family day care educator, complete this form, or give us a call on 0427 637 272 for a conversation about what’s next.

Find out how much you could earn

Use our income calculator to see an estimate of the gross income (your income before tax and other expenses) that you could potentially earn as a family day care educator.

Setting up your home for family day care

Setting up your service involves balancing your business and family life.

Family day care can be run from a home you own or rent.

You will need to ensure that you gain landlord permission to deliver your family day care service from a rental property.

You can choose which areas of your home will be used exclusively for family day care and which areas will be shared spaces for you and/or you own family.

Each educator’s home is different, and so setting up your space is about how you want your service to run and what you want to achieve and create.

The family day care team will work with you to ensure that your home meets the requirements of running a family day care service.

Below are examples of how some educators have set up their family day care services.