There’s a message that does the rounds in every parent group about a week before the holidays start. “So what are you doing with the kids this time, camp or vacation care?” Someone always replies with a laughing emoji, because nobody actually knows the difference until they’ve booked the wrong one. I found this out myself a few holidays back, when I assumed a “holiday camp” would run until at least five and got a fairly pointed phone call at 2.55pm asking when someone was coming to collect my son.
They’re not the same thing, and they don’t pretend to be if you actually read the fine print, but from a scroll through Facebook they can look interchangeable. One is really childcare with activities built in. The other is an activity that happens to need childcare-style supervision. Once you see it that way, the rest of the decision gets a lot easier.
Vacation Care Is the One That Covers a Real Working Day
Vacation care is the holiday version of before and after school care, usually run at the school itself or somewhere close by, through the council or a provider like OSHClub or Camp Australia. The hours are the whole point. Most run from around 7am to 6pm, which is the first time in this whole conversation something actually matches a normal working day.
It also tends to be full of kids your child already knows, since it’s usually the same school or the same local area. For a child who gets a bit anxious around new faces, that matters more than whatever’s written on the activity sheet.
The bit nobody loves is the quiet days. Ask around and you’ll hear the same story from different parents: the day the program goes to the trampoline park, the kids come home buzzing and won’t stop talking about it. The day there’s no excursion, you get a shrug and “we just did colouring in and watched a movie.” It’s not that the staff aren’t trying. It’s hard to run a full, exciting day for forty kids on a modest budget, and some days it shows.
Day Camps Are Shorter, Sharper, and a Bit More Fun
Specialist day camps are a different beast altogether. Sports camps, coding camps, outdoor adventure camps around places like Brisbane where kids get to try abseiling or kayaking, art camps, whatever your child happens to be obsessed with that month. These run more like a school day than a work day, usually 9am to 3pm, and the whole thing is built around one theme rather than a general mix of activities.
My son did a football camp last year and came home so tired he fell asleep at the dinner table, which sounds like a bad thing but honestly was one of the best nights of the holidays for everyone involved. He also came home talking about two new kids he’d met, neither of whom go to his school, which doesn’t happen much at vacation care where he mostly sees the same faces from his own class.
The catch, and it’s a real one, is that 3pm finish. If you work until five, that’s two hours you need to fill somehow, whether that’s a grandparent, a favour from another parent, or booking a day of personal leave to cover pickup. It’s the kind of thing that catches people out because the camp’s website talks up the activities and buries the finish time somewhere in the fine print.
Nobody Explains the Money Side Properly
This is the part that actually decides it for a lot of families. Vacation care is classed as Outside School Hours Care, and because of that it’s eligible for the Child Care Subsidy as long as the provider is approved, which most school and council programs are. Depending on your household income, that can cover a genuinely large chunk of the fee. Families earning under roughly $85,000 can have up to 90% covered, and support still applies, just at a lower rate, right up past half a million dollars in household income. Since January this year, every eligible family is also guaranteed a minimum number of subsidised hours a fortnight regardless of how many hours they work. If you’ve never checked, it’s worth ten minutes on the Services Australia site, because a lot of parents assume the subsidy stops once primary school starts, and it doesn’t.
Specialist day camps almost never qualify for CCS, because most of them aren’t run by an approved education and care service. You’re paying the full daily rate, every day, and over a two week stretch that adds up fast. It’s worth checking whether the camp you’re paying for counts as a tax deduction too, since the answer isn’t always what people assume. And if the budget’s already stretched this term, there are some genuinely useful ways to get through the holidays on one income without every day costing full price.
What We Actually Do
We don’t pick one. Vacation care covers most of the fortnight, because I need somewhere for him from 8 to 5 and I’m not going to turn down a subsidy for the privilege. Then I book one, sometimes two days of whatever camp he’s been going on about since last term. It’s not a clever system, it’s just the one that stopped me getting caught out again.
The only thing I’d genuinely tell another parent is to book early. Vacation care spots at popular schools disappear fast once enrolments open, and the good camps fill up just as quickly once the holiday dates are locked in. Work out your weeks, decide which days actually need a full day of cover and which ones you can hand over to something your kid is excited about, and book both before you talk yourself out of it.
Fees, subsidy rates and program hours vary by provider and by state, so it’s worth checking directly with your school or council and with Services Australia for figures specific to your family.