I finished my first proper stretch of vacation care last week, running between a few different school sites near home, and I am still catching up on sleep. It was tiring in a way that after-school care never is, but also the kind of tired that comes with actually feeling useful.
If you have only ever dropped your child off at before and after school care during term time, vacation care is a different beast entirely. Same provider, same educators in a lot of cases, completely different pace.
Vacation Care Runs at a Different Intensity Than Term-Time Care
Before and after school care is a couple of hours, bookended by school. Vacation care is a full day, every day, for the length of the school holidays, and the program has to hold a much bigger group of kids’ attention for a lot longer.
Shifts run long too. Mine were closer to five to seven hours some days, once you count set-up, the activity itself, and pack-down. It is more physically demanding than a term-time shift, but it also means you actually get to go on the excursions with the kids rather than just supervising drop-off and pick-up.
What Actually Fills a Vacation Care Day
Most programs split the days between incursions and excursions, and the two feel completely different from the educator’s side.
Incursions are when outside providers come to the school – people running craft sessions, water play, or a session building little cars or robots. These are lower-key days. The kids are excited, the noise level is high, but everyone stays on site.
Excursions are the big days out: trampoline parks, indoor activity centres, the cinema, or rock climbing. These are the days that actually test an educator. Every 30 minutes or so, we would run a head count, and each of us was responsible for a group of roughly ten children on any given outing, working off the roll sheet the school issues for the day. Under the Education and Care Services National Regulations, the minimum requirement for children of school age is one educator to fifteen children, though most services aim to keep groups smaller than that on excursion days simply because a bus, a pool, or a climbing wall is harder to supervise than a classroom. That gap between the legal minimum and what actually happens on the ground is something I only understood once I was the one doing the counting.
It is a lot of repeated, unglamorous checking – count them on, count them off, check again, confirm with the person next to you – but that repetition is exactly what keeps a bus full of overexcited kids safe. It is also, I will admit, chaotic. One trip back from the trampoline park had socks flying everywhere before we had even parked.
If you are trying to work out what a specific holiday program near you actually involves, most listings on our things to do with kids directory will tell you whether a program leans more toward on-site incursions or excursion-heavy days, which is worth checking before you book if your child gets carsick or finds big groups overwhelming.
The Part Parents Rarely See: Reflection and Observation
Every day wraps up with a reflection and observation session. Each child has a diary where they draw, write, or just talk through what they thought of the day. It is part of the My Time, Our Place framework that outside school hours care programs are required to run alongside their activities, not just an add-on.
On the last two days of the block, the whole group sat down together and talked through the week – favourite day, activities they would skip next time, what they wished the program had more of. As an educator, this stage is where you start writing a lot more observations than you did in the first few days, because you are paying closer attention to how each child is actually feeling about their choices, not just whether they are having fun in the moment.
The Moments That Stuck With Me
Rock climbing day surprised me the most. I am not great with heights, and I fully expected a few kids to sit that one out. Almost none did. Watching a six-year-old talk themselves up a wall they were clearly nervous about was one of the best parts of the week.
What impressed me just as much was how clearly the kids could say what they did not want to do. One child did not want to watch the movie, put headphones on, and sat quietly doing their own thing instead. Another skipped the climbing wall and played on the playground next to it. Nobody pushed them. Every choice was respected, and that stuck with me more than any of the planned activities did.
A few kids also handed me handmade gifts on the last day, which is the kind of thing nobody warns you about before you start this job.
What This Means If You’re Choosing a Program for Your Kids
If you are a parent weighing up vacation care options rather than an educator like me, a few things from this week are worth knowing before you book:
- Book excursion days early. Bus seats and ratios are the two things that cap numbers, so popular excursion days fill first, sometimes weeks out.
- Ask what a typical day looks like. A program heavy on excursions suits a confident, active kid. A program with more incursions and quieter days might suit a child who finds big outings overwhelming.
- Check your eligibility for the Child Care Subsidy. Most approved vacation care programs are CCS-approved, and the subsidy can significantly reduce your out-of-pocket cost depending on your family income and activity test. Services Australia has the current rates and eligibility rules, since these are updated regularly.
- Line the booking up with actual term dates, not just the calendar, since holiday dates vary by state and vacation care programs run to the school calendar, not the date on a wall planner.
A Tiring, Worthwhile Way to Spend a Holiday Block
Vacation care is more demanding than I expected going in, both for the kids and for the educators running it. But it is also the first time I have properly seen how much thought goes into a program that, from the outside, might just look like a room full of kids and a bus timetable.
If you have got a vacation care block coming up, whether you are the one dropping your child off or the one about to run your first shift, it is worth knowing that behind the noise and the head counts, there is a genuine amount of care going into making sure every kid gets a say in how they spend their day.