The move away from CCS to the temporary system was a killer for alot of centres. If you had poor occupancy coming in to the assistance calculation period and your numbers increased you could be down massively on revenue. The free childcare wasn't for parents, it was to keep centres viable whilst they worked out what was next. I know my kids centre is back at capacity now, and whilst revenue is stable, being forced to overpay people who were earning less than $1,500/fortnight was starting to hit the bottom-line (it's a co-op and I'm the treasurer). As a well run not for profit with good occupancy we are going to end up around $220k ahead of budgeted surplus solely on government grants. That against a budgeted turnover of $1.8m.
Parents can still access the Additional Child Care Subsidy for financial distress which means they are in the same position if they have lost work.or have reduced hours as they were, or at least should have expected to be, under free childcare. Returning to the old system now there has been time to get past the uncertainty of March makes sense as some centres were being strangled on income whilst others were making windfall gains.
It was an absolute disaster and most parents didn't really understand how it worked. I know I certainly didn't until I looked into it further. Most thought that free child care meant that the portion parents were previously paying was instead paid by the government however they basically just stopped charging the parents and didn't compensate the childcare providers.
Plenty of small centres weren't able to offer children all their previous days back when people started returning as they didn't have the budget to pay staff.
We stopped sending our daughter for a couple of months (but kept our place and kept paying until it was made free) but her room dropped down to about 2 kids on some days (from around 20). They are pretty much back to normal numbers now (my daughter has been back for 3 weeks now).