Watchdog failing to meet SA childcare inspection deadline
Despite millions promised to help clear hundreds of childcare centre inspections, a watchdog admits it cannot keep up. Hundreds of new complaints are rolling in.
SA’s Education Standards Board will not finish inspecting childcare centres in its backlog by the end of 2026, despite a $22 million funding commitment pledged last year.
Education Standards Board Chief Executive Benn Gramola said about 250 childcare services around the state that were in an inspection “backlog” would be cleared by August 2027 – eight months after a deadline set by former education minister Blair Boyer.
Boyer – who was education minister last year – allocated $900,000 to the board in August 2025 to boost compliance checks and ensure childcare centres were meeting quality standards, part of a funding package that would give the watchdog $21.8 million over five years.
The deadline delay was revealed in Parliament’s Statutory Authority Committee on Monday morning. The committee also heard the watchdog had received 454 complaints about the state’s childcare sector this financial year so far.
Asked about the backlog clearing deadline by Liberal Dennis Hood on Monday morning, Gramola said: “The short answer is we won’t meet that requirement”.
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“Our aim is to clear that backlog by August next year, now I know that is obviously past December this year, but there have been significant reasons for that and lots of changes around safety requirements,” Gramola said.
He blamed the delay on “a fairly intense period of the sector”, with major changes including mandatory training and mobile phone bans coming into effect this year.
“Our focus has been shifting; we are making sure that the sector is complying with those immediate needs,” he said.
“I think if you talk to anyone in the sector, the changes across the whole sector in the past 18 months have probably been more than the sector’s seen in the last 10 years.”
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He said a number of childcare services had not been inspected in 10 years, and these were prioritised, along with any that were not rated before new education quality standards were introduced in 2018.
“We had around eight to 10 years between quality assessment and ratings; that was the average. So you can imagine there were services that were around 15 plus years that hadn’t been seen,” Gramola said.
“Since then, we’ve reduced that average down to about four and a half years, and that is through actively going out and providing that assessment and rating.”
Once the backlog is cleared, the Education Standards Board (ESB) will provide routine childcare centre quality checks every three years, Gramola said.
Politicians also grilled Gramola and ESB Regulation and Quality director Sean Heffernan on the embattled Edge Early Learning Centre, which went into administration in August.
Heffernan confirmed he regularly was in contact with administrators Korda Mentha and that all but three of Edge’s SA centres had now been sold to other childcare providers, Montessori and Goodstart.
He said there would be compliance checks regarding the handover of those centres, while Oaklands Park, Plympton and Royal Park Edge Centres would be permanently closed.
“There is sufficient supply within those areas to absorb those children, and a lot of those services already had fairly low occupancy rates prior to them being closed,” Heffernan said.
He said all Edge Early Learning Centres in South Australia had been visited by the Education Standards Board ” within the last 18-month period” and “some have been visited significantly”.
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