stuart.and.michelle

Is it similar to the UK in that kids over 3 are allocated a free nursery place or are they all private?

quoll

http://www.det.wa.edu.au/education/ece/calculator.html is a good place to start. If you then follow the links to the fact sheet they seem to be offering universal access to kindergarten which is the year before full time school so the age calculator will tell you when your child will be eligible.

Not usually for 3 year olds though, you have to get a child care centre for that.

northernbird

Children don't start schooling until the year they turn 4 and that is Kindy which is usually 2 days per week and is not compulsory therefore no guarantee of a place at your catchment school.

As Quoll says if you want something for your child prior to that it is private and it is absolutely nothing like the UK, more like daycare in my view.

Mamma Minty

That is a good place to start. It does depend when their 4th birthday is, as to when they start. My son isn't 4 until May but he starts kindy in Feb this year. But good kindy places can be hard to find, so it is worth ringing the schools asap.

HelenTD

The birthday calendar in WA starts from 1 July to 30 June the next year, so starting kindy in early Feb each year, your child could be as old as 4 years 7 months, or as young as 3 years 7 months. Kindy is equivalent to 2 full days a week, but this might be in different formats depending on the school, eg 1 full day and 2 half days, or 4 half days, or 3 slightly longer half days. The next year is pre-primary, which is 5 full days, although the little darlings usually build up to that over the first month or so of the school year (ridiculous in the case of the older children, or those who have spent a lot of time at day care). In my experience, kindy and PP can be pretty average, or not as stimulating as a good child care programme.

As the others said, there is no guarantee of a place at your school of choice. Often parents hedge their bets by applying for places at several schools, even though the form tells you not to do that. Our school principal told us that when they meet up with other principals and registrars in the local school "cluster", they pull out the applications of those who've put in multiple ones, and they put them aside until they've allocated places to everyone else.

For those kids who just miss out on a place, such as the July kids, there are other options, such as a day or two at a good child centre centre with an early childhood programme run by a qualified early childhood teacher. Both of my kids went to what I called a pre-kindy programme for half a day each week (it might be possible to do more sessions), held at local community centres by a qualified teacher and teacher's assistant. These were low cost session, and each parent had to do a roster or two per term. I think that the Playgroup Association kept a list of these. Playgroups are another option, although they didn't seem to work for us.

stuart.and.michelle

Thanks for this. It says she won't be able to start kindy until 2011 but I guess we can always use a private child care centre (if possible) to allow her to meet new kids. This'll become easier to sort once I have hopefully secured a job and know where I am likely to be based.

Janne

Hi there,

We moved to Perth in July 09 with our two year old son. Perhaps a bit naively we looked for a nice place to stay first and then started to look for private child care centres in the area (South Perth/Kensington).

Although there are some really good day care centres near us, they all got long waiting lists (up to two years!!). The ones near us that had immediate vacancies were horrid!!

My recommendation would be that when you're looking for a place to stay find out about the day care centres and their availabilities before committing to anything house wise.

stuart.and.michelle

Good to know thanks. We're quite happy that she won't be starting kindy until next year as I expect this year to be hectic enough. Michelle won't be working anyway so not getting a spot in day care prior to kindy won't be the end of the world.