Industry Insights · Little Scholars School of Early Learning
Industry Insights Little Scholars School of Early Learning Prepared for Search Scope · Drew Heslehurst, Executive Director · August 2026
Patterns rather than news, written from a South East Queensland vantage point, operating campuses across the Gold Coast, Brisbane, the Redlands and Ipswich. Correct as at August 2026 and due for review by August 2027. Attribution: suitable for publication under Jae Fraser or Drew Heslehurst, depending on whether the framing is sector practice or commercial.
What you are seeing What is genuinely working in your industry right now? Child safety reform has raised the floor, and it was needed The reforms rolling through since late 2025 are the most significant change to early childhood regulation since the National Quality Framework was introduced, 24-hour incident reporting, restrictions on personal devices near children, substantially higher penalties, a national worker register, mandatory child safety training for every educator, and a statutory duty making children's safety, rights and interests the paramount consideration in dayto-day operation. It has been expensive and administratively heavy for every provider, including us. It has also worked. Practices that were previously a matter of provider judgement are now baseline, and the gap between the best-run services and the weakest has narrowed. Any provider complaining about the burden should be asked what they were doing before. Wage reform has slowed the bleeding on educator retention The funded wage increases have made a measurable difference to whether educators stay in the sector. This matters more than any other single intervention, because continuity of educator is the mechanism through which early education actually works. It has not solved the problem, and it has lifted the cost base considerably, but it is the first structural response to a workforce issue the sector had been managing rather than fixing. Broader subsidy access has brought families in who were previously locked out Loosening the eligibility rules around subsidised care has changed who can access early education, particularly families with irregular or low work activity. From an enrolment perspective it has widened the addressable market. From a child development perspective it reaches the children who benefit most from early education and were least likely to receive it. Transparency outperforms reassurance, consistently This is the pattern we have watched hold longest. Providers who explain things plainly, how subsidy works, what a rating means, what happens when something goes wrong, do better with families than providers who reassure in general terms. Parents are researching harder than they were three years ago and they can tell the difference between an answer and a soothing noise. The visit still decides it For all the research families do online, the decision is made on site, usually within the first minute. Nothing has displaced this and we do not expect anything to. What has changed is that the visit now happens later in the process, after far more filtering.
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Industry Insights · Little Scholars School of Early Learning
Practical help is valued more than facilities Investment in things that reduce a family's workload consistently outperforms investment in building fit-out. Parents notice a new playground for about a week. They notice not having to cook dinner every day for years.
What has stopped working? Marketing the building The facility-led pitch, new premises, equipment, fit-out, has stopped moving people. It was effective when centres varied widely in physical quality. Most new centres now look good, so looking good has become table stakes and carries no information. Parents have worked out that the room tells you very little about who is in it. Generic reassurance about safety "Your child's safety is our highest priority" has become close to meaningless, and since 2025 it actively invites scepticism. Parents now ask specific questions and expect specific answers. What the device policy is, how incidents are reported, who has completed what training. A provider offering warmth in response to a specific question reads as evasive, whether or not it is. Waitlist scarcity as a sales tactic Manufactured urgency about places has stopped working and started backfiring. Families have been on enough waitlists that never went anywhere to be suspicious of the technique. It also produces exactly the wrong response. A parent told to hurry usually goes and looks at three other centres. Assuming a rating does the selling An Exceeding rating is genuinely valuable and worth having, and it does not convert on its own. Most families do not know the difference between the rating levels, and the ones who do treat it as a filter rather than a decision. It gets a provider onto the list. Something else gets them chosen. Treating compliance as an administrative function The volume and seriousness of regulatory obligation has moved past the point where it can sit as one duty among many for someone also rostered on the floor. Providers still running it that way are absorbing the load in the one place it does the most damage. Adult attention available to children. This is the pattern we have organised most deliberately against. Word of mouth as a growth strategy Word of mouth remains the strongest single influence on a family's decision and it has stopped being sufficient on its own. Families now research before they ask anyone, and a recommendation increasingly sends them to search rather than to the phone. A provider with an excellent reputation and a weak digital presence loses to a mediocre provider who is easy to find and easy to understand. Refusing to discuss cost until the tour Withholding any indication of cost until a family has visited has stopped being viable. Parents will simply not proceed, and they find a number elsewhere, usually a wrong one on a directory. The published gross rate remains meaningless because subsidy makes every family's cost different, but declining to engage with the question at all now reads as a red flag rather than as standard practice.
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Industry Insights · Little Scholars School of Early Learning
What customers want What is changing about what customers want? They ask about safety directly now, and they want specifics The single biggest shift. Parents who three years ago would not have raised it will now ask, on a first visit, how incidents are reported, what the policy on personal devices is, and what training educators have completed. They are not looking to be reassured. They are checking whether the person answering knows. They want to see the day, not hear about it Expectation has moved from a summary at pickup to visibility during the day. Photos, observations, what was eaten, how they slept. This is now baseline rather than a differentiator, and its absence is noticed immediately. They want their time back more than they want amenities Households where both parents work are stretched in a way that has intensified with cost-of-living pressure. Practical help that removes tasks from a family's week is valued far more highly than anything added to the physical environment. This is the shift we saw earliest and built the Family Time Program around. They want to know what it will actually cost them, before they visit Families are far less willing to invest a tour in a service that will not engage with cost. What they want is not a headline rate, which they have worked out means nothing, but a real figure for their circumstances. Providers who will work through subsidy with them at the enquiry stage have a meaningful advantage. They are asking about educator turnover Newer, and still uncommon, but growing: parents asking how long educators have been at the centre and how often room leaders change. It is the right question and very few services have a good answer to it. We expect this to become a standard question within a few years. They will switch Loyalty to a service has weakened. Where a family would once have stayed somewhere unsatisfactory because moving felt disruptive, they now move. That cuts both ways. It is a risk to every provider and it is where a large share of available demand sits, because most children in any given catchment are already enrolled somewhere. They will not pay separately for things they did not choose Resistance to itemised extras has hardened. Families would rather understand one figure than be nickel-anddimed on incursions, meals and programs. Inclusive models are read as honest; add-on models are read as a tactic.
Outlook Where do you think your industry is heading? Framed as our view rather than as prediction. We may be wrong about any of it.
Compliance load is permanent, and it will decide who thrives Our view is that the current regulatory intensity is the new baseline rather than a spike, and providers should plan on that basis. The consequence is that the ability to absorb administrative load away from the floor becomes a genuine competitive variable rather than a back-office detail. Providers who resource it properly will look better on quality; providers who do not will quietly get worse while remaining compliant on paper.
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Industry Insights · Little Scholars School of Early Learning
Workforce transparency will keep increasing A national worker register is a significant structural change and we think it is the beginning rather than the end. Our expectation is that visibility of who works in the sector, and their movement through it, will keep growing. That is good for children, and it makes educator retention harder to obscure. Differentiation will move from facility to people and program If every centre looks good and every centre meets the standard, the remaining variables are who is in the room and what actually happens there. We think the next decade of competition in this sector is fought on educator stability and program substance, and that the providers who invested in buildings will find they bought a depreciating asset. Parents will get better tools, and will use them Government-run information for families is improving, including visibility of compliance actions against services. Our view is that this trend continues and that provider-published marketing steadily loses ground to independent data. That should be welcomed. Anyone worried about it is telling on themselves. Consolidation will continue, and independence becomes rarer and more valuable Rising compliance cost and a higher wage base favour scale, and we expect continued consolidation. The likely consequence is that genuinely independent operators become scarcer, and that independence itself becomes a more meaningful point of difference for families who want decisions made by people they can actually reach. The measurement gap will eventually be addressed This is the view we hold most strongly and the one that may take longest. The quality framework measures what can be inspected on the day, and the strongest determinant of a child's experience, whether the person who knows them is still there next term, is not measured at all. Our view is that this gap is now visible enough that it will not survive indefinitely, and that continuity of educator will eventually be treated as a quality measure rather than a staffing statistic. We would like to be part of the argument that gets it there. What we do not think will change That a parent decides in the first minute of walking in, and that no amount of information changes that. The research determines who gets visited. The visit still decides.
NEEDS INPUT None. Every question in this document is answered from confirmed source material.
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