Hourly and drop-in daycare in Woodside

What that means when you telephone

An hourly place exists on a given day only if a permitted place is genuinely unoccupied — because a child is away, because a part-time family is not in, or because we have deliberately held one back. It is not spare goodwill and there is no lighter category of attendance in the Health Code.

So the answer is sometimes no. It will be a straight no with a reason and the days that week which do have room, rather than a maybe that wastes your morning.

And it is why you should be sceptical of anybody in this city advertising unlimited same-day availability. They are either holding a great deal of expensive capacity permanently empty, or describing something the permit does not allow — which is a thing inspections look for and a thing that shows up in a public record.

The paperwork, which is the real obstacle

A first session needs the same enrolment file as a year-long place: a health form signed by your child's physician, a complete immunisation record, emergency contacts and collection authorisations. That is Health Code requirement, not nursery preference, and it applies to a two-hour booking exactly as it applies to a full-time place.

It takes a few days, mostly waiting on the physician's signature. This is the single most common reason we cannot help somebody who rings this morning needing care this afternoon, and it is much better learned now than at nine on a bad morning.

It also applies to a sibling of a child already here. The file belongs to the child rather than to the family, and there is no version of this where we take a child whose health record we do not hold.

How to actually get a place

Register in advance, before you need anything. It is free, takes about twenty minutes, and puts the file on record so that a future call is a question about availability rather than a fortnight of paperwork.

Book a day ahead where you can. Enrolled families booking the previous afternoon get an answer immediately, because we already know what tomorrow looks like in each room.

And if you are booking most weeks, ask us to price fixed part-time days instead. Two or three fixed days is cheaper per hour and considerably better for a child, and we will tell you that rather than take the hourly money.

What an hourly day is actually like

The same as anybody else's. Your child joins the room for their age, with the same adults, the same meals and the same activities — not a holding area for visitors.

A two-hour minimum exists because below that the settling costs the child more than the session gives you. A ninety-minute drop-in is mostly a child working out where they are.

You get the same written note home: sleep, food, mood and one specific thing that happened. An hourly child is a child rather than a booking.