KEY POINTS:
The personal touch is important to Clare Grace.
To her, it's what separates her home-based childcare from a centre or creche.
After two decades in early childhood education, the grandmother of eight has become a passionate believer in home-caring for young children.
Now she's turned what used to be an unpaid favour into a booming business.
It's hardly a new idea. For years, friends, aunties, grandparents and neighbours have looked after other people's children so their parents could work.
But in an era of near-full employment, where child-minders are scarce, paid home-care is a growing industry.
Building on contacts from playcentre work, Grace has created a network of about 300 mums (and one dad) who are willing to take on a few extras.
When she started Easy Mind childcare six years ago, Grace planned to stop at 100 children.
Now she has 500 children placed with carers, with centres in Whitianga, Thames, the Waikato, Gisborne, Hawkes Bay, Manawatu and the Wairarapa.
A Dunedin centre opened in January and already has 38 children enrolled.
Grace has worked hard to keep the personal touch as numbers increased.
She visits each region every month, and says she knows all the carers and most of the families.
Her team of educators co-ordinate between 16 and 20 carers, helping with visits, support, ideas and group excursions so they don't get too isolated.
Grace says carers become like "favourite aunties" to the children they care for.
The limit of four pre-schoolers (including their own) to one carer makes it easy to give children the everyday experiences they need in order to learn.
"In centres, because of large group sizes, they work really hard to provide as home-like a setting as possible," says Grace. "We don't have to try hard to do that, because it's just there."
She doesn't need to convince Louise Cocks.
The mother of three has had her children with Easy Mind for two years and says it's a "massive difference" from using a childcare centre.
Cocks was pregnant with her youngest son and sending her eldest off to school when she learned that middle child Charlotte had leukaemia.
The extra care taken by Charlotte's carer, Wendy Swale, has meant the "very social" little girl, now 4, has been able to keep up her usual activities.
"If she had been in a creche, she wouldn't have been able to go at all," says Cocks. "She would have been cut off automatically because of the bugs and all that. With home-based care, she's scarcely missed a day since she was diagnosed."
It takes a certain kind of person to want to fill their house with other people's children and Grace says she's an expert at weeding out those who aren't right.
When she rings referees for her carers, she tells them: "I've got some really good friends with some really good skills, but I wouldn't necessarily put my child with them.
"When you interview [carers], their children are usually playing up because they don't really know what you're doing there and they know mum's a bit nervous ... The child decides they'd like some attention too.
"We actually quite like that, because they'll interrupt a number of times and we like to see how she copes."
Parents get to choose which carer looks after their children and work with them to plan daily activities.
All carers must meet Education Ministry standards for home-based care, which cover the safety and suitability of the house and their understanding of and skills with young children.
All children get a standardised education based on Te Whariki, the Ministry of Education's curriculum for early childhood education. Grace says Te Whariki is a perfect fit for home-based care because the environment naturally fosters the right kind of learning. Experiences like helping with the dishes, outings to parks and shops, or attending an older sibling's school sports day are also more manageable with just a few children.
Because the carers are based at home, money that would otherwise go on overheads such as rent and electricity is spent on activities.
"We pay for all the excursions and programmes like music and mini-gym that parents want their children involved in," says Grace. "Anything in the community that is of benefit to young children."
Easy Mind is part-funded by the Education Ministry, just like a childcare centre or kindergarten. Parents pay an hourly fee ($4 for most parents) direct to Easy Mind, which uses the fees and ministry funding to pay for overheads, activities and a set rate to carers for their contracted hours. As well as the base funding, parents of 3 and 4-year-olds can claim 20 hours' free childcare from the ministry, and parents earning below a set threshold can claim a Working for Families subsidy of between $1 and $3.50 an hour.
The various subsidies are all collected and passed on by Easy Mind. Luckily for Grace, her husband and business manager is a chartered accountant.
Government funding means submitting to reports by the Education Review Office but, so far, these have been positive, commending Easy Mind's strong relationship with its carers.
Grace came across home-based care in Melbourne in the early 1980s, where she looked after her own newborn and another toddler under a council-run scheme. She loved the experience so much she decided to train as an early childhood teacher.
But, because home-based childcare isn't mainstream, Grace comes across many early childhood teachers who have had no training in home-based care at all.
"We have to be proactive about finding [training] ourselves and providing it," she says.
Easy Mind pays for its educators to train to any level up to a diploma of teaching. As a minimum, all carers must finish a certificate in home-based care at the Open Polytechnic.
Easy Mind has come a long way since its first nine months, when Grace was the only co-ordinator. "I started on a shoestring and I was buying second-hand cots and things. Now everything is new and everything's good quality."
These days, co-ordinators get new cars and, once a year, Clare takes them, the carers and their families, away for a weekend for a national meeting.
She says her team has adopted her vision of home-based care and could now run the business just as well as she can. But she won't be leaving the world of childcare any time soon.
"Can't you tell? I absolutely love it," she says.
