If you have school aged children, you may have used the Active Kids vouchers available via Service NSW. I’ve certainly used them for my daughter… but I’d not previously considered that there are people who can’t access or use them.
Sadly, “schemes” such as the Active Kids vouchers are not set up for the people who need them the most. Language, digital access issues, and additional costs can be major barriers that result in low-income households being unable to use the vouchers, which were introduced to help all families. They have ended up being exclusive, rather than inclusive, however.
With the Active Kids scheme, you receive $100 twice a year (per child) to pay for a sporting activity. Let’s use the example of swimming lessons here – those vouchers equate to, say, a month of lessons before fees must then be paid directly by the child’s parent or guardian. If they can’t afford to carry on with the lessons, they often won’t use the vouchers in the first place.
To compound the issue, many sports clubs have benefited from Active Kids vouchers, but don’t consider how they can pass on these benefits to low-income households.
In this SMH article, Dr Tanya Notley, a media literacy and digital inclusion professor at Western Sydney University, explains that “we have to recognise that giving the same amount to everyone isn’t a fair system… for the lowest income households, the vouchers should be enough to access sport.”
The entrenched inequality of who is benefiting the most from the vouchers is starkly highlighted by the following figures: in the Camden LGA, the vouchers have an 80 per cent uptake; that drops to 48 per cent in neighbouring Liverpool; and Brewarrina, in the state’s north-west, has only 14 per cent uptake.
Currently, parents apply for the vouchers through the Services NSW website. But what about those families who don’t have online access? Service NSW should be considering different ways to distribute vouchers: perhaps an increased amount could go to low-income families; or a system could be introduced whereby people can donate their unused vouchers to those who need them; or provision could be made for those people with low digital literacy or access, by enabling them to register offline (at post offices or banks, say) and to be sent the vouchers by mail… These are just a few ideas we’ve come up with on the fly, so there is certainly a great deal more that can be done to make the Active Kids program fairer.
It’s simply a matter of making the right changes to help the people who need it the most.