In the Children's services NMDS, this data element refers to the finish time of each session that a child care or preschool service is available for children to use on each day in the collection week.

Note: This question records responses to ‘Days of operation – per week’ and ‘Start time of sessions’.

Question: For each day of the week on which you provided child care or preschool activities in the collection week, please indicate start and finish times of each session.

For family day care and in-home care services this question should be asked of caregivers only and asked in the following way: ‘For each day of the week on which you provided family day care/in-home care activities, please indicate the earliest time of day and the latest time of day that you were available to care for children.’

Provision should be made for an ‘available for overnight care’ box.

Provision should be made for recording of service provision times in the morning and afternoon, to allow for services that do not operate continuously throughout the day. 

Provision should be made for mobile children’s services so that each day should be broken into 3 possible session times. For mobile children’s services this question should be asked in conjunction with service address for each session, days of operation and the start and finish time of each session each day.

CODE 999999

Not stated/inadequately described, is not to be used on primary collection forms. It is primarily for use in administrative collections when transferring data from data sets where the item has not been collected.

Round to the nearest quarter of an hour.

This data element does not include times when staff are working at a service but the service is not open for children to use, such as when staff are planning programs or consulting parents.

Services that do not operate continuously throughout the day should record finish times for each session on each day.

Mobile children’s services should record start and finish times for each session on each day.

This data element may be used in conjunction with the data element ‘Start time of session’ as a measure of the availability of child care and preschool services and the appropriateness of this in meeting family needs. In addition, this data element can be used to derive the number of hours per day and hours per week a child care or preschool service is available for children to use.

This data element enables the identification of sessional provision of child care and preschool services.