Scope SCREEN INDUSTRY VIEWS

SCREEN FOREVER CRECHE IS A GAME CHANGER

Cameron Williams

For the first time ever in its history, the Screen Forever conference has offered a free creche to delegates. The service – a joint initiative between the South Australian Film Corporation (SAFC), Create NSW, Screen Producers Australia and Women in Film and Television (WIFT) – was situated on site at the 2018 event’s Crown Conference Centre location and was managed by childcare provider Crechendo. The creche accommodated up to twenty children.

Returning to work after becoming a parent can be tough – less sleep, zero time to yourself and the stress of balancing the demands of employment. While a lot of workplaces have begun to offer flexible arrangements to working parents, they don’t tend to account for or extend these to networking opportunities and conferences. Work-related events often fall on childcare days or clash with part-time hours, and it’s even trickier when functions spill over into the evening.

Families have different set-ups when it comes to who cares for their kids when work calls: partners, relatives, neighbours, friends, nannies. And there’s a lot of misunderstanding when it comes to the complexities of swapping childcare days at short notice. The demand for childcare in Australia is so high that there’s rarely any wriggle room in providers’ schedules. So asking a parent to reschedule their childcare days is like asking to broker world peace.

When it comes to the screen industry, it’s often much easier for working parents to pass up opportunities because they’re not worth the stress of juggling childcare options. A by-product of this is that parents then find it harder to sustain their careers; their absence from events, in turn, misleads the industry into believing that it isn’t always possible to work and be a parent.

But Screen Forever has sent the message that you can be both. In the lead-up to the creche’s launch, SAFC CEO Courtney Gibson said, ‘Being parents and carers shouldn’t negatively impact our ability to work, just as our work shouldn’t negatively impact our ability to look after our families. Access and flexibility are the cornerstones of diversity in any industry and the Screen Forever