AUSTRALIAN Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, promising an 'education revolution', last year, may use the collapse of ABC Learning Centres to boost investment and standards in the childcare industry, a researcher has said.

Temasek, Singapore's state-owned investment firm, paid A$402 million (S$407.8 million) for a 12 per cent stake in ABC Learning in May 2007.

'It's a watershed, there's no doubt,' Mr Tayler said in a telephone interview yesterday.

'We need to invest in staff development, education and training and professional-development support on an ongoing basis. It's an opportunity, not a crisis.'

At stake is the early education of more than 370,000 children in Australia's 4,300 daycare centres, according to figures in a 2006 government report.

In August, the same month ABC Learning's shares were halted from trading, the government drafted proposals to give preschoolers access to 15 hours of education and care per week from a university-qualified teacher.

Mr Barry Elvish, chief executive officer of C&K Preschooling Professionals, the largest owner and operator of not-for-profit childcare centres and kindergartens in ABC Learning's home state of Queensland, aims for independent, privately owned childcare providers and not-for-profit community centres to purchase ABC's centres or take over their management to avoid so many children depending on a single company.

'Winners'
'If the government gets this right, the winners are going to be everybody,' Mr Elvish told Bloomberg from Brisbane.

ABC Learning is the world's largest publicly-traded childcare provider and faces having its assets sold to repay at least A$2.2 billion of debt.

Former Chief Executive Officer Eddy Groves, who left the business Sept 30, borrowed to expand in the US and UK, almost quadrupling the number of centres the company operated in 2 1/2 years.

ABC has about 120,000 children in its centres and employs more than 16,000 people in Australia, the government said.

'The government's priority is to ensure that all working families reliant on ABC Learning can continue to have access to childcare into the future,' Mr Rudd told reporters in Sydney last Friday.

The government has pledged as much as A$22 million to keep the business running until the end of the year, saying about 40 per cent of the centres are unprofitable.

After peaking at A$8.80 in 2006, giving ABC Learning a market value of A$4.8 billion, its shares lost 94 per cent of their value before being halted from trade in August, when the company failed to release earnings.

'I'm sorry for the shareholders, and I'm sorry for the temporary disruption that's going to be caused for their clients and their staff, but ultimately this provides an opportunity to redress the situation, which was not good for children in the sense of quality and parent choice,' Mr Elvish said.

Public expenditure on childhood education and care services for children aged six and younger in Australia was 0.4 per cent of gross domestic product in 2004, the latest year for which data are available, five-times less than top-ranked Denmark, according to a 2006 survey of 14 developed nations by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Mr Tayler, who was co-author of the report, also said about 40 per cent of childcare workers in Australia aren't qualified for the job.