Three options. Only one actually works for your business.
After school programmes compete with chains and the 'just babysitting' reputation. Most marketing makes the second worse.
After school programmes face two structural problems that most marketing makes worse instead of better. The first is the chain operators: Camp Australia, OSHClub, Junior Adventures Group and Helping Hands have national contracts with primary schools and treat the school relationship as the main customer, not the parent. An independent OSHC or a council-run programme has to win the parent over the chain, which means the marketing has to be more specific to that school's community than the chain can ever be. The second is the 'just babysitting' reputation: parents who do not need OSHC for working-hours reasons see it as a holding pen, not an enrichment opportunity, and the programmes that lean into 'we're a fun safe place after school' instead of 'we run a coding programme on Tuesdays, a junior-chef session on Wednesdays, chess club on Thursdays' lose the enrichment-seeking parent to a paid after-school class at $40 a session. The programmes that fill year-round are the ones that market every Tuesday's coding session as if it were a private enrichment class that happens to be CCS-subsidised, and the chain operators never write copy that specific.
Good after school programme marketing is three things, in this order: a website with one page per school plus suburb plus programme type ('after school care [suburb primary]', 'before school care [suburb primary]', 'vacation care [suburb]', 'after school coding [suburb]', 'after school chess club [suburb]') so you rank for every parent's actual search and the chain operator's generic 'OSHC' page loses to your school-specific one, a vacation-care campaign that drops the day-by-day programme 4 weeks before each NSW or VIC school holiday with single-day, multi-day and full-week options, and a permanent enrichment-and-CCS trust layer that puts your enrichment programme schedule (Tuesday coding, Wednesday junior chef, Thursday chess), the CCS subsidy explainer, the educator-to-child ratios (1:15 for OSHC, 1:11 for early childhood under the regs), and your ACECQA NQS rating on every page. The programmes that fill year-round are doing exactly this. The programmes losing kids to Camp Australia are still using the words 'safe, fun, supervised' as their entire pitch.
Six agents, working in your accounts.
Account Lead, Web, SEO, Advertising, Social Media, and Content. One platform, one bill, you approve the work.
Sets the plan around the OSHC calendar and the school-by-school relationship: a per-school enrolment push at the start of each term, a vacation-care programme push 4 weeks before each NSW or VIC break, a CCS-rate update push the week each new financial year's CCS rate is announced, an Active Kids voucher push the week each new round opens. Briefs the other agents so the per-school pages, the vacation-care ads, the enrichment-session posts and the parent newsletters all reinforce 'this is enrichment, not babysitting, and the CCS rate makes it cheaper than a private after-school class'.
Imports your existing site so you stop paying Wix plus OSHC Online plus a separate landing-page tool, and ships one page per school you operate at. Adds the school name, pickup point, bell time and educator team on every per-school page, this term's enrichment schedule with real activities (not 'fun games'), a CCS-subsidy calculator with worked examples, a 4-weeks-out vacation-care booking page, and a parent enrolment flow that lands in your existing system.
Goes after every school-plus-programme search the chain operators populate with templated content: 'after school care [suburb school name]', 'before school care [suburb]', 'vacation care [suburb]', 'after school coding [suburb]', 'after school chess [suburb]'. Ships ChildCare and EducationalOrganization schema, optimises the Google Business Profile with the full enrichment list and CCS-subsidised flag, and earns review prompts after every vacation-care week. Auto-applies the low-risk fixes.
Runs Meta and Google Ads timed to the OSHC calendar: drops a vacation-care campaign 4 weeks before each NSW or VIC break, lifts spend the week each new CCS financial-year rate is announced, runs an enrichment-positioning campaign in February and July targeting parents who currently pay for private after-school classes, runs a per-school awareness layer for the schools where you want to grow the roll. Targets parents on Meta with a school-catchment radius (typically 3km). Drops broad 'after school care' keywords entirely in favour of school-specific ones.
Turns every Tuesday coding session, every Wednesday junior-chef cook-up, every Thursday chess-club tournament, every vacation-care excursion into a post in your real accounts: a Tuesday coding-showcase Reel, a Wednesday junior-chef plated-dish carousel, a Friday vacation-care-day-recap story, a Sunday parent testimonial about how the enrichment changed their child's after-school routine. Builds the visual case that turns the parent at school pickup into the parent who enrols their younger child next year.
Drafts the guides parents Google before they enrol: 'how does the CCS subsidy actually work for after school care', 'OSHC vs private after-school classes: the maths', 'what to look for in a vacation-care programme', 'is after school care just babysitting, or is it enrichment'. Two drafts a month, in your voice, that catch the parent the week they realise they need OSHC for the next term.
Your first 30 days.
- Site imported, Wix and landing-page tool subscriptions cancelled
- Annual plan around the OSHC term and vacation-care cycle delivered by Sam
- Google Business Profile flipped to 'After school program' with CCS-subsidised and ACECQA signals
- School-plus-programme pages indexed for your top 3 partner schools
- Meta vacation-care campaign live 4 weeks before the next break
- Per-school enrichment schedules (coding, junior chef, chess) shipped on every page
- First fortnight of enrichment-session captions queued from your showcase photos
- 'OSHC vs private after-school classes: the maths' parent guide drafted
After school programmes don't fail at the programme; they fail at out-marketing Camp Australia in their own local schools, and they fail at telling parents that Tuesday is coding day and Wednesday is junior chef. The vacation-care roll fills four days before each break, the per-school landing page is a copy-paste of the OSHC home page, the CCS-subsidy calculator is missing, and the parent who would have paid $40 a session for a private coding class never realises your CCS-subsidised programme runs the same activity for a $10 gap. The work is the per-school page library, the 4-weeks-early vacation-care launches, the enrichment-not-babysitting positioning, the consented session posts, and the CCS and Active Kids voucher copy that updates the day each new round opens.
Agencies are too dear to actually run this for $3.5k a month. Tools are cheap but the vacation-care programme you mean to draft this weekend is still half-built in Canva the morning bookings open. In-House is the third option: for $299 a month the agents ship the per-school pages, run the vacation-care and CCS-update ads, post the coding-and-chess-and-junior-chef moments, and draft the parent guides. You stay in the driver's seat, two taps to approve, minutes a day between pickups. Fill the OSHC roll, sell out the vacation camps, win the next school contract from the chain operator.