No ‘idle threat’: childcare on notice as reforms agreed
Callum Godde and Farid Farid |
Shoddy childcare centres have been put on a short leash as the roll out of security cameras and a national workers register are green lit.
The measures were among a series of childcare and early education safety reforms agreed to on Friday at a crisis meeting of federal, state and territory education ministers.
Up to 300 small and medium operators will be part of the CCTV trial from October or November as part of a $189 million federal government funding package.
Work will begin immediately on the national register of all childcare workers, with the list expected to be soft-launched in December ahead of a full rollout from February.
Other agreed reforms include banning mobile phones in centres from September, mandatory national child safety training for all workers to detect and report suspected grooming and abuse and an extra 1600 spot visits.
The Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority will report back on staff ratios by the end of 2025 after calls to introduce the “four eyes” principle.
The meeting of education ministers came after Melbourne childcare worker Joshua Dale Brown was charged with sexually abusing eight children under the age of two.
Brown was known to have worked at 24 facilities between 2017 and 2025.
Governments across the country must step up to restore mums and dads’ confidence in the system, Federal Education Minister Jason Clare said.
“This is not the end – it is the next thing we need to do,” he told reporters after the ministers’ meeting in Sydney.
“The awful truth is this work will never end because there will always be bad people who try to poke holes in the system and find vulnerabilities.”
Brown’s former employers, G8 Education and Affinity Education, pledged to install CCTV in hundreds of their for-profit centres after the allegations emerged in early-July.
The NSW government had already announced a trial of CCTV in at-risk facilities, although service leaders, staff, unions and parent groups raised “strong concerns” about the practice during a Victorian review.
It is legal to install CCTV in centres, apart from inside change areas and toilets.
Mr Clare said the protection and storage of CCTV footage would be a focus of the upcoming trial to ensure it doesn’t become a “honey pot” for hackers, along with camera placement.
“The police tell us that this can be an important aspect in deterring bad behaviour,” he said.
The federal government has initiated compliance actions against 37 early childhood centres under laws passed by federal parliament in July.
Mr Clare issued a stern warning to the named and shamed centres, which have six months to clean up their act after failing to meet standards for seven years.
“I am serious about this, it is not an idle threat: meet the standard or risk being shut down,” he said.
Child protection, early learning and union groups hailed the latest reforms as a step forward.
“These are practical measures that will close loopholes, improve accountability, and give families greater visibility and confidence,” Australian Childcare Alliance president Paul Mondo said.
The Front Project agreed they would restore confidence once implemented but cautioned children, families and educators remained vulnerable to falling through the cracks of the cross-jurisdictional system.
“Today marks a line in the sand,” chief executive Caroline Croser-Barlow said.
The United Workers Union said it was worried about the CCTV rollout coming at the expense of “sensible staffing decisions”, while the Independent Education Union said it was no substitute for a strong child safety culture.
Working-with-children check changes, agreed to by attorneys-general on August 15, will mean anyone prevented from holding a check in one state or territory will be automatically banned across the nation.
The federal opposition supports the urgent reforms but lamented governments failing to implement changes that were canvassed during the royal commission into institutional child sexual abuse which ended in 2017.
“Another day wasted is another day we cannot afford,” opposition education and early learning spokesman Jonno Duniam said.
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National Sexual Abuse and Redress Support Service 1800 211 028
AAP
