The revelation on Tuesday that a Victorian childcare worker had been arrested for over 70 alleged child sexual abuse charges sent shock waves through the entire country.
It left state and territory governments scrambling to ensure the child safety protocols in their early childhood education and care sectors were effective.
In 2015 the Royal Commission into Institutionalised Responses to Child Sexual Abuse recommended that Working With Children Checks (WWCCs) across the country be both standardised and nationalised.
A decade on they’re still handled at the state and territory level, with different practices in different jurisdictions, but experts are calling for that to be changed.
Nationally consistent Working With Children Checks
To work in the childcare sector a person must first receive a Working With Children Check or a Working With Vulnerable People check, depending on the jurisdiction. (ABC News)
At present some jurisdictions WWCCs are a point in time check, updated only on the day they are issued with a list of offences from that person’s criminal history.
In the ACT the equivalent of WWCCs are Working With Vulnerable People (WWVP) checks, which already include ongoing assessment of a person’s eligibility to work with vulnerable people.
They can also involve national criminal history checks along with other relevant disciplinary and police information — and when someone is deregistered, protocol requires the national database for WWCCs be notified of that.
ACT Children and Young People Commissioner Jodie Griffiths-Cook said the incident in Victoria was a “devastating reminder of our collective responsibility to do all we can” to protect children from harm.
Jodie Griffiths-Cook says including the ACT’s continuous monitoring system in national Working With Children Checks could improve child safety. (ABC News: Greg Nelson)
She said creating national consistency in WWCCs could help the childcare sector do that — and that including features of the ACT’s WWVP registry could offer value to that proposed national scheme.
“I certainly think this [incident in Victoria] is a real reminder of the importance and the value of having those kind of systems that speak to each other across our state and territory boarders,” Commissioner Griffiths-Cook said.
“If we’re going to go down the path of having such a registry, we need to make sure we’re also including some of the best practice features that we’ve got here in the ACT, like continuous monitoring of WWVP registry.”
Commissioner Griffiths-Cook said that continuous monitoring was part of what made the ACT well-placed to manage safety in its childcare sector, along with being a smaller jurisdiction.
National childcare workers’ register
Early Childhood Australia CEO Samantha Page says a registry for childcare workers similar to the one used for teachers would improve child safety. (Supplied: Early Childhood Australia)
A national register of early childhood education and care workers is another safety protocol experts believe could improve child safety in the sector.
Early Childhood Australia CEO Sam Page said a national registration scheme for educators, similar to the one used for teachers, had been on the agenda for several years.
“We have registration for teachers, and we can see how that works,” Ms Page said.
“We’re not waiting for teachers to commit a criminal offence.
“If we see teachers struggling, if we see poor practice, if we see inappropriate behaviour, the teachers board can react to that quickly and proactively and prevent anything worse from happening.
“That’s what we need for educators as well.”
Phone ban and CCTV use in consideration
The ACT and NSW governments are both considering the use of CCTV in childcare centres to ensure child safety. (ABC News: Lincoln Rothall)
Another reform being considered for the childcare sector across different states and territories is a ban on using personal mobile phones in centres.
Commissioner Griffiths-Cook said the risks of someone being able to inadvertently film or photograph a child was important to mitigate.
ACT Education and Early Childhood Minister Yvette Berry said the territory government was “absolutely on board” with understanding what such a ban would look like.
She said she was in talks with NSW Education and Early Learning Minister Prue Car following the state’s review into its childcare sector to consider what parts of its recommendations would be appropriate for the ACT.
Ms Berry said part of that was the consideration of introducing CCTV in childcare centres for added safety monitoring.
She said while she understood why some might have concerns about the considered CCTV use and mobile phone ban, it would include ensuring there was appropriate policies around how they were used in services.
Creating a ‘culture of reporting and constant risk vigilance’
Sam Page of Early Childhood Australia says educators need to be supported to create a culture that promotes reporting. (ABC News: Adam Kennedy)
Though updated policies and national registers could offer improvement to child safety, Sam Page said the safety of children still came back to the team of educators working with them every day in childcare services.
She said the vast majority of those educators were totally committed to child safety and wellbeing, but that needed to be supported.
“We need to give them buildings that work, we need to give them enough educators at any given time, enough staff that no educator can be left alone with a child,”
Ms Page said.
“We need to support a culture of reporting and constant risk vigilance, so that if educators are concerned about another educator’s behaviour — think they’re crossing boundaries with a child or with their family — they can raise those concerns and those concerns will be taken seriously, and there will be a response to that really quickly.
“Sexual abuse perpetrators are incredibly insidious, and we need every other educator to be alert to that risk and to be watching out for signs of risk and taking preventative action.”
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