Victoria’s Rapid Child Safety Review has been received well by the early childhood sector and child safety advocates, but the overwhelming response suggests it speaks to the need for unified reforms on a federal level.
The review was commissioned after more than 70 charges of child abuse were laid against a former Melbourne childcare worker in July and outlined 22 recommendations to make the childcare sector safer.
The Victorian government said it had accepted all recommendations and would work to adopt them through an immediate $42 million funding boost, but the report also called for urgent action to take place nationally.
Industry bodies agree that the federal government needs to do the heavy lifting when it comes to improving child safety.
‘Moment of reckoning’
The review’s recommendations include establishing a new independent early childhood education and care regulator, increasing the volume and frequency of unannounced compliance visits, and allowing the immediate suspension of Working With Children Checks (WWCC).
The changes follow two ABC investigations that recently uncovered separate cases where male educators who were sacked by childcare operators and banned from the sector still had active WWCCs at the time of writing.
National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds said she was “hugely relieved” at the report’s findings, but said previous barriers to reforming the sector needed to be looked at.
“There’s been previous royal commissions and inquiries and reviews and these recommendations have been sitting on a shelf until now,” Ms Hollonds said.
“There are significant barriers … and I think if we don’t identify those barriers, name them, and work out how to overcome them, we might find ourselves in a similar position in the future.”
Anne Hollonds says the priorities of children should be established in law. (ABC News)
In 2022, the Victorian Ombudsman recommended the state urgently change its laws after a youth worker was cleared to work with children despite facing sexual offence allegations.
Five years before that, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse laid out 189 recommendations aimed at making institutions safer for children, including through nationalising WWCC.
But director of the Australasian hub of the global child safety institute, Childlight UNSW, Michael Salter, said it was important to recognise that the royal commission did not focus on the early childhood sector.
“People might think that we’ve gone through that process of interrogating the issues in early child care, but we haven’t,” Professor Salter said.
“This is the moment of reckoning to think really seriously about the very specific child protection challenges.”
Calls for national response
Several of the review’s recommendations are outside the Victorian government’s scope and correspond to federal action.
These include a Commonwealth-led rethink of the national system, the establishment of a National Early Childhood Reform Commission, creating a National Early Childhood Worker Register, standardising Working With Children Checks, and improving information sharing and training standards for childcare workers, and rethinking the market-driven childcare centre model.
While committing to a child safety overhaul on Wednesday, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan said it was a “national system that required a national response”.
Professor Salter said it was important that states and territories recognised the national picture.
“We want to make sure we’re making the same determinations in each state and territory, we’re not having offenders move between states or finding loopholes as they move,” he said.
“Funding for the early childhood sector is a Commonwealth matter and the Commonwealth really needs to show leadership here, and that is going to come with budget implications, but governments are really going to need to face the reality that a high-quality, safe childcare sector is not necessarily a cheap childcare sector.
“I think the rapid review is a very good blueprint for the states and territories generally and certainly for the Commonwealth to think about what best practice looks like for the early childcare sector.“
The Victorian government has also urged its federal counterparts to enshrine the “safety, rights and best interests” of children in national law.
This would make them the “paramount consideration” for “staff in services, managers, service providers, their owners, funders and board members”.
The children’s commissioner said this recommendation was “game-changing”.
“The system … has been geared towards protecting adults, it’s been geared towards protecting the administrative needs of governments, and towards protecting providers — not protecting children,” Ms Hollonds said.
Organisations including Bravehearts, the Australian Education Union, the Australian Childhood Foundation, the Commission for Children and Young People, and The Front Project have welcomed the Child Safety Review, but say government action is needed to back it up.
Cost of CCTV ‘a small price to pay’, Point Cook parent says
Amanda’s* (name changed for privacy reasons) daughters attended the Point Cook childcare centre where alleged sex offender Joshua Brown worked.
She said screening of childcare employees had to go beyond the WWCC system, regardless of whether it becomes nationally standardised.
“If Working with Children Checks is all they require in child care, that blows my mind,” Amanda said.
“They should be doing full police checks on staff in centres.”
As a parent, she said she wanted to see a greater push from authorities to have CCTV cameras in childcare centres across the country, despite pushback over privacy provisions.
“I find that an easy cop-out, because it would obviously cost the industry a lot of money to install all the cameras, but from where I sit, childcare centres do pretty well for themselves,” she said.
“So if you’ve got to install cameras to ensure the safety of children, it’s a small price to pay.”
The Victorian report found providers were prioritising profits over child safety. (ABC News: Kyle Harley)
One of the review’s recommendations was to have a national trial of CCTV in early childhood education and care settings as a monitoring and investigative tool.
Childcare giants have previously said such a program would require government funding to cover “extremely high” installation costs.
But Wednesday’s report also found providers were prioritising profits over children’s safety, with regulatory issues more prominent in the for-profit sector.
The state review was handed down days before education ministers from across Australia meet to discuss child safety.
The meeting, scheduled for Friday, is expected to cover accelerating a national register of workers, the role of CCTV in childcare centres, and mandatory child safety training.
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