Day care providers face crackdown from child safety task force

FAMILY day-care operators at the highest risk of child safety failures are facing surprise inspections by a special task force working to stop a pink batts-style disaster.

Education Minister Kate Jones. Picture: Jack Tran

FAMILY day-care operators at the highest risk of child safety failures are facing surprise inspections by a special task force working to stop a pink batts-style disaster.

Generous childcare benefit rates introduced by the Federal Government in 2012 have spurred a 53 per cent jump in family day-care providers in Queensland, with about 5000 workers now in the sector.

State Education Minister Kate Jones has identified family day care as the biggest area of safety risk in the childcare industry, prompting her to set up a $9 million task force to check the sector.

She said the top-up funds came after concerns the federal incentives had led to massive growth, but the Federal Government had failed to contribute funding for compliance to match the boom.

It came on top of the added regulatory burden of strict new national quality of care standards, which involves rigorous assessments by the State Government to check how operators measure up.

Ms Jones said she got the eight-man task force up and running after realising on taking office that the growth in family day-care entrants had not been met by an equal growth in compliance checks.

She drew a parallel to the pink batts disaster on the back of the federal green incentives.

“There were a lot of new people because for the first time there was money in this space,” she said.

“I was worried about the risk in that.”

Early Childhood Education and Care deputy director-general Gabrielle Sinclair said the squad was targeting newcomers, schemes that had ­rapidly expanded, those receiving complaints and schemes investigated by the Federal Government over suspect taxpayer-funded childcare payments.

But she defended a dearth of information on who worked in the day-care schemes.

The Sunday Mail revealed last week that police seeking details in 2013 from the Government on one scheme run by a church were referred back to the church for the records.

Police had been investigating sexual abuse allegations against a church official. The centre closed this year. Attempts to obtain records have been unsuccessful.

It has exposed a potential problem area in which the names of family day-care workers and addresses of the homes in which children are being cared for are not kept by the Government.

Those details are kept by the provider.