By Wendy Tuohy and Liam Mannix
Child safety officers should be mandatory at every childcare service and the state government should create an independent regulator following devastating child abuse allegations, experts say.
Victoria’s regulation of national Child Safe standards has failed vulnerable children and parents, child safety leaders say, and the Education Department’s in-house regulator has been shown to be unable to protect children.
Illustration by Marija Ercegovac
Minister for Children Lizzie Blandthorn said on Wednesday that assessors from the Department of Education and Training’s Quality Assessment and Regulation Division had visited 4700 of the roughly 5000 licensed childcare centres in the last year.
But two sources with insider knowledge, who cannot be identified because they are not authorised to discuss departmental matters, said the division was so under-resourced that inspections might only be “paper-based searches of policies and procedures”.
They said resources were so inadequate that the body did not have the capacity to do much-needed in-depth inquiries with centre workers to establish what happens in childcare centres in practice.
NSW Greens MP and former corporate lawyer Abigail Boyd, who has investigated childcare safety nationally, described the childcare system as “a paedophile’s dream”.
“The regulator is just completely asleep at the wheel,” she said.
Blandthorn said on Wednesday that Victoria had lost some federal funding to support safety compliance regulation in recent years. Creating a new, independent regulator was being given “due consideration”.
The NSW government announced the establishment of an independent early childhood regulator last week, responding to a rise in safety breaches at childcare centres.
Calls for independent regulation of national Child Safe Standards aimed at preventing sexual abuse of babies and toddlers in the state’s burgeoning childcare sector were supported by National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds.
“The regulators don’t have enough teeth to act,” she said. “We need strong independent oversight and monitoring. The regulators are often not visiting centres – there are big gaps in time between their visits. All those things need to be fixed.”
Deb Tsorbaris, chief executive of Victoria’s peak body for child and family services, the Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Welfare, said on-site child safety officers were currently recommended but the position must be made mandatory.
“This is a critical role that would make sure difficult questions are asked during recruitment and onboarding and [that] continual safety audits, training and engagement with children and families becomes part of the culture of our childcare and early years settings,” Tsorbaris said.
“Unfortunately what happened at this childcare centre doesn’t surprise me.”
Victoria’s multibillion-dollar childcare sector is in crisis after police on Tuesday charged childcare worker Joshua Dale Brown with 70 offences, including child rape. Brown worked in 20 daycare centres across Melbourne and Geelong over the last eight years.
On Wednesday, under pressure over the growing scandal, the Victorian government announced two reviews of the sector and a range of reforms, including mobile phone bans at childcare centres.
Janise Mitchell, chief executive of the Australian Childhood Foundation, supported calls for the creation of an independent regulator, and said applications for working with children checks must include mandatory training.
“We released some research showing 37 media reports in the 2024 calendar year of people who had working with children checks around the country being found to have been abusing children,” Mitchell said.
“There is an over-reliance on the working with children check, it is not a failsafe … We have been calling for mandatory training to be included since March last year. [Now] it is purely an administrative process.
“We know perpetrators use these systems to gain access to kids, but because so few perpetrators ever come to the attention of the justice system, they’re able to use these credentials to find their way into systems.”
Mitchell said there were more than 5.8 million people with working with children checks across the country, “and most of those haven’t received any training in understanding the issue [of child safety].”
Brown had a valid working with children check when he was arrested, police have said.
Anne-Marie Morrissey, a former childcare centre co-ordinator and now an associate professor of early childhood education at Deakin University, also supported creation of an independent Victorian childcare safety regulator.
“[We need] as much regulation independence as possible: it’s not working as it is,” Morrissey said. “Centres can work the system, people come out and they get it together and put on a good front.”
The sector “certainly needs stronger regulation”, said Morrissey, a long-term researcher.
“And I don’t think the Commonwealth, in areas where it does have power and influence, is really doing enough ... We have to have a real overhaul and look at the nitty-gritty of what is going on that these things can happen.”
Several experts said they were not aware of any way parents could get access to information about what allegations or investigations had been undertaken by the Victorian regulator into specific childcare centres.
“What happens when things are reported? There’s no transparency around that. We [sector observers] don’t know what’s going on,” Morrissey said.
“People report things, and we never know what happens; there never seems to be consequences, in particular with these commercial chains. They just seem to go on their merry way.”
Monitoring of childcare business activities was so poor “a centre might get closed down, and then they pop up somewhere else, possibly under another name”.
State and federal inquiries and royal commissions have found serious flaws in the working with children check system.
The 2015 Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse recommended a national system, with information and intelligence shared across borders. A decade later the system is still a patchwork of different state laws, due to the states being “over-protective” of their state schemes, said Robert Fitzgerald, one of the commissioners.
“It is shameful we have not achieved a nationally co-ordinated Working With Children regime, 10 years on from those recommendations. It means there is a gap in the safeguard system,” he said.
A review by the Victorian Ombudsman in 2022, following a sexual assault of a 13 -year-old by a man with a valid check, found the system was “absurdly” flawed.
The checks only look for criminal convictions and do not take into account police intelligence, arrests or complaints, even when they relate to child safety matters.
“It’s a very broken system” that created a false sense of security for childcare centres employing new staff, National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds said.
National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds.Credit: Ben Symons
Several experts pointed to underlying systemic pressure straining safety at the nation’s childcare centres: the federal government is trying to rapidly expand the childcare sector, creating huge strain on centres to find qualified staff.
“We’ve dropped the ball, in the rush to open more centres, because of the demand. We’ve dropped the ball on safety,” said Hollonds.
Victoria added 151,736 new childcare places between 2013 and 2023, 72 per cent of them in for-profit centres.
But Australia is short tens of thousands of early childhood educators to meet current demand – and needs thousands more to meet the federal government’s legislated plans for three days of subsidised childcare for every family, due to start in January.
This leads to “severe understaffing at most centres,” said the Greens’ Abigail Boyd. “When you have understaffing it means you don’t have people keeping an eye on each other, and you have educators alone with children. Unfortunately, it is a paedophile’s dream.
“There used to be a culture of teamwork in these centres. They knew each other really well. If there was someone who wasn’t doing the right thing, they would all know about it.”
While the state’s school and kindergarten teachers must be registered with the Victorian Institute of Teaching, no such licensing scheme exists for childcare educators. That makes it impossible for authorities to track their movements between centres, or co-ordinate the collection of intelligence, allegations or complaints.
“Just like schoolteachers have to be registered, we need the same thing for early childhood teachers, absolutely,” said Hollonds.
As a condition of registration, teachers are required to undertake continual education and training.
In 2023, federal childcare regulator the Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA) recommended childcare educators be required to undertake bi-annual training in child safety, including identifying grooming and abuse.
Registration would also enable states to operate “person of interest” systems – another key recommendation from the 2023 review.
Working with children checks only consider offences a person has been convicted of. A “person of interest” system could also track complaints and unsubstantiated allegations, as well as childcare workers who were regularly changing centres.
Ashley Paul Griffith, one of Australia’s worst paedophiles, worked at 11 locations across Brisbane, and was the subject of multiple unsubstantiated complaints before his arrest.
“Typically the offender moves on before their offences become known. They are looking for opportunity,” said David Bartlett, a criminologist and director of BDK Insights.
ACECQA recommended moving to a risk-based approach, taking action against staff when complaints are received rather than waiting for an offence to be committed.
Griffith was caught by police in possession of child abuse material; police then worked backwards to discover he was a childcare worker. “That should send shockwaves through the sector, because it means the sector is not picking them up,” said Boyd.
Support is available from the National Sexual Assault, Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service at 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732).
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