How do you choose a safe childcare centre?

When Brisbane mother-of-two Elizabeth first looked for a childcare centre for her 10-month-old daughter, now aged three, she toured 11 facilities before making a decision.

Although she had the means to be discerning and find a “better centre”, she says the process was challenging and made her aware of the sector’s shortcomings.

“One of my biggest red flags when choosing a childcare centre is if they have a very high turnover of staff,” she says. “That’s the number one sign something’s not right.”

Recent news has left many Australians questioning their child’s safety in early education settings, as the sector and governments scramble to address concerns. Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

Now her other daughter, a seven-month-old, is about to start childcare, and while Elizabeth hasn’t faced the same rigorous vetting process this time around, she’s feeling anxious for other reasons.

Last week, police charged 26-year-old Melbourne childcare worker Joshua Dale Brown with the sexual abuse of infants and young children, prompting action across the country, including an emergency roundtable in Queensland on Wednesday.

After the meeting, Education Minister John-Paul Langbroek said “we’ve all been shocked by the recent issues”, and he urged affected stakeholders to work together to restore faith in the early education sector and its more than 54,000 workers.

“We must make sure we do things in a calm and measured way to make sure that whatever it is that we do actually leads to safer outcomes for our children,” he said.

I’m not a parent, but I have a nephew and niece in daycare and kindy, and I’ve cycled through the collective grief and anxiety of recent weeks, as well as following the case of Ashley Paul Griffith, one of Australia’s worst paedophiles, who was charged with sexually abusing dozens of children in childcare centres, including across Brisbane.

Clearly, measures to improve child safety across the sector are drastically needed, but what does that mean for parents with children in childcare right now, or those about to engage with a facility for the first time? How do you choose a “good” centre? And how do you determine safety in a system that seems so devastatingly broken?

Elizabeth was recently contacted by a friend asking for advice on choosing her first childcare centre. “She’s just had her first baby … and she’s pretty rocked by the news and terrified to put her daughter in childcare.”

She repeated her approach to checking staff turnover, and recommended spending time observing staff and watching how they interact with kids, checking the staff-to-child ratio, and reading Google reviews.

“Parents who have complained about or have bad experiences at the centre will generally leave a bad Google review,” Elizabeth says.

Brisbane mum Rebekah interviewed “every single daycare [centre] in my area” and spent the first two months doing “stay and plays” before choosing a centre for her then 13-month-old son, who is now 18 months old.

“I’d sit there and basically observe and see if my kid would even leave me, and if he wouldn’t, they were ruled out,” she says.

Rebekah is a child safety officer with previous experience working on the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. She says the “interviews” were mostly to understand child safety policies.

Parents often don’t have a choice but to send their children to childcare. Credit: Kate Geraghty

“I was very concerned [with asking] what their ratios looked like, and about their incident report mechanisms,” Rebekah says.

“I also wanted to scope out what the rooms looked like, and see if there were closed-off spaces that my kid could be put in, because that would have been a big no for me.”

Rebekah knows how to monitor for signs of abuse and says she is “constantly observing” her son for changes that indicate his safety has been compromised. This includes sudden bed-wetting and resistance to nappy changes, checking for bruises or red marks, and behavioural shifts, such as becoming more withdrawn or aggressive.

“We’re trying to teach him protective behaviour too, but he’s still so young.”

Following the roundtable meeting, Langbroek said the department would work to implement mandatory child safety training for early educators, and lobby the federal government for a national register of childcare workers. This adds to a review into the Blue Card and child safety system already underway.

Goodstart Early Learning chief executive Ros Baxter added, “there is also already a lot of work and thinking that goes into keeping your children safe” in centres, and while “it’s a terrible moment for those who have young children” and work in the sector, they are taking these issues seriously.

That’s lukewarm comfort at a time like this, especially for working parents with limited choice. But that makes it more important to see safety standards improved and rigorously implemented across the entire sector. Parents should be able to leave their children in the hands of childcare staff without having to worry about their safety.

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