Childcare owners want stricter checks and employment register on daycare workers
Childcare operators are demanding a national employment register and wider criminal checks for all daycare workers, 18 months after education ministers were officially warned of regulatory loopholes for pedophiles.
Childcare operators are demanding a national employment register and wider criminal checks for all daycare workers, 18 months after education ministers were officially warned of regulatory loopholes for pedophiles.
Following sexual abuse charges laid against Melbourne childcare worker Joshua Dale Brown, which were revealed on Tuesday, Australian Childcare Alliance vice-president Nesha Hutchinson said there was “a lot of frustration’’ among centre owners and operators over the failure to set up a national system for childcare employers to verify credentials, criminal records and work history of jobseekers.
“Employers are doing the best they can with what little information they are allowed to access,’’ she said. “There needs to be a national register of early childhood workers for employers to look up employment history and verify qualifications.’’
Ms Hutchinson also called for broader “working with children’’ checks that reveal whether a jobseeker had been convicted of any violent crime.
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare was briefed a week before parents were told on Tuesday that childcare worker Mr Brown had been charged with more than 70 child sex offences involving eight children in Melbourne’s western suburbs between April 2022 and January 2023.
The Victorian government has advised parents to test 1200 babies and toddlers for sexually transmitted diseases. It released a list of 20 childcare centres where Mr Brown worked – including 11 in the past two years – and revealed he had passed a working with children check.
The Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority warned the nation’s education ministers 18 months ago of gaps in child safety in daycare centres. In its report to ministers in December 2023, the ACECQA revealed “increasingly acute shortages of appropriate qualified early childhood teachers and educators’’.
“This has resulted in concerns about the screening and monitoring of behaviour of people seeking to work with children and young people,’’ the report warned.
“With the increased use of casual and agency relief staff, concerns have also been raised about the level of vetting being undertaken pre-employment.’’
ACECQA also raised the risk of staff using mobile phones to create child pornography – yet ministers will not ban the use of personal digital devices until September 1 this year. It called for stronger safeguards and screening for childcare staff to mirror the public registers that reveal the work history and disciplinary action against teachers.
Childcare employers and government regulators should be able to “efficiently undertake due diligence through a one-stop mechanism for the validation of qualifications, relevant child safety checks and mandatory training completions,’’ it stated.
State and territory childcare regulators should share suspicions about childcare staff, it recommended, through a “secure mechanism to record and share information about ‘persons of interest’ who may be the subject of unsubstantiated allegations/potential concerns for the safety, health and wellbeing of young people’’.
ACECQA chief executive Gabrielle Sinclair updated a meeting of federal, state and territory education ministers about child safety again on Friday.
Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan on Wednesday announced she would fast-track a state register of childcare workers “as soon as possible’’.
“Acknowledging there is work to create a national register of childcare workers, more needs to happen now,” she said. “We will start building the Victorian register to give families an extra layer of checks and balances as soon as possible.” She also suggested a “four eyes’’ approach so that no child was left alone with an adult.
Ms Hutchinson said this was “best practice’’ but not realistic in some small centres because of staff shortages.
“Increasing safety to that level would in some circumstances require a significant increase in the number of staff, which brings a significant increase in costs to families,’’ Ms Hutchinson said.
She said it was illegal for centres to install CCTV cameras in bathrooms and nappy change areas, because of privacy laws.
Victoria’s Minister for Children, Lizzie Blandthorn, criticised the national reform as “frustratingly slow’’, noting the federal government had ceased funding state governments’ early childhood regulators in 2018. “We need to see tangible outcomes sooner,’’ she said on Wednesday.
The NSW government announced last week that it would set up a new stand-alone regulatory agency for childcare, with powers to mandate installation of CCTV cameras to deal with safety concerns, and to publish more details of safety breaches.
Mr Clare on Wednesday said he knew parents were “bloody angry and frightened’’ over the sickening allegations.
“I know they’re angry because one of those parents is a friend of mine, and her two little girls are directly affected by this,’’ he told ABC radio. “She’s right to be mad. I’m mad.’’
He said education ministers had agreed to change the rules around mandatory reporting of suspected sexual or physical abuse so centres must report cases within 24 hours instead of seven days, starting on September 1.
Work was under way to “stop a provider or an employee who works in a centre who’s been found to be a bad actor from moving out of the childcare sector into another part of the care economy, for example the NDIS’’, he said.
Mr Clare said the Attorney-General, Michelle Rowland, was “determined to take the action necessary to make sure our working with children checks across the nation are up to scratch’’.
“That will be something to be discussed by attorneys-general when they meet next month.’’
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