Child Safety in Early Learning Centres: Safeguarding the Safety and Wellbeing of Children and Young People
Early Learning Centres (ELCs) have legal obligations to safeguard the safety and wellbeing of children in their care. This is a hot topic at the moment, given the recent episode of ABC’s Four Corners (Four Corners), which highlighted the significant challenges facing ELCs, including staffing shortages, inconsistent regulatory systems, privatisation of the early learning sector and hiring unsuitable people, which has led to staff and the organisations breaching their child safety obligations. Among the concerns raised by the ABC, the episode included examples of children being neglected and physically and sexually abused.
Current media attention on the sector serves as a timely reminder of what obligations ELCs have and what they should be doing to keep children in their care safe, as no child should be harmed when attending early learning or educational facilities. This article provides a snapshot of how organisations can mitigate risk to children in the early learning sector.
Implementation of Child Safety Policies
ELCs must ensure that they have policies and procedures which document their commitment to child safety. Policies and procedures must be continually reviewed and updated, particularly in response to any complaints, identified risks, concerns or safety incidents. Causes and gaps in procedures should be identified and policies and procedures should be updated accordingly.
ELCs are required to maintain a host of policies and procedures under regulatory frameworks.
These policies and procedures must be implemented in the day to day running of the ELC and followed by all staff members and volunteers. They should be integrated into all induction, training and supervision processes.
Recruitment Strategies
ELCs must ensure that they hire suitable people to work with children in their care. This requires them to have comprehensive child safe recruitment strategies, to ensure that that all staff members and volunteers meet the requirements for working with children. A Working with Children Check should not be the only step taken to ensure that a person is suitable to work with children.
Child Safe recruitment includes:
- Ensuring all job advertisements emphasise child safety and wellbeing
- Comprehensive reference checks are conducted for all potential hires, including referees from previous employment who hold a position of leadership
- All staff and volunteers hold a current working with children check
- Ensuring there are specific child safety selection criteria that all potential hires must meet
- Ensuring that roles and responsibilities are clearly outlined before the hiring process is completed
- Questions in interview to assess the person’s capacity to understand and implement their child safety obligations
- Thorough induction processes that include supervision and training to ensure that the person is suitable.
Four Corners highlighted how some ELCs have been cutting corners and hiring unqualified people to fill staffing gaps quickly. It is essential that child safety informs all recruitment and hiring processes, and that unqualified staff are not hired simply to fill a gap out of desperation.
Training and Supervision
ELCs must ensure that all staff members and volunteers are provided with the knowledge, skills and awareness to keep children and young people safe through ongoing education and training. ELCs must incorporate child safety training as an essential element of inductionand onboarding processes for all new staff and volunteers. Child safety training, including upskilling and filling gaps in knowledge must be addressed frequently in staff meetings and briefings. In addition, refresher child safety training should be provided to staff on an ongoing basis at least annually.
Staff and volunteers must be trained and supported to:
- Effectively implement the ELC’s policies and procedures
- Recognise indicators of child abuse and harm
- Respond effectively to issues of child safety and wellbeing
- Build a culture of safeguarding
- Be aware of their reporting requirements including mandatory reporting, reporting to Police and notifications under the Reportable Conduct Scheme (if in existence within the state of operation)
- Understand how to mitigate risks of child abuse and harm
- Behave professionally in line with the Code of Conduct
Staff and volunteers must be supervised and supported in conjunction with their training. Management should be trained to spot behaviours that can compromise child safety and ensure that they take steps to address and correct those behaviours. Regular supervision ensures that all staff members are meeting their child safety requirements and allows ELCs to identify potential risks and respond to risks before children are harmed. This should include conducting regular safety audits and maintaining a risk management system to ensure there are real-time responses to any incidents or areas of concern.
Investigating Allegations and Complaints
ELCs need to ensure that they have child-focused complaints processes in place. Complaints processes should clearly outline the roles and responsibilities of staff and the approach to responding to allegations and complaints.
ELCs must ensure that all complaints are taken seriously and responded to promptly. All incidents should be responded to in a trauma-informed manner where the child’s voice is heard. Any criminal or potential criminal conduct should be reported immediately to Police and ELC’s should cooperate with any police or regulatory investigations.
Allegations that are notifiable under the Reportable Conduct Scheme, must be notified within the prescribed time period and properly investigated by a person who has requisite skill and experience. All allegations should be taken seriously and investigated thoroughly, with findings made to address any misconduct and also any systemic issues that may arise throughout the investigation.
Steps should be taken to address any critical incidents, disclosures or reports, including:
- Meeting legal reporting requirements
- Supporting the child and their families in the investigation process
- Appointing an external investigator to conduct an independent investigation to thoroughly investigate the concerns, in a trauma informed manner
- Identifying the cause of the issue and systemic gaps to ensure the incident does not occur again.
- Updating policies and procedures to mitigate future risk
- Providing additional support and training where appropriate to all staff to mitigate risk.
How can Safe Space Legal Help?
Safe Space Legal has extensive experience working with schools and other organisations working with children to ensure they are meeting their child safety obligations and can support organisations by:
- Drafting best practice child safety policies, procedures and codes of conduct;
- Conducting gap analysis audits of critical incidents;
- Providing training on legal obligations, duty of care and child safety;
- Conducting child safety investigations which are compliant with relevant state and territory schemes; and
- Provide sound legal advice on risk mitigation.
Contact office@safespacelegal.com.au or call (03) 9124 7321 to organise a complementary discussion in relation to your organisation’s safeguarding needs.