In the wake of horrifying reports last week alleging that eight children had been sexually abused by a worker in a Melbourne childcare centre, politicians and providers have scrambled to offer a response.
One option emerged from the fray as something concrete and immediate: the installation of CCTV cameras in childcare centres.
Two of the country’s largest for-profit providers, G8 and Affinity – which employed the man accused of more than 70 offences against children – announced they would either implement or speed up the rollout of CCTV to all of their centres.
A third provider, Goodstart, which is the country’s largest not-for-profit provider, has been installing CCTV cameras at its new centres since 2022, with about 70 of its roughly 660 centres currently fitted with cameras. A Goodstart spokesperson said the company would continue to roll them out across its entire network, but said this would take “several years”.
State governments are considering mandating CCTV across all centres, with NSW saying it will install cameras at centres with serious compliance concerns or those under investigation, with other states considering implementing similar trials.
Goodstart warned that if the government made CCTV cameras mandatory they would have to consider funding support, “as installation costs of secure systems are in the tens of thousands of dollars per centre”.
But early childhood experts have raised concerns about the move, saying that a reliance on CCTV as a safety measure means the more difficult, structural work in the sector might not be done, and the introduction of CCTV cameras into spaces where more than 1 million young children play, eat and sleep poses significant child safety risks.
‘Not as simple as just putting up cameras’
“I think firstly, it is really important to say that everyone wants children to be safe. And so obviously we all need to be thinking about every option there,” says Carolyn Smith, the early education director at the United Workers Union, which covers the early childhood education workforce.
“I think there are two concerns around CCTV, and the first is that this looks like a fix, but also creates potentially a lot of unintended consequences. So, there’s 17,000 centres across Australia. They will be filming children all day, every day. That is a lot of hours of images of children. How does that get stored safely? What happens if a parent doesn’t want their children filmed?”
Smith has concerns about hacking, data storage, and the way AI might be used in conjunction with the footage to produce illegal and deeply harmful material.
“In this era … hacking is assumed now in most systems. They’ve hacked almost every bank, they’ve hacked superannuation companies, they’ve hacked Qantas. The local childcare centre, how are they going to keep [footage secure] that potentially could be used very badly?”
Lisa Bryant, an early childhood education consultant, agrees.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea for a whole range of reasons,” she says. “First of all, it’s not always effective. We had a case in Canberra a few years ago – the guy’s still in prison – where the offending occurred in a blind spot of the cameras. So it doesn’t take long to work out where the cameras are and where the cameras aren’t. And there are places that you can’t legally put those cameras and it’s in places like toilets etc – the places where the offending is more likely to happen are the very places where you’re not likely to be able to put the cameras.
“There’s certain children that wouldn’t be able to have their images recorded by those cameras, like children who are in state care. So what happens if you’ve got those children in your centre? Can you not use your CCTVs there?”
Bryant also cites a case reported in 2021 of hackers who allegedly gained access to the CCTV at some Australian childcare centres.
“All this data has to be served somewhere and often it’s recorded into a cloud-based system and that allows paedophiles a great source if they want to look at children.”
Lizzie Blandthorn, the Victorian minister for children, told reporters on Friday that she personally supports CCTV surveillance cameras being installed in childcare centres, saying police had told her it would be an effective deterrent against offending.
However, she said the Victorian government would take its time to consider the risks presented by CCTV cameras before making it mandatory.
“CCTV would act as a deterrent, but there are questions that need to be answered about how you safely install it and store the information and where that information goes.
“It is not as simple as just putting up cameras.”
Goodstart, the not-for-profit childcare provider that began rolling out CCTV in its centres in 2022, has a comprehensive, publicly available document that outlines its CCTV policy. The document says feeds are not monitored in real-time, do not capture audio, and cameras are not installed in bathrooms, nappy change areas or staff rooms. It says the footage is generally kept for 30 days and is accessible to authorised members of the safety health and wellbeing team at Goodstart. Parents can apply to get footage of an incident involving their child.
A Goodstart spokesperson said: “We have found during our trial that CCTV can help maintain safe environments for children, help provide fair and accurate information on incidents and disputes, help give families peace of mind and boost security by deterring break-ins and theft.”
But the spokesperson warned that implementing CCTV systems in a secure way was expensive: “Part of the high cost of installation of CCTV systems is that we record on a secure system with strict protocols to protect the data and the encrypted transport of data to cloud storage.”
Guardian Australia can reveal that Affinity, one of the providers speeding up its rollout of CCTV cameras, is still in the process of developing guidelines for how the CCTV footage will be stored, how long it will be retained, and how child safety concerns will be addressed, despite having already installed CCTV cameras at 100 childcare centres – 40% of its centres nationally – over the last few years.
A spokesperson for Affinity said: “The detailed technical, operational and policy settings, including footage retention, data security and specific exclusions, are also currently being developed. These will align with all relevant laws and with sector-leading privacy and child safety standards.
“The intent of the new rollout is to enhance supervision and safety, with installation prioritised for areas where it will have the most impact. As with all measures involving children, we are carefully balancing safety, privacy and compliance obligations.”
G8 Education, which is accelerating the rollout of CCTV to all centres after the trial use of it in “several of our centres”, did not answer questions about whether it had already developed a CCTV policy, but a spokesperson for the company said: “We understand the importance of adhering to child safety, child dignity, privacy and data protection requirements, and commit to adherence with all relevant privacy laws and sector regulations and the adoption of best practice cybersecurity measures.”
Systemic change beyond quick fixes
Anne Hollonds, the national children’s commissioner, says she is “not opposed to CCTV, per se, in some situations”, but she does have concerns about an over-reliance on it, and she worries it is “an apparent quick fix”.
“It doesn’t replace proper staffing levels of trained educators who’ve been properly screened in the recruitment [process] and a proactive child-safe culture that involves everyone from the boardroom to the sand pit.”
G8, Affinity and Goodstart all said in statements that they saw the use of CCTV cameras in centres as one part of a suite of child safety measures they were implementing or had already implemented.
The bigger work that needs to be done, says Hollonds, is addressing chronic staffing shortages in the sector and high rates of casualisation in the workforce, as well as introducing stronger regulation, including a national register of early childhood educators, that would allow employers to know the work history, credentials and any investigations of potential staff members.
“I would rather that we were working towards the systemic changes needed to create an early childhood education and care sector that was both safe and in the best interests of children.”
Smith, from the UWU, agrees. “Really, the broader concern is that people say, ‘oh, we fixed child safety now, we’ve got cameras,’ and some of the harder, more expensive work that takes a bit more effort won’t be done.”
Smith says that addressing staffing levels, as well as transparency at centres, is key, arguing that centres should have to disclose the number of casual staff they use, their staff turnover, their history of using waivers to get exemptions from having staff with requisite credentials, and any breaches of quality standards.
“All of those things should be publicly available and easily accessible to parents and families and to educators, when they’re deciding whether they’re going to go and work there.”
Finally, all of the experts agreed there needed to be real consequences for providers who do the wrong thing.
Last week, the federal education minister, Jason Clare, announced the government would seek to change laws when parliament resumes later this month, to give it the power to withdraw a centre’s right to receive childcare subsidy (CCS) – the main source of government funding for childcare.
Smith says this was a significant and welcome announcement, but also that it was “pretty shocking” the government did not already have the means to cut a centre’s funding if it is doing the wrong thing.
“Previously … they had no legal basis to withhold CCS,” she says. “We really welcome that change to the legislation … There needs to be consequences for poor behaviour.”
