On Friday, state education ministers will meet Jason Clare to discuss the thorny and critically important issues facing the country’s childcare sector.
There could not be a more significant moment for the conversations that we are having about the safety of the more than 1 million Australian children who attend childcare.
Except for the last most significant moment. And the one before that.
Because this – tragically – is not the first time there has been a government meeting or report or a major review into childcare policy after horrifying allegations of serial abuse of children in childcare.
Review after review has made recommendations to the government – about record-keeping, oversight, regulation, funding – that have sat, for years, gathering dust on government shelves.
After charges were laid against Ashley Paul Griffith, who was found guilty last year of abusing 73 girls while working in childcare in Brisbane and Italy over two decades, Clare commissioned a review. It made recommendations about how to monitor childcare workers who exhibit concerning behaviour, and even those who have serious reports of child abuse made against them to police but who aren’t convicted.
These recommendations still have not been implemented.
Last year, the Productivity Commission handed down a comprehensive report into the childcare sector, which included recommendations related to standards and safety, including that an independent national commissioner for early childhood be established and that regulators be given additional funding so they could conduct more frequent inspections.
Many of these recommendations still have not been implemented.
Before that, there were recommendations handed down in 2015 after the royal commission into the institutional abuse of children, which included a call to have a national working with children’s check, a recommendation that sat in the too-hard basket for a full decade until last week, when the attorney general announced there would be a national working with children check (WWCC), of sorts, by the end of the year.
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In light of this, it is imperative that Friday’s meeting produces real solutions that are actually implemented. Here is what the government has indicated will be on the table.
A national register of childcare workers
This idea has been mentioned a number of times by Clare since the arrest of a Melbourne childcare worker, who has been charged with sexually abusing eight children in his care, was announced in July.
Parents across Victoria were subjected to the horrific experience of getting a “drip feed” of information about where the alleged offender had worked, said Clare, as police were forced to pore over the records at individual centres to find out if, and when, the alleged offender had been there.
“This highlights … why you need a database or a register, so you know where all childcare workers are and where they’re moving from centre to centre,” Clare said.
I don’t know anyone who would disagree.
But, if this is all the national register does – tell us who has worked where and when – then its utility is extremely limited.
A more useful register is one that would allow centre directors, the regulator, even police, to create a record of “red flag” behaviour, logging when someone has been fired for cause, or for allegedly grooming a child; or of times someone has been reported to the police for alleged child abuse, even if the police have not been able to lay charges, so that people looking to employ a childcare worker can know the history of the person they are dealing with.
Last week, Det Sup Linda Howlett, the head of the New South Wales police child sexual abuse squad, threw her support behind a “red flag” register, saying it would likely help police identify and apprehend potential offenders much earlier.
“At the end of the day, the offenders that we’ve actually charged, and a number of them are quite high profile, have never had a criminal history,” she said.
Obviously this would be tricky to do. Obviously there are privacy concerns and legal issues to be sorted. Our society operates on the fundamental principle of people being innocent until proven guilty; we don’t want a system where one false and malicious accusation can ruin a person’s career and life.
However, we also don’t want a situation like the one we find ourselves in now, where the concern for the privacy or reputation of the adult so dramatically trumps the safety of the child.
Such a system could have made an enormous difference in preventing some of the offending of Griffith.
Before he was investigated and arrested, more than one complaint was made about Griffith to his employers, the Early Childhood Regulatory Authority and the Queensland police, including at least one of sexual abuse against a child in his care. The earliest of these reports to police was made more than a decade before he was eventually arrested.
Nationalising working with children checks
This was a recommendation presented to the government in 2015. The attorney general, Michelle Rowland, acknowledged last week that the fact it had taken 10 years to implement was a “failure of successive governments”.
However, Rowland acknowledged governments wouldn’t be standardising the criteria that led to someone’s WWCC to be revoked across the states. Instead they would implement a system that meant someone banned from working with children in one state wouldn’t be able to keep their WWCC in another state.
Firstly, let it sink in that that hasn’t been the policy until now.
It is great that a “banned in one, banned in all” policy will be introduced by the end of the year. But this is a bare minimum. It should happen, but let’s not kid ourselves that it’s the answer.
In the case of Griffith, at the time of his arrest, he didn’t have a criminal conviction and still had a valid WWCC. A national WWCC system would have made no difference in preventing his offending.
What could have played a role is if the bar for cancelling someone’s WWCC was lowered, so that it considered repeated reports to police alleging sexual abuse as a reason to cancel someone’s right to work with kids. A review of the Victorian childcare system, released on Wednesday, recommended precisely this – that a worker’s WWCC could be suspended or refused when there were “credible allegations or patterns of concerning behaviour with children”. It will be interesting to see how much traction this suggestion gets at the national table on Friday.
Pulling funding from underperforming centres
After huge community outrage after the recent Victorian allegations, one of the first things the federal government announced it would do was to introduce legislation that would allow it to pull funding from centres that repeatedly failed to meet national safety standards.
The government introduced this in the first week of the new parliament and it has already put about 30 childcare centres on notice that they need to pick up their game or face a funding freeze.
We have seen enough reports of poor-performing centres, where children are kept in unsafe or neglectful circumstances, to know that this is a good change. And while it will help to address the centres that operate so poorly that children are in danger, it’s not a policy that will necessarily help with the other issue at the front of mind for the public – sexual abuse of children.
Installing CCTV
There are arguments in favour of this. Howlett told a parliamentary inquiry last week that CCTV has been instrumental in some prosecutions of childcare workers, who would have escaped justice without that evidence.
However, there are valid concerns about introducing this surveillance into childcare centres, including hacking, the safe storage of footage and who is allowed to access and view it.
Implementing CCTV safely will cost money, with Goodstart, one of the largest not-for-profit childcare providers, saying the “installation costs of secure systems are in the tens of thousands of dollars per centre”.
So, that’s one to watch closely at Friday’s meeting – if CCTV is mandated, it must come with adequate funding to be implemented safely, or we are opening up a whole new dangerous can of worms.
None of us watching this unfold think their task is an easy one, but it’s far too important a task for them to look for easy wins.
