There has been a LOT in the media lately around the early childhood education and care sector. Recent events have put a spotlight on the way organisations that interact with children/young people function, and the measures taken to keep children safe across many sectors. State governments across Australia are calling emergency meetings to discuss greater child safety measures to be mandated across all organisations that work with children/young people.
Regulations and legislation are changing to reinforce the need for greater measures and accountabilities to be implemented in our child-related organisations to keep children and young people safe.
If you own, manage, work or volunteer in an organisation that interacts child children and young people, or even if you are a sole trader that interacts with children and young people, the best place to start is to understand the National Principles for Child Safe Organisations (also referred to as the Child Safe Standards) and how best to implement these in the organisation.
These standards/principles aim to provide a nationally consistent approach to creating organisational cultures that foster child safety and wellbeing. These standards/principles collectively show that a child safe organisation is one that creates a culture, adopts strategies and takes action to promote wellbeing and prevent harm to children/young people. They are intended to guide what organisations need to do to be child safe by setting best practice.
You might be wondering – surely child safety is nothing new. So, where did all this start?
The creation of a more robust approach to child-safety started the way many changes occur in Australia… with a Royal Commission.
The Royal Commission heard from more than 8,000 survivors of abuse aged between seven and 93 years old. It identified over 4,000 organisations where abuse had occurred. Thirty-two per cent of these were government organisations. It found that it takes an average of 23.9 years for a survivor to disclose that abuse has occurred.
In 2017, this Royal Commission found that organisations that work with children and young people (including those who volunteer):
- failed to prioritise the best interests of children;
- lacked adequate child protection policies and procedures;
- had poor practices, inadequate governance and complaints processes; and
- did not provide adequate child safe education and training for staff.
From these findings, there was a recommendation that all institutions in Australia that engage in child-related work be required to implement the ten child safe standards, which have been incorporated into the National Principles for Child Safe Organisations.
These Standards must now be implemented across many sectors, including early childhood education and care, education, faith, local government, health, sport, and recreation sectors.
If you’re interested in learning more about the National Child Safe Standards and how to implement these in practical ways, Clear to Work offers a low cost, self-paced online course designed to assist organisations and those interacting with children and young people to make sense of the seemingly complex task of implementing the Child Safe Standards in a meaningful way and learn how to demonstrate compliance to these Standards when required.
Child safety and child protection is everyone’s business. We all have a part to play!