Two-thirds of childcare workers have completed new mandatory child safety training as the government cracks down on the sector following a spate of abuse cases in centres around the country.
A third of workers yet to complete the training will have to do so before the six-month deadline expires in late August. Since the government made the online safety course compulsory as part of a $226 million package to bolster child safety, more than 180,000 of an estimated 270,000 sector workers have fulfilled the requirement.
The sector was plunged into crisis after a slew of allegations against workers abusing children in their care was revealed, including in Melbourne, where alleged paedophile Joshua Brown was accused of sexually abusing eight toddlers and babies and contaminating children’s food with bodily fluids. In Sydney, it was revealed childcare worker David James, accused of abusing 10 children, had continued to work after his behaviour was reported to police.
The Coalition has identified childcare – which costs the federal budget almost $16 billion each year – as a key policy battleground as parents say their confidence in the sector has faltered. The opposition is considering alternatives to centre-based care such as vouchers for nannies, while the prime minister aspires to a legacy of universal childcare – meaning accessible and affordable care for all children.
Education Minister Jason Clare said the speed with which the training has been taken up showed how much educators cared about child safety.
“They’ve been given six months to complete new safety training. The majority of them have done it in two months,” he said, adding staff were the best protection asset against abuse. “It tells you a lot about how much they care about and want to protect our kids.”
Providers can claim a subsidy if they close a centre in the evening for staff to complete the training, for which up to $40 million has been committed annually from the child care subsidy budget.
Workers must provide a completion certificate to their employers, and company directors and management are also required to participate.
The two-hour online training – developed by the Australian Centre for Child Protection – uses videos and multimedia to teach workers about child safety and how to identify abuse and neglect. It builds on a patchwork of existing training requirements to create a standardised national course.
Topics covered include how to develop child-safe policies and procedures and how to recognise grooming behaviours, such as an adult praising one child as being more mature or special than others.
The training must be repeated every two years, and a second, advanced training module will be rolled out from July.
Director of the Institute of Child Protection Studies at Australian Catholic University, Professor Daryl Higgins, said knowledge was critical to preventing abuse, particularly in a sector where many workers were qualified with a diploma or graduate certificate.
“That’s one of the challenges of expecting sophisticated information about understanding and managing risks in an environment where we actually don’t expect to have high levels of training in the workforce at large,” he said.
“But … there’s a limit to what two hours of knowledge-gaining is going to be able to do in terms of changing actual practice on the ground and changing cultures,” he said, adding that should be done through leadership in the sector and greater funding.
Labor rushed laws through parliament following the abuse revelations, granting itself the ability to strip funding from centres that were failing safety standards, which led to 30 centres being put on notice. The government also pledged to trial CCTV in centres and to develop a “banned in one, banned in all” check system to stop people who had harmed children from moving between jurisdictions.
Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.
Brittany Busch is a federal politics reporter for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.