Sad State of Affairs: Latest on the Childcare Industry

A Word from our CEO Michael Pecic:

It has been incredibly heartbreaking and distressing to hear that, in recent months, some educators in the Early Childhood sector across Australia have been charged with sexual and physical offences against children. Our thoughts are with the children and families affected by these deeply concerning events. We have seen Government and Industry bodies immediately start assessing processes and laws associated with the operation of early years services across Australia.  Services and organisations are grappling to respond to concerns and provide parents reassurance surrounding the safety of their child whilst in care. 

How can we enhance our services to better support families, educators, and children, ensuring that child safety and wellbeing remain central to all activities and care within the early years setting?

Although the following isn't a comprehensive list, it certainly represents a step in the right direction.

1. Proper implementation of the Child Safe Standards.

• Services need to really imbed the Child Safe Standards into practice. This not only requires a continual review, but refresh and implementation.
• Make a commitment to children’s safety and wellbeing that is visible across the organisation, and evident in key policies and procedures.
• Strong leadership sets the tone and example by embedding children’s safety and wellbeing into policies, procedures and culture and ensuring these are followed and reviewed.
• Champion and model a child safe culture at all levels of the organisation, from the top down and from the bottom up.

In Safe Hands Educators In Safety now offers a complete Child Safe Accreditation Package where all facets of your services operation is reviewed against the child safe standards to ensure all practices and policies are aligned to ensuring a child safe organisation.

2. Provide educators with the tools to apply child protection processes within their everyday practices. It is vitally important that educators understand more than just their responsibilities to report concerns. This is done by:

• Providing educators the skills to develop an array of practices within their early years framework to ensure practices are in place which will easily help identify any inappropriate actions or unsafe practices by other educators or staff are identified quickly.
• Providing simple strategies and tools educators can utilise to identify child protection concerns through actions of children, families or staff.
• Understanding how to respond to a disclosure made by a child, how to document and report effectively are key skills educators often lack.
• Imbedding risk management strategies to ensure a child safe organisation is maintained.

In Safe Hands Educators In Safety provide a library of child protection training courses that can be tailored to meet any organisations requirements. These courses are designed to help educators to continually grow their knowledge and capacity to respond to child protection.

3. Provide Educators in-depth Child Protection, Safe Sleep, Active Supervision and Guiding Children Behaviour training. Active Supervision requires educators to understand how to plan and respond to children’s needs continually. Providing activities and environments where both child and educators can engage to support education and growth is important. This can only be done with educators teaching child safety and children’s rights into all activities. This includes reviewing transitioning and tools provided to children to self-regulate in various situations.

In Safe Hands Educators In Safety provide an array of courses to provide educators knowledge and understanding of practices that ensure active supervision and positive guiding children behaviour processes.

4. Finally, it is vitally important organisations and educators understand psychosocial hazards in the workplace. Educators need to understand their duty of Care to children and how personal issues can affect their ability to engage safely with children. Services need to imbed practices which support staff to understand psychosocial hazards and practices to support a healthy and supported working environment.

In Safe Hands can support organisations in understanding psychosocial hazards and how if not supported properly can place children at risk in the early years environment.