Kurrajong independent MLA Thomas Emerson’s actions forced the release of documents related to children’s safety in early childhood centres. Photo: Supplied.
CONTENT WARNING: This article contains references to child abuse.
Almost all of the respondents to my recent survey on early childhood sector reforms – 98 per cent of them – agreed or strongly agreed that reform is needed to ensure children’s safety always comes first in the ACT.
The ACT’s early childhood strategy, Set up for Success, doesn’t address safety or safeguarding in the sector at all.
Thousands of government documents released on Christmas Eve show that this failure to prioritise safeguarding measures in our early childhood sector has exposed some of our children to significant harm.
Less than two months before those documents were released, at a time when only the government had access to them, the Minister for Education and Early Childhood asserted “we have a robust and comprehensive regulatory system”.
Now that we’ve all got access to these documents, it’s apparent that it may have been an overstatement.
Children being verbally and physically abused by an educator who had been allowed to work in early childhood in the ACT despite having been convicted of assaulting a child in NSW.
Communication failures between a centre, the regulator, police and families meant it fell to the mother of a child who had been sexually abused to notify other parents – in the centre’s carpark at pick-up time – that the same educator may have assaulted their children. Her efforts led to a second conviction.
Chronic understaffing causing inadequate supervision that led to serious injuries including broken bones, dislocated jaws and untreated head injuries.
A centre that reported and sacked an educator who’d faced three separate child sex abuse allegations spread over six years. It then took the regulator 12 months to bar that educator from continuing to work elsewhere in the sector.
Extreme cost-cutting by some profit-maximising providers is creating immense pressure on under-resourced, overwhelmed, and unappreciated educators, with one exhausted educator complaining to the regulator that staff were being denied breaks. She said her centre, which is rated as “exceeding the National Quality Standard”, was operating below the required staff-to-child ratios “almost every day”.
And none of the hundreds of breaches revealed through the document release led to a centre being fined.
That’s despite new Productivity Commission data showing the ACT had the second-highest rate of confirmed breaches of the Education and Care Services National Law in the country last year.
It turns out the ACT Government never even set up a mechanism to issue those infringement notices. All Australian Education Ministers agreed last August to triple the penalties for child safety breaches in the sector, but here in the ACT, we’re unable to administer those penalties.
What was that about a “robust and comprehensive regulatory framework”?
Many of the challenges the sector faces boil down to the workforce being critically undervalued and unsupported.
I know the sector feels under siege, and that the public scrutiny created by this document release has been challenging for the many good educators and providers who do critical, often thankless work in Canberra’s early childhood education and care centres.
But scrutiny is not the problem.
A regulatory system that has allowed bad actors and providers with skewed priorities to enter and remain in the sector – that’s the problem.
The fact is that the system is not currently set up to support and incentivise best practice. Passionate educators are being burnt out and leaving the sector, while small, locally run centres with a track record of putting our children first are being cannibalised by large
conglomerate providers with other priorities.
We need to provide far greater support to elevate the many educators and centres that are delivering excellent education and care, and we need to clamp down with genuine consequences for the providers that are not.
We also need to ensure the regulator is appropriately resourced to do its job and that educators are supported in maintaining a strong culture of reporting safety issues that require the regulator’s attention.
We owe it to our children to take the steps necessary to create an early childhood regulatory system that really is “robust and comprehensive” – where best practice becomes the status quo.
This week in the Assembly, I’ll be proposing a package of reforms aimed at elevating the minimum standard in the ACT.
I’m hoping to secure multi-partisan support for rolling out these reforms over the coming year, despite the political resistance we saw to my calls for the release of the document last year.
We’ve faced a reckoning in the ACT, and it’s undeniable that reform is urgently needed. I hope all parties can put politics aside and come forward in good faith to make this happen.
Every child deserves to grow up in a community that puts what’s best for them first. Every parent and carer should feel confident that, no matter which centre they drop their child off at in the morning, their safety, wellbeing, and growth will be prioritised above all else.
And every educator should be valued and empowered, through sufficient resourcing, support and training, to uphold that expectation.
Thomas Emerson MLA is the independent Member for Kurrajong in the ACT Legislative Assembly.
