Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ)
It has been a tumultuous and frightening time for Australian families and educators. For more than a year, there has been a litany of claims of abuse and poor standards across the early childhood sector.
Friday marks 12 months since the federal government passed major legislation to try and improve safety in early education centres.
Are kids any safer? What more needs to happen?
What are the key changes?
Governments have made a raft of changes in response to fears about childcare safety.
This includes legislation on July 31 last year, giving the federal government powers to cut off funding to centres if they don’t meet quality and safety standards.
Other changes announced last year – though not in this bill – include:
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expanded mandatory child safety training for early childhood workers. The basic training explains how to detect and respond to unsafe situations, as well as reporting obligations. It also focuses on professional boundaries and the conduct of educators. For example, no “secret” or “special” relationships with children. The aim is to remove opportunities for grooming behaviours that could lead to sexual abuse
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greater workforce screening and more scrutiny of recruitment processes. For example, instead of relying solely in working with children checks, employers need to contact referees
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more spot checks for services.
In August 2025, state and territories ministers also agreed to develop a national early childhood worker register. This is a secure national database that tracks workers.
They also agreed to run a national CCTV trial in select centres and ban educators using their personal mobile phones at work.
We need more time
As of late June 2026, the government had cut funding to one centre and issued warning notices to 115, which it found were “not up to scratch”.
But it’s too early to say if these reforms have seen reductions in abuse.
While better data on incidents can help, its also hard to measure the absence of something you’re trying to prevent.
We need to understand how widely and routinely prevention-focused activities have been implemented in early learning centres. So longer-term evaluations will be needed.
Is this enough?
According to Education Minister Jason Clare, more than 99% of educators have completed the first stage of the mandatory safety training. They have six months to complete the next stage.
Training can improve awareness, confidence and recognition of grooming and inappropriate educator behaviour. But it’s not enough on its own.
Learning new information via online learning modules is not the same as knowing how to implement it in practice. Or knowing centre management wants you to speak up, or parents will be supportive if you do.
This means creating workplace cultures where concerns can be raised early, without fear of blame. To do this, child safety must be part of daily conversations, where leaders welcome concerns, admit mistakes and seek feedback. When managers are less defensive, staff feel more safe to raise issues.
Staff need space to think
But there are other complexities that need to be considered. Unfortunately children are at risk from abuse from other children as well as adults. Current policies and training aren’t really dealing with the risk of harm from other children.
Different strategies are needed for both adults and children. For example, harm from adults might put attention on nappy changing practices. But harm from children might mean we think differently about places like outdoor cubby houses, and supervision practices for these areas.
Staff need paid time for reflection, supervision and professional development. This is so they don’t get too busy to notice issues as they crop up. And to ensure their policies don’t just sit on the shelf, but are used and kept up-to-date.
In turn, that means we need to fix well-known issues with worker shortages, high turnover rates and workload pressures.
Parents should be more involved
Parents are a crucial but underutilised part of keeping kids safe in early childhood centres. Centres should be encouraged to strengthen their engagement with parents when it comes to safety.
Centres need to think make sure they deliver age-appropriate body safety education (knowing the correct names for private body parts, how your body works, that your body is your own and where to go for help). This is a key part of prevention but shouldn’t be done just by early childhood centres. Evidence shows its best done with parents, who are the primary educators of children.
The Australian government’s One Talk at a Time campaign reminds parents they need to have regular age-appropriate conversations with their kids. This is to help children understand their bodies, recognise when something doesn’t feel right, and know they can come to the adults in their lives for help.
What else is needed?
We still need to see action around designing safer childcare centres.
For example, clear lines of sight in a room help educators watch children, and each other. Secure entrances ensure only authorised people can come into a centre. This is what we call situational or contextual prevention – it focuses on reducing opportunities for abuse and strengthening the environments where children are cared for.
If there is one message from the past year, it is that child safety is not a document on a shelf or something that gets ticked off. It must happen every day through the actions of educators, leaders, regulators and parents working together to keep children safe.
Daryl Higgins receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council (as one of the Chief Investigators on the Australian Child Maltreatment Study), Australian government and state/territory government departments.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/30/australias-childcare-safety-changes-are-turning-one-are-they-working/