Security cameras will be trialled at hundreds of childcare facilities across the country as work begins on building a national register of workers in the scandal-plagued sector.
Federal, state and territory education ministers met in Sydney on Friday and agreed to a suite of safety reforms in the childcare and early education sectors.
The CCTV trial involving up to 300 small and medium operators will roll out from October or November and be funded through a $189 million federal government package
Ministers also agreed to begin work immediately on a national register of educators, with a pilot to launch in December ahead of the full rollout from February.
The register is being “built from scratch” and will require legislation to mandate that centres share information.
Other nationally agreed measures include banning mobile phones in centres from September, mandatory national child safety training for all workers and an extra 1600 spot visits by the federal education department.
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare said governments across the country must step up to restore parents’ confidence in the system.
“This is not the end – it is the next thing we need to do,” he said on Friday after the meeting.
“The awful truth is this work will never end because there will always be bad people who try to poke holes in the system and find vulnerabilities.”
The meeting comes after Melbourne childcare worker Joshua Dale Brown was charged with dozens of sex offences, including allegedly sexually abusing eight children.
Brown was known to have worked at 24 facilities between 2017 and 2025.
It is legal to install CCTV in centres, apart from inside change areas and toilets.
Major providers G8 Education and Affinity Education have already committed to installing CCTV in hundreds of their for-profit centres following the allegations emerging against Brown in early July.
The NSW government also committed to trialling CCTV in childcare centres when the regulator had safety concerns following a review by former state deputy ombudsman Chris Wheeler.
But service leaders, staff, unions and parent groups raised “strong concerns” about rolling out CCTV during a Victorian review, led by former South Australian premier Jay Weatherill and veteran public servant Pamela White.
Clare said CCTV footage protection and storage would be a focus of the trial to ensure it didn’t become a “honey pot” for hackers, along with camera placement.
“The police tell us that this can be an important aspect in deterring bad behaviour and where bad behaviour does occur it can be important in their investigation to catch the crooks afterwards,” he said.
The federal government has initiated compliance actions against 37 early childhood centres under laws passed by federal parliament in July.
The centres, which had not met safety standards for seven years, were given six months to clean up their acts or face losing funding.
Previously agreed working-with-children check changes will also mean anyone prevented from holding a check in one state or territory will be automatically banned across the nation.
But a national check is not on the cards, and state and territory jurisdictions will continue to manage their own systems.
1800 RESPECT 1800 737 732
National Sexual Abuse and Redress Support Service 1800 211 028
-AAP
Live News
