How to Address Childcare Challenges: Spot Checks and Funding Strategies

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Childcare centres failing to meet standards could face random “spot checks” under expanded powers the federal government will move to legislate soon after parliament returns, Education Minister Jason Clare says.

The legislation, Clare said, would give his department the power to pull funding from childcare centres “persistently failing” to meet safety and quality standards.

“One of the big weapons that the Commonwealth has, probably the biggest, is the funding that we provide to childcare centres … if they don’t get it, they can’t operate,” he told Sky News on Friday.

Centres not meeting minimum standards would also be unable to expand, Clare said, adding the bill would also allow department officials to make unannounced visits to centres where there is suspected fraud.

“They won’t need a warrant,” Clare said. “They won’t need the police to come with them when they’re investigating fraud in childcare centres.”

Brown, 26, had a valid working with children check and was not known to police or subject to any complaints before his arrest in May.

Every state and territory maintains separate working with children schemes with different rules and requirements.

Victoria, Queensland, and NSW have all committed to reviewing or tightening their regimes, and Clare confirmed plans to strengthen the checks will be discussed at a meeting of state and federal attorneys-general in August.

He said they would examine how to improve the criminal record check system.

“Part of it is about information sharing across borders,” Clare said. “Part of it is about making sure that it’s updated in near real time.”

But Clare warned there was “no silver bullet” to solving problems in the sector.

“There’s a whole bunch of things that we need to do, and this work will never end,” he said. “There are always going to be more things that we need to do here because there’s always going to be people who are going to try and break through the net to try to do the dastardly things that we’ve seen other people do.”

A child is putting alphabet letters on a magnetic board.

Education Minister Jason Clare said early childhood education ministers would discuss the use of CCTV cameras at centres when they meet next month. Source: AAP / Dominic Lipinski/PA

Clare also said that early education ministers would discuss the installation of CCTV cameras at childcare centres when they meet next month, following the announcement by childcare chain Goodstart Early Learning that it would install them across its 653 centres.

“One of the things that having a CCTV camera in a childcare centre can do is if there’s somebody that’s potentially up to no good, they know the camera’s there,” Clare said. “It means it’s less likely that they’re going to act, so it’s one of the things that we’re looking at right now.”

It comes as a former royal commissioner has criticised governments for dragging their feet on creating a national regime for Working With Children Checks (WWCC).

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse called on the federal government in 2015 to “facilitate a national model” for WWCC.

Robert Fitzgerald, one of five members of the royal commission, said the recommendation remained unfulfilled.

“My view is that is shameful,” the now-age discrimination commissioner told the Australian Associated Press.

“Ten years on, that job should have been completed and the fact that it isn’t means there are gaps in our child safeguarding regime.”

Clare said earlier this week the reforms had taken “too bloody long”.

— With additional reporting by the Australian Associated Press