Security cameras are expected to be trialled at hundreds of childcare facilities across the country after a sector safety crisis.
Education ministers from across the nation are meeting in Sydney on Friday, with mobile phone bans and a rollout of CCTV in childcare centres heading the agenda.
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare said 300 centres across the country would take part in the CCTV trial, overseen by the Australian Centre for Child Protection.
“Some of those will be centres where they’ll be mandatorily required to install those cameras, and in other cases, centres will volunteer to be part of that trial,” he told ABC TV on Friday morning.
It is legal to install CCTV in centres outside of change areas and toilets.
Mr Clare said CCTV protection and storage would be a focus to ensure it doesn’t become a “honey pot” for hackers, along with camera placement.
“We cannot be complacent here,” he said.
“Cameras can’t do everything. They can help to deter people from doing bad things, they can help police with their investigations afterwards.”
The federal government is set to table $189 million in funding over four years to tackle problems in the under-fire sector, describing it as the biggest child safety package the early learning sector has ever seen.
Backing up recent tweaks to working-with-children checks, which made bans nationally applicable, Mr Clare also wants a register that will let regulators see who’s working in childcare centres and where.
The register is being “built from scratch” and will require legislation to mandate that centres share information.
Mr Clare said, if approved, trials would be conducted by December, with a view to rolling out the register from February next year.
The government has initiated compliance actions against 37 early childhood centres under laws passed by federal parliament in July.
The centres, which had not been meeting safety standards for seven years, were given six months to clean up their act or face losing funding.
The $189 package also includes about $20 million for mandatory childcare safety training for the entire national workforce.
Along with the training, Friday’s meeting is set to tackle more centre spot checks, a mobile phone ban and harsher penalties for breaches of standards.
It will also consider how parents can be given more information about the condition of childcare centres.
Mr Clare said no parent should have to wonder if their kids are safe in childcare.
The meeting comes about a month after Melbourne childcare worker Joshua Dale Brown was charged with dozens of sex offences, including allegedly sexually abusing eight children.
Brown is known to have worked at 24 facilities between 2017 and the time of his arrest.
Working-with-children check changes will 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, with jurisdictions to continue managing their systems.
Early Childhood Education Minister Jess Walsh said state and federal governments would act “shoulder-to-shoulder” to make the sector safer.
“Our investment of up to $189 million is the biggest child safety package the early learning sector has ever seen,” she said.
Federal opposition education spokesman Jonno Duniam called for state and federal ministers to commit to measures “that will truly shift the dial in improving child safety”.
“Bureaucratic hurdles are no excuses for parents who expect safer childcare centres immediately, not by the end of the year or after,” he said
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Source: AAP
