Speaker: Toni Kember

Good morning everyone. My name is Toni Kember and I'm Director, Early Learners in Early Childhood Outcomes. I'm also the NSW representative on the AEDC National Committee.

I join you today from Dharug land, the land of the Burramattagal people, a clan of the Dharug people.
I'd like to acknowledge the Burramattagal people who have held a sacred the duty of protecting the land and living in harmony with it. I also acknowledge the lands from which you are joining this meeting. This land always was and always will be Aboriginal land and I, pay my respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander colleagues on the call with me today.

I look forward to today's session on Australian Early Development Census 2024 NSW Data Insights.

This session is being recorded. The recording will be shared through the Sector newsletter from the department. You'll receive an email when the recording is released.
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Throughout the session, we'll also add to the chat information and relevant links. If you don't get your question answered today, please reach out to our email adc@dat.nsw.edu dot AU at the bottom of your screen. The option to turn on live transcripts can be actioned. If you decide to activate, you'll be able to move the box to a space that suits you and even change the size of the font.

Let me introduce our speaker for today, Dr Mary Taiwo.
Mary is a Senior Population Data Officer with NSW Department of Education where she performs the role of NSW AEDC State Coordinator. Mary has managed the 2021 and 2024 AEDC collection cycles in NSW. Mary is passionate about using evidence to inform effective practises that leads to better outcomes for all children. She completed her Master of Philosophy with the University of Cambridge in the UK in 2011 and a Doctor of Philosophy with the University of Edinburgh in the UK in 2015, all in the fields of inclusive and special needs education. Prior to joining NSW Department of Education, Mary worked as a researcher with the University of Edinburgh and Macquarie University.

In today's session, the 2024 Australian Early Development Census data, which was published in June this year, will be explored. We'll explore the data, outcomes and highlights some implications for the trends observed over time. This session will provide opportunities for you, opportunities to help you engage with the data to form your services.

Continuous improvement. In this session, you'll develop knowledge of the data, the 2024 collection, the outcomes and trends observed in New South Wales, learn how to access, engage with and interpret the AEDC community level data, and learn how to engage with the professional learning resources to support your use of the AEDC data. Let me hand you over now to Mary.

Speaker: Mary Taiwo

Thanks, Toni, and thanks everyone for joining us.
And for those who watch the recording later, I hope you find the session useful. I'll just go ahead to start the session.

And as part of this session, as Toni has already highlighted, we're going to look at develop a deeper knowledge of the AEDC 2024 data.

But it also be an opportunity for you to ask questions where you've if you've already engaged with the data or based on some of the information that I'll share today.

So just to give a bit of context to start, the AEDC, which is Australian Early Development Census is a nationwide study that looks at early childhood development in the five key domains that you can see on your screen there, which is Physical health and wellbeing, Social competence, Emotional maturity, Language and cognitive skills (school-based) and Communication skills and general knowledge.

So each of these domains has what we call sub domain indicators, which are the descriptions you can see in the lower part of the domain.

And a summary of this is that a domain is not made of just maybe one question on an aspect of a child's growth and development, but that it actually includes all these different elements, what we call the sub domain indicators. For example, the child's readiness physical readiness for school and their social competence and responsibility and respect and their approach to learning.

So there are different elements that contribute to each domain. I wouldn't talk much about each of these domains because we did have a session as part of the ECEC Connected series in March where I talked a lot more about the AEDC broad day. So I recommend going back to watch that if this is the first time you're engaging with the AEDC.

So I'll move on to the next slide just to give a bit of context.

Again, the ADC data is collected once every three years and we did the last collection in term 2 in 2024, but that was the sixth run of the data collection. And the data we're going to talk about today is the outcome of that particular data collection.

It happens in all schools in the Catholic, Independent and Government schools, so which is a public schools kindergarten teachers complete the collection. And as I said earlier, there is a lot of questions that are included in the AEDC instrument.

That's the questionnaire that the teachers have to respond to and it takes about 20 minutes for them to complete the instrument per child. Also the instrument has been validated for Aboriginal children and we do take into account cultural sensitivity. There's a lot of work that I see happening in that space and consultation with various stakeholders.

But the schools are also encouraged to work with an Aboriginal Cultural Consultant, so which is anyone with an Aboriginal background within the community that can help them respond appropriately to some of the questions are culturally sensitive, especially if the teacher is from a non Aboriginal background.

So as you will see, we did have a big high level of participation in NSW with over 90,000 children, which is about 95% of the children in kindergarten across NSW in 2024.

In terms of the schools, we had good representation across all sectors. Over 1600 public schools for about 487 Catholic schools and over 200 Independent schools participated. So these are all primary schools.

There are more schools in each of these sectors, but only primary schools are invited to participate and we had over 5400 kindergarten teachers participate in the data collection. So again, it gives us a sense that this is a broad perspective.

And if you do the national report, you can see that across the country too, across with other states, there was a high level of participation. I would maintain that since the beginning of the data collection.

So just give a sense of the type of data that is captured in the AEDC. Sometimes people just want to understand what are the questions that teachers respond to. So these are just a few examples from each of the domains to give a sense of that.

Again, if you go back to the session in March in the ECEC Connect is available on the web page, you'll be able to see more into that. But then we have the domain guides that the link will be put in the chat.

But for example, some of the questions if the child in terms of physical health and well being is, is a child independent in their toileting habits with social competence?

Is this child able to get along with their peers?
Is this child interested in reading around language and cognitive skills?

So there are different questions that we asked and the teachers answer yes, no, or they have the option to say, I don't know if they've not had the opportunity to observe that with the child.

One of the reasons why we have the data collection in term 2 is that the child that transitioned into school in term 1 and then the teachers have had the opportunity to observe over a period of time from when the child transitions or to just at the end of January, then February.

So by May when the data collection commences, we're confident that the teacher has had a chance to observe over time and their response is based on observation over time and not just a one off response. One of the questions we do ask the teachers to is if they've had the opportunity to interact with the child, like for at least a month.

Again, we do know that sometimes teachers move if something happens unexpectedly, but we also want to be confident that it's based on observation over time. And if the teacher has indicated that they haven't had their interaction with the child, maybe they are new to the class and they have the full of term too. So they don't have to do the collection at the beginning. They could wait actually and do it maybe mid term or towards the end of the term. All of the timing is taking into account.

So we do all of that just to give us the confidence that this is based on observation and not just a one off incident from the child.

So I'll just go straight into the data itself and, and just to give a broad sense of what we saw, some of the trends we observed in 2024 data. The data that I'll be speaking about is the at the state level.
And towards the end of the session, I'll talk a bit about your community level data, which is what I think will be relevant to you specifically because you can download that and look at what's happening at your community level.

So one of the ways we report the AEDC data is in terms of the percentage of children who are on track on all of the five AEDC domains, which I referred to earlier on.

So we look at that which is called OT 5, the green line you can see on the screen, and then the percentage of children who are developmentally vulnerable on at least one of the AEDC domain, so one of the five domains highlighted. And then the percentage of children who are vulnerable on at least two of the AEDC domain. So they could be vulnerable in maybe just one or they're actually vulnerable in all 5.

But then we look at the minimum, which is minimum of one or more and then minimum of two or more developmental vulnerability. So looking at the green line there you can see the percentage of children who are on track. This is in NSW now. So starting off from 2009 when the first data set was collected, we had 54.8.

What if you look at it, we did make progress.
We had a bit of a blip in 2015 and we went down a bit by 2018 and NSW get a bit of momentum. And then in 2021, which is was just after COVID, we had a bit of a drop. But then unfortunately we've had to drop again in 2024.

So basically this is saying that the percentage of children who are transitioning into school and are on track on all of the five AEDC domains, it's on a decline and the decline is significant for NSW. So if you look at the grey line, which is a past stage of children who are developmentally vulnerable on at least one of the five AEDC domains, you can see that. You can see that when we started in 2009, it was at 21.3. But then if we look at the progress, it went up to 21.8 in 2024.

So again, this is a significant increase in the percentage of children that are developmentally born at least one of the five AEDC domains. It's not the trend that we want to see because we want to see less children being vulnerable.

And then similar with the percentage of children vulnerable on at least two of the AEDC domains, which is a purple line. You can see that in 2009 it was 10.3 and then we did see a decline going to about 9 point percent up to 2018, but it went up in 2021 to 10.5 and then by 2024 is 11.2. Again is an increase in the children who are vulnerable at least two of the AEDC domains.

So this just give us like a high level summary to see and every community report will have an equivalent of this for that community. And by committee report, I've been at the local council level. So I recommend really looking at what's the trend for your community once you have a chance to look at the data. So with the five domains, these are the outcomes for each of the domains.

I have the other two domains in the next slide that we'll talk about. So from the domains we did see that in NSW physical health and wellbeing was the domain that we didn't really have a significant shift in the percentage of children on track.

So the green lines are the percentage of children who are on track in the domain, while the amber or the yellow line are those who are at risk. The red line are those who are vulnerable.

So if you look at it, when we come to social competence, we've seen a decline from 77.1% in 2018 and it's gone down to 75.3% in 2024.

So an increase in the a decline in percentage of children who are on track means an increase in children who are either at risk or vulnerable.

So if you look at it there, we've seen just a little bit of increase in the percentage of children who are vulnerable in social competence and then a little bit of increase in those who are at risk too when it comes to social competence.

So in terms of emotional maturity, emotional maturity is one of the domains we've seen a significant decrease in the percentage of children who are on track. So it was 80.2% in 2018. And this was a progress from 78.3 when the data was first collected in 2009. But then we've seen a decline down to 78.0 by 2024, which is a bit lower than where we were in 2009.

So the implication of that is that we're seeing more children transition into school and they have lower levels of emotional maturity. So they're either at risk or vulnerable.

And actually if you look at this, we've had a significant increase in the percentage of children who are vulnerable when it comes to emotional maturity.

So similarly with language and cognitive skills, this is more the literacy, numeracy, school based skills, which is why the school base is there. We've seen a decline the percentage of children who are on track in this domain too, from 87.2 in 2018 to 83.1 in 2024.
It now means that we've had an increase in the percentage of children who are either at risk or vulnerable when it comes to language and cognitive skills all across NSW.

So when it comes to communication skills and general knowledge, we've also seen a decline in the percentage of children who are on track in this domain from 76.8 to 74.9 in 2024, so 76.8 in 2018 to 74.9 in 2024. So this is at the state level of what we're seeing and I've had the opportunity to engage with different local councils and communities and looking at the data for the most of it, some of the trends are similar.

We have a few exceptions where subcommittees have seen either an improvement or decline in different domains. So I recommend that when you look at your community report, do look at what the trend is because at the state level it might vary and actually consider why is there a variation in your community. So I'll look, I'll move on now to outcomes for First Nation's children.

So looking at this, this is the first stage of children who are on track on all the five AEDC domains. So remember we looked at that a few slides ago when we looked at it at the state level for All Trade NSW and similar to the trend for children in NSW, we've seen a decline in outcomes of First Nation's children in terms of the percentage of children who are on track on all of the five AEDC domains.

And this is particularly significant because we know this is the closing the gap target in increasing the percentage of children who are on track on all of the five AEDC domains. That's something that we're all kind of talking to and trying to understand.
But compared to the decline that we've had for all children, I think the decline for Aboriginal children is less both in NSW and even when you look at the national report, you see that is that.

So potentially some of the relative factors we're looking at is that probably some of those targeted programmes is what protected against a larger level of decline for some of the equity groups or the different priority groups that we're looking at.

When it comes to developmental vulnerability, the trend is also similar for First Nations children, just as we have for all children and all the other priority groups that I'll talk about too.

Now, we've seen a slight increase in developmental vulnerability on one or more domain from 37.2 to 37.5%, which has increased from 34.1 in 2018, but it's gone up a little bit here if you look at between 2021 and 2024.

Similarly in the purple line, which is a percentage of children who are developmentally vulnerable and two or more of the AEDC domains has gone up a little bit, but this in this instance was actually just a bit of a decline by 0.1%. Again, like I said, it might be that some of those targeted initiatives are actually beginning to, some of the outcomes are beginning to kick in and we might see it in further collection circles. So just to give a sense of the domain outcomes for First Nation children, for Aboriginal children.

So if you look at the trends with each of the domains is similar to what I've shown earlier for all children in NSW where we've seen a bit of a decline with emotional maturity if you look at it up here.
Similarly, if you look at social competence here, although there's been a bit of an improved, there is an improvement for social competence on the percentage of children who are on track for Aboriginal children. Again, it might be what for us now we're going back to look at, OK, why did we see an improvement?

What's working and what can we do to actually make it work better?

But then it's similarly with language and cognitive skills like we've seen for all children, we've seen a decline in the past stage of children who are on track on all of the five AEDC domains and a similar trend with communication skills and general knowledge.

So another priority group is the children with Language Background Other Than English. And here we've kind of compared it between children who speak English only and children with language background other than English. And it's, as you can see from the trend here, it's similar.
We've seen a decline for all children it regardless of if they have a language background other than English or not, a decline the percentage of children who are on track on five of the AEDC domains.

So it's almost at similar levels, a few points down in that way, and also looking at the different domain outcomes in terms of the percentage of children on track.
Also all this all but either English only, which are the solid lines, while the dotted lines are children with language background other than English. You'll see that we'll have a similar decline language and cognitive skills.

One of the domains impacted emotional maturity, also one of the domains that has seen the decline social competence and communication skills and general knowledge. So the trend is similar across.

So even though in some instances it might also look like maybe the gap has been closed, but also it means that not necessary is because everyone is seeing the decline at a similar level in that sense. And here we have for SEIFA category, so quintile 1, the most disadvantaged communities and quintile 5, the least disadvantaged communities.

Again, we've seen a decline in the percentage of children who are on track on five of the AEDC domains from 64.3 here. So this is quintile 5, the least disadvantaged communities. They had 63.4 in 2021 and it's gone down to 61.8 and similarly 44.2 and 43.6. For the most disadvantaged communities.

So again, one of the things we're looking at is what exactly has really happened because not everyone had a similar experience of COVID and why are we consistently seeing a bit of a decline in the percentage of children who are on track on all of the five AEDC domains.

So also looking at the different domain outcomes, the solid lines here at least disadvantaged communities, while the quintal one, which is the dotted line are the most disadvantaged communities. And if you see compared to where each of in each of these domains where the different categories were in 2018, we've seen a bit of decline in 2021.

Sorry, I'll go back in 2021. We've seen a bit of decline with the domain outcomes if language and cognitive skills, in some instances, maybe the most disadvantaged communities.

For example, when you look at language and cognitive skills, we've seen more decline in that. And I think working in the sector, you'll be able to understand what are the other factors that have played in apart from COVID in the past few years, what's happening for families and how are those communities impacted differently compared to the least disadvantaged communities. And actually, if you look here for the most disadvantaged committees, a little improvement in the percentage of children who are on track in fiscal health and well being compared to children in the most and sorry, in the least disadvantaged committee.

So children in most disadvantaged communities had a bit of an improvement in fiscal health and well being compared to children who are in the least disadvantaged committee. So it always varies sometimes.

And I think with the AEDC data, we always encourage people to look at your committee to the people in your community because they might understand what's happening more.
Although we have the state level outcomes that I'm speaking to now, but what's happening in the committee might actually be different.

So one of the questions we asked as part of the AEDC is first, if a child has a special needs assessment or a disability that's impacting on their engagement with learning.

So the teachers, if they have a diagnosis that is official, that medical diagnosis and the teachers say yes to that and they tell us what the diagnosis is. But then if the teacher has said no or regardless they're going to, we're going to ask them if actually they feel based on the observation of the child.
Remember I said the teachers would have known the child for a few months already?

So then we ask them the question, based on your observation, do you feel like this child needs further assessment?
There might be a learning need that is interfering with their engagement with learning already.
So this is the question here that is represented in this graph.

So the dotted lines, as you can see here, this is a percentage of children who have transition into school and they have a diagnosis, they've had an assessment and they're receiving the support that they need.

So they've transition into school. The school is aware that this child has an assessment. It could be that they need some level of adjustment or maybe they're already receiving some intervention in school.

So we have 6.9% of children in NSW who in 2024, when they transition into school, had a disability or special need that meant they were receiving some support while in school.

However, with the solid lines here, as you can see, these are the percentage of children where the teachers are saying this child doesn't really have an assessment. But I do think we need to assess to know because something else is happening that's impacting on the child's ability to engage with learning effectively.

So sometimes it could be that the teacher is seeking, there might be a behaviour issue or the child might be on the spectrum but no one knows yet. Or maybe the child has a speech, something happening for them with their speech, and the teacher is saying we actually need to assess and maybe the child needs support.

So here you can see that we've seen an increase, actually a big shift in NSW.

But this is not just particular to NSW, I've also seen at the community level, community reports where they seem big shift, but also we've seen it in other States and additional national level, so 18.4. So practically one in five kids. The teachers are saying we need to assess something else might be happening that is impacting on this child's learning.

And this is pretty, this is actually significant because if one in five children is transitioning to school without any form of assessment, then probably we actually need to take a step back and think, well, what support are we providing for families to ensure that they do recognise if the child has a need, but also that that early intervention is happening as required or the child is actually assessed to know what nature of support will be provided at the point of transitioning into school.

So one of the things that I'm going to talk about now a bit is actually some of the domain. So within, like I said earlier, within each domain, we had sub, we have sub domain indicators that gives us a bit of sense of the different areas of the domain. So it's not just one aspect.

So this is fiscal health and well being. Within physical health and wellbeing, we have 3 sub domain indicators and the one where we've seen the big shift in is physical readiness for the school day.
So between 2021, it was 10.4% of children who were vulnerable in fiscal readiness for the school day, while by 2024 it's gone up to 11.1%.

Physical health for school days and almost like a poverty indicator in a way because it gives us some of the questions around that is, is a child dressed appropriately when they come to school? Is a child hungry when they come to school or is a child do they bring, do they bring lunch or do they have the what the essentials that they need?

So that again is giving us a sense of where exactly within physical health and well being are we seeing more children being either at risk or vulnerable. But this is, but the lines here are kind of showing the vulnerability and where we've seen the biggest shift and increase is fiscal readiness for the school day, social competence. We didn't really see there were shifts in the different aspects. So there was there wasn't a particular aspect or a sub domain indicator that stood out.

However, I will speak to emotional maturity. So the two sub domain indicators where we've seen an increase in vulnerability when it comes to emotional maturity is anxious and fearful behaviour.

You can see that it was 10.8 in 2021 and it's gone up to 11.9 by 2024 and then hyperactive adding attentive behaviour, which was 10.5 in 2021, but it's gone up to 12.3 in 2024.

So again, it's more teachers saying that actually kids are displaying hyperactive adding attentive behaviour more as part of the whole emotional maturity domain.
But then those areas that it's worth thinking about, how can we better support children in this area and how can we enable kind of more growth and development within? And this aspect of emotional maturity, when it came to language and cognitive skills, it has to do more with advanced literacy.
That was where we saw the biggest shift.

So basically Tracy, there was a bit this it was OK interest in literacy and numeracy was still good. We did have a bit of improve would I say increase in vulnerability in that.
But the biggest shift came within advanced literacy. Again, we knew that COVID came in and some kids were withdrawn from a preschool environment by families for various reasons.

And there were so many things that happened in the past few years that it before 2024 that interrupted in children's growth and that interrupted children's growth and development in those years. So thinking about that.

So how else can we support the next group that are coming through to ensure that actually they've those areas that they need to be supported in are addressed effectively?

So I move on to transition to school indicators. And one of the questions again, that we do ask teachers, it's around transition to school.

If the child is speaking good progress and adapting to the school structure, if the parents and the caregivers are engaged with the school in terms of in supporting the child's learning and if the child is read too regularly or encouraged to read at home.

So here again, in some little ways, we saw some tiny small shifts here and there in terms of parents being able to say, yeah, very true, the child is where to at home or somewhat true, or if the child is where to at home. The other option is I don't know, or it's not happening. So although we did not see significant shifts here, but we've kind of asked if some of the analysis has already started happening at the national level.

We've seen that one of the factors that is influencing on domain outcomes actually is if the parents or caregivers are actively engaged with the child's learning. Again, this is from the teachers perspective based on their experience with the family already and if the child is ready to at home.

So we've seen a bit of decline here. If you see it was 69.1%, the teachers were like, yeah, 69.1% of the children, but by 2024 it's gone down to 66.8%. And similarly in saying somewhat true, it's 19.3 and then 18.0.

So for the rest of it, it means the teachers were saying I don't know or not true, it's not happening for the child.

Also the child being retro at home is something that we've seen as a big factor that is influencing on the ADC outcomes based on the initial analysis that have been happening. And I'll look at this particular slide is based on some of the national analysis happening.

So not just for in New South Wales that we're seeing those trends, we've also seen it in other states. So we know that that going to preschool makes a difference. So we know that already.

So the child, if we have on the record that the child did attend preschool, they're almost 1.5 times to be on track compared to their peers who did not. But if you look at the middle graph here, the, I'm sorry, the middle chart or the image here, if the child is retro at home, then there was 58.1% chance that they're going to be on track. So they are less likely to be vulnerable either in one or more of the AEDC domains.

However, if the teacher is saying no, the child was not read to at home or the teacher cannot really say for sure that the child is read to at home, then they are less likely to be on track.

So just about 10% of possibility that the child is going to be on track on five of the AEDC domains. So on track of five of the AEDC domains, if they're read to at home, then there is a high likelihood that you're going to be on track all round, less developmental vulnerability.
But if the teacher is saying it's either the child is not read to or the teacher cannot say for sure that the child is being read to, then there is a less likelihood that the child will be on track on all of the five AEDC domains. Similar with parent or caregivers engagement with the child's learning.

Children whose parents are actively engaged with school were five times as likely to be developmentally on track compared to their peers whose families are not engaged based on the teachers response to that question. So again, we're actually seeing that for this ADC.

We do know that families play a big role in children's learning in their growth in their development. But I think in this particular ADC data collection, well, because of the trends that we've observed and everybody was a little bit surprised to be honest.

And the fact that it's not just something peculiar to the states that experience COVID lockdown more we've had, it's not just NSW, Victoria, Queensland, the ACT, Tasmania and Western Australia have all seen significant shifts in AEDC outcomes.

It's LED us to ask more questions like what exactly is happening with this?

Why are we seeing less outcomes despite the investment?

So these are some of the things that we're beginning to peek out to that. OK, actually this factors do make a difference alongside every other experience that the child is having along the AEDC outcome. So families engagement with the child's learning and if the child is read to at home we've seen has played a big role in some of the outcomes we're seeing.

So what next things for us to consider going forward, having listened to the AEDC, what the AEDC data is telling us?
I think some of the things like I've said, based on, as I kind of talked through the slides, we've kind of have a bit of an idea of where to focus on.

We know some of the domains where we've seen the shifts and within each domain, we've also seen those areas where we've seen shifts compared to others, like the hyperactivity, the fearful behaviour, advanced literacy and in terms of fiscal readiness for school.

So we have a bit of sense of, OK, where are the gaps and where can we target the support that we provide to families and to children. And we know that there's a lot of work that's happening either across jurisdiction or even within the state and with local communities.
So there are already things that we can build on to make progress and also a lot of partnership with families that you work with and the communities that you're in. And because we know that every child, regardless of their background or where they live, have their kind of desire to have the best start in life.
And when we take this data now, because part of it, what I don't want people to go away thinking is like, oh, we're doing our best. Why is the data not showing?
But actually is that we've seen where there are the positives, but then also we've seen the gaps where we can work with.
So it's about focusing on where can we improve on what we're already doing.
I'm bringing that together with policy and practise.
I know the Department of Education, Health and Department of Committee of Justice have all looked at this data and conversations are happening.

But then within your community and the people you partner with is worth thinking, well, where next and what can we do to improve on outcomes?
And I'm sure you've seen this before and most people within the early childhood sector are very familiar with bronfenbrenner's kind of model of it's not just the child, but the whole surrounding of the child.

What else is happening is broader than the child. It's about families, it's about the siblings, it's about the extended family and every other thing.

So just looking broadly beyond, like we said, one of the things that has really suited for us, we knew that from at the back of our mind, but that actually those little indicators of families reading to the child or encouraging the child to read, which again, we know because of the stress, the financial stress, people having to work longer hours and having to or take on an extra job in the past few years means maybe less time for parents to do those things that they'll probably love to do like reading.

But it is making a difference. And it's not just the reading, it's not just reading to the child. But then as part of that, there is that emotional growth that is happening.

There is communication skills, there's that social competence that is building up while all of those activities are happening.
So thinking through who you're partnering with and also be building those connections with community, with culture playgroup.

Some of the community reports that I've looked at, if in some instances where there has been a decline in playgroup attendance, it actually kind of shows it affects the results in one way or the other for that particular community.

With in some of the local councils have looked at, while local councils are actually seen maybe like an improvement in playgroup attendance, then you're able to see that it coming out in some of the domain outcomes. Again, I'll refer you back to the March session. In that session I did talk a lot more about the community level report. So building connections with community is important, as I've already indicated.

Who are the partners within the community that needs to play a part in the outcomes that you've you've observed or you're observing?

Who are you already working alongside with that can actually help to shape children's outcome?
What information do you already share with your current partners?
Who do you need to share this information with?

If you look at your community report and look at your AEDC data, who do you need to invite on the table to have a conversation with?

And also, how extensive and purposeful are your networks?
Do you need to create new networks or do you need to actually redirect some of the conversations to ensure that you're responding to the deeds within your community and you're responding to those areas that need improvement?

So like I said, we've I've provided that information on committee that I just thought to highlight some of the team because I talked about all some of the communities I've seen play groups in.

And I don't want people to go away to get like, how do they know if people were going to play groups or not?
So when you download your committee level profile from the AEDC, Data Community Data Explorer is going to give you information like what you can see on your screen, the children in the community, the children who are born in the country, percentage of children who are First Nation children, children with English as a second language, and those with language background and English.
So there's a bit of demographic information that gives you context to understand your data.
So that's important to look at. Also, it gives you the graphs.

So I, I looked at some of these graphs at the state level, but the one you're going to see, like what you're seeing on the screen will be for your community. Once you download your community data, the link to the community data explorer will put in the chat.

If you want to go there, just type in the name of your local council, for example, Parramatta or Blacktown or wherever it is you are in and you'll be able to download a PDF document from that. It also gives you the summary indicators.

I've talked about percentage of children on track on all of the five AEDC domains and the percentage who are developmentally available in at least one of the AEDC domains or the percentage who are at least what are going, who are going to be in two or more of the domains.
That information is also available at your community level.
So do have a look at that to have a sense of this is what's at the state level, but how does it apply to our community?

So it also gives you the numbers, do look at the numbers in terms of what's the percentage, the numbers behind the percentage that will help you know, is this a targeted or we need more response. One of the things, the importance of looking at your committee level data is that it also provides a breakdown almost at a suburb level for each of the domains.

So if you look at the latter pages towards the end of that PDF when you download your report, you're going to see a bit of breakdown. For example, within Richmond Valley, you can see like we have casino, we have Evans Head, we have outer casino.

So you can look across and say, OK, is this happening for everyone in Richmond Valley or is it just within particular suburbs that are impacted?

We do know and in some local councils the suburbs could be across the road from each other, but the life experience experiences are pretty different for children. So having that at the back of your mind to understand what exactly is happening and what's the best way to respond. It's helpful. Also looking at the community in context of NSW and nationally.

Like I said, what's happening in NSW, what's happening nationally versus what's happening in this community in each of the Domain outcomes. This gives you a bit of context to see are we doing better than the state average or do we need to, what do we need to focus our attention or are we going, are we behind the state average? Are we behind the national average or not? So just giving all of it is in context so you're not running off.
Some of the things we have is we also have additional sessions where if you really want to understand how you might want to respond to your data.
So we had the first session and the 3rd of September with Nathan Wallace for those who are able to join. But we do have a few coming up, one in term 4 this year before the end of the year and then the two next year. The links to register to that is there.

Again, we're just working with different stakeholders to help unpack your data, but more importantly to help inform how you might want to respond to a data, especially when you've looked at it at the community level.

We have other professional learning courses on the NSW web page and other examples of services that have engaged with the AEDC data and responded to it.
So we have some case studies you can look at. And we did have a symposium this year, but we've had two other years where you can look at videos and examples of how people have understood the data, how they've used it, some of the research behind the AEDC data that might support.

Your engagement with that and the team is always available to engage with you if you have questions and to respond.

I don't know if there are questions in the chat now I'm not looking, but if you do have questions or you want to unpack your data a bit more, do feel free to email the email there AEDC at det.nsw.edu. au or you can also call the number on the screen there. I will stop here and have a look if we have questions. I don't know if we have questions in the chat.

Speaker: Toni Kember

Mary, it's Toni here. No, we don't have any questions in the chat yet.

But reflecting on your conversation regarding community level data, opening the opportunities for collaboration and shared action and looking beyond the child to the family, those things influencing the family time.

You highlighted also community context, really digging into what else is happening beside the data.

You looked at that strength of the community connections, addressing the needs of community together in your time than we when we looked at the data 2021, we had some great community engagement of community data and action.

Can you reflect on some of the really big impacts communities were able to have through using that community based data to just I suppose springboard into opportunities and implementation of action?

Speaker: Mary Taiwo

Yeah, Thanks Toni. Thanks for that.
I think some of the communities we worked with were able to, I just for some of them is some of the partnerships that were established because in some instances they kind of worked with a local speech therapist or an occupational therapist that they brought into the service in the time that they had to respond to something specific.

So I think some of the partnerships that were established and some of the families stood in some communities that were able to build more connection or more time with families.

I know some of the, one of the committees we worked with actually had a playgroup that meant parents were able to come into the school and that was like an access point for some of the families who probably are new to the Australian system or maybe for various reason have like anxiety engaging with the school system.
But just coming into that playgroup, I'm kind of feeling comfortable in that environment meant that they were able to start engaging with the school, with the school community before the child was able to transition into school.
Some of the outcomes we've seen actually for some of the children also is one of the services worked around supporting children's language development and they're able to like write stories with the children and do some artwork and write.

So even building that confidence for the children within that community was something that we saw as outcomes. We do have those case studies on our community grant webpage where people shared some of those stories. But I think some of those partnerships have extended.

And one of the schools actually had like a broader network that they worked with and a few early childhood services there.
And they were able to have that partnership where they had the children coming to the school and sometimes the school went into the services.
So they have a better understanding of the transition process that they can have for the children there.

So that was just some of the early outcomes that we started seeing by the end of that.

Speaker: Toni Kember

Where which is influencing a response to not only the community level data, but also this transition to school data that you've referenced as well during this session.

And we know the benefit of engaging with schools and early childhood services, early child services and schools for that segue into a smooth transition from early learning into the school space and that comfort it gives children too.

You also discussed in the data a shift in teachers reporting further diagnosis required, I think was the reference you made.

Can you unpack a little bit about that for us, please?

Speaker: Mary Taiwo

Yeah. So I think basically that question usually asking teachers if the child doesn't have a diagnosis or even if they have is do they feel like the child actually has or the childish experiences something that is kind of in the way of their effective engagement with learning. And the teacher says yes.

So part of that is that the teacher actually give, we allow them to give indication, which we don't report on that of what area if the child needs an assessment, is it speech?
Is it do they feel like the child is on an autism spectrum or is it a behaviour matter that needs to be addressed?

So I think that in a way, I've actually seen it to play a big role in some of the committee profiles that I've looked at.
Because in some instances, if there is an increase in the percentage of children that the teachers feel probably needed any intervention before the transition to school.

Or at this stage the teacher is saying, I'm not quite sure, but something else is happening for this child that it means it's interfering with their engagement in learning.
A lot of those children probably will not be on track in the five AEDC domains because we don't know yet.
But based on the teachers observation, they feel like or something might be happening for the child. So therefore it's interfering with the ability to engage with learning effectively.
In some communities where I've seen an increase in that, it's almost equivalent to the decrease in the percentage of children who are on track on five of the AEDC domains.
And in one of the committee profiles that I we looked, I looked at with the council, the people, the early childhood stakeholders from the council, we did see that there was a bit of a decline in the percentage of children where teachers were seeing need for that assessment. And actually the other side of it that we did see.

So as part of the community report that is they provide the percentage of children who have had some level of early intervention.
So we saw that there was an increase in the percentage of children who had received some level of early intervention. And so therefore, it now meant they had an improvement in the percentage of children who are on track on five of the AEDC domain. Even the early childhood educators in the room were surprised. But then once we're able to look at the data, that one, they were like, yeah, because they've had more actually in that community. They said they have. They've had more playgroups that have been there for a long time.
So that trust has been built, and more families are actually willing to even allow their child go to an assessment. And then what they're now seeing is that that early intervention is happening for more kids, and now it's like there's an improvement in outcomes for children.

So basically, I think a response to that would be, well, how can we leverage the services that families already have access to?

Or how can we support families more to have that access?
So even their awareness, because some of the communities also is more that families are afraid.
They don't want their child to be labelled while they transition into school.

But the downside is like the child has gone into school and they have all these needs that no one is really aware of and supporting them effectively from the beginning.
So the child's experience with learning is already been impacted in a negative way in most instances before they start getting the support.
So I think that's one area where response can be, will I say, will I say targeted response could be in supporting families to have that assessment early and if their needs, the early intervention is provided before transition into school or at the point of transition into school. Yeah.

Speaker: Toni Kember

Thanks, Mary. Mary, we also have a question from our audience.

Cathy's asked are there any suggestions as to why the lines have decreased, such as research around social media access to phones for parents and for children because we know that children are having access to phones a lot earlier.

Speaker: Mary Taiwo

Yeah, then anticipated. Than anticipated, Yeah.
I think there's a bit of work and some of the session we had with Nathan Wallace, he did talk about that a little bit.
So I don't know if you're familiar with Nathan Wallace work.
You could send us an email and we'll probably link you to some of his resources if possible. Some of the things he talked about was he has definitely access to phone on time, basically impacts on the child's brain development.
And even that is almost like what's the word? Is it dopamine?

Is that the the height for your kind of dopamine?

Speaker: Toni Kember

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker: Mary Taiwo

You're like, yeah, stimulating the brain early on, but actually at that age, below the age of three, technically the child's brain is supposed that's when the peak of the child's brain relaxing develops and grow in terms of language, in terms of their sense of safety, for them to actually even learn what's happening in their environment or to learn from their environment.

But if the child already has screen, it's like they're already very hyperactive.

It's really like stimulants in a way. So you're already stimulating the child and some of the data we did see around increasing hyperactivity anxious and fearful behaviour.

And some of the stakeholders I've spoken with, they've actually been like, yeah, that that is can be directly linked to that excessive engagement, like the lights from the screen and all those things is there. So the child is very active. There's some work, I think, yeah, maybe do send an email.

I know there is a researcher in New Zealand that has been doing some work recently around that, the screen time, the exposure and some of that is still very much early research. But we do feel a lot of the stakeholders I've spoken to already do point out to that that screen time is can be can be the explanation for a lot of those things we're seeing. And even from early childhood educators saying that I was speaking to one last week, as you're saying, basically the whole week, they try their best to while the children are in the service to kind of minimise that.

But then when they it's come back on Monday, it's like they have to start all over again because I've had the whole weekend with so much screen time. So therefore Monday is all over retraining them again to with some of the things that they already know. So yeah, so it's definitely having a negative impact for children.

Speaker: Toni Kember

Yes. And I do recall that when Nathan spoke recently with us around the AEDC data, he also referenced parents use cell phones and the impact that has on being on the screen rather than engaging. And it was interesting.

He also discussed some research in this space, perhaps as we jump back to that slide where we show our researchers who we're meeting with and plans, the audience can see what we're referencing. So the recent session we've had is recorded and available at the moment, but the other three sessions are yet to come where we're unpacking further insights into the AEDC data.

Nathan Wallis session was definitely provide some of those answers to what's happening in this space, but also some of those questions around what are we thinking we can do differently to support our families, our children and our opportunities ahead.

Speaker: Mary Taiwo

And I think he did talk about the relevance of language a lot in terms of language developed for children having those conversations and kind of expanding, which is when I spoke about the reading, like the child being read to and encouraged to read to again, we think, Oh yeah, they're just reading the story. But I so much more happening in that time is the language is the interaction and also that social competence that they pick on from that that happens.

Speaker: Toni Kember

Mary, if you had one takeaway that you'd want to share with the audience, there's a final wrap up.

What would be the takeaway to action from knowing and understanding the influence of not only the NSW data, but national data and understanding the big picture?

Yeah, I think the takeaway for me is that like the data speaks loudly in that sense.
There's a lot of good work that's happening, but I think it's time we work closely with families in a way to ensure that the whole experience is holistic for the child, and families do play a very significant role in what's happening for children.

Speaker: Toni Kember

Yeah, Thanks, Mary.

Now audience can see on screen the opportunity to click the QR code for feedback in relation to our session we've presented.
Thank you so much for attending our session today, Mary.

Thank you for always bringing your understandings and research that you've applied to the data collection this time round, but also your experiences from previous data collections and what that brings the table for your understandings on the influences and impacts this data collection will have on our actions moving forward.

Speaker: Mary Taiwo

Thank you.

Speaker: Toni Kember

Thank you so much for joining us today.

[End of Transcript]

Speaker: Michelle Milnes

Just want to take a moment to thank everyone for joining this ECE Connect session for Family Day Care services. We'll be talking about the Transition to School Digital Statement journey and the onboarding of Family Day Care to the platform.

Can see we've got a number of participants who've joined already, but we'll just wait a couple of minutes to make sure we've got capacity and then we'll kick off. Thanks everyone, and thanks again for attending this ECE Connect session. Just a reminder, the session's going to be recorded so you can access this at a later date.

Really thrilled to have such good representation here from the Family Day Care sector.

I think it's a really exciting time for us as we know the important role that Family Day Care services and educators play in preparing children for school and in transitioning children from one setting to the next.

I'd just like to acknowledge country and recognise the ongoing custodians, the lands and waterways where we work and live. I'd like to pay my respect to Elders past and present.

As ongoing teachers of knowledge, song lines and stories. At the department, we strive to ensure every Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander learner in NSW has the opportunity to achieve their full potential through access to education.

My name is Michelle Milnes, I'm the Director of Pedagogy and Practice and we are the program managers at the Transition to School Digital Statement.

I'm joined this morning by my colleagues Melisa Giles and John Walsh, and we have a handy team in the background making all of this possible. We have a Q&A function enabled, so please feel free to pop your questions into that Q&A and some of the team will be able to respond to those in the back end. If we notice that a couple of questions are coming up as common themes, then we'll try and promote those at the end. If we've got time to answer those questions live today. We'll be talking about the Transition to School Digital Statement, itself sometimes referred to as the TTSDS.

We'll be talking about what makes a quality transition, Family Day Care integration and the organisational structure of Family Day Care educators and services.

We'll have a TTSDS demonstration for you and we're looking at really specific Family Day Care resources being created specifically for Family Day Care educators and services.

We'll also be looking at ways in which you can seek support from us in the department to access and navigate the Transition to School Digital Statement.

And at the end, we'll be looking for some feedback from you just to how you found the session today. Thanks team.

So the Transition to School Digital Statement, often referred to as the TTSDS. It's an online tool used by early childhood education and care services to complete a statement for every child they have transitioning to kindergarten the following year.

The statement, though, is more than just an online tool. It's a really structured way to communicate a child's learning, their strengths, their needs and their background, and that helps to ensure a smooth transition and a strong start to school.

The statement itself supports the creation of the continuum of learning from early childhood settings into kindergarten and ensures that each child is known, understood and valued before they enter the school gates on day one.

The statement itself really ensures adequate supports and resourcing can be established at the school in readiness for the child's day one and also supports partnerships between the home, the ECEC service and the school.

The statement itself directly aligns with Quality Standard 6.2.1, highlighting the importance of sharing information to benefit a child's transition.

As a collective, though, we have to remember that at the heart of every statement is an individual child. But the statement itself isn't a tick a box exercise.

It's a really genuine way of sharing of a child's learning journey in a way that helps the new school see and value a child from the very beginning. It strengthens those connections between ECE services, families, schools and education support staff.

You'll see on the right hand side of the screen here the impact that the Transition to School Digital Statement had on the 2025 Kindergarten cohort. We had over 67,000 statements created, with approximately 3/4 of those sent to NSW public schools.

To increase these numbers for our 2026 cohort, we've got several transitions teams working with NSW public schools to raise the profile of the statement and build their capacity in understanding the statement's purpose.
The work is continuous and ongoing and we've had really engaged dialogue with school principals and directors of educational leadership to craft the statement in a way that is really impactful for schools.

To look at the timing that'll work best for schools and to really help to draw out that information that's going to support a child to be successful in a kindergarten setting from day one.

What we can't see, unfortunately, when we're looking at the digital statement is whether non government schools, Catholic schools have received statements because those need to be emailed directly or printed.

We're most certainly promoting the use of the digital statement and the portal for schools this year so we can more accurately account for who is completing statements, where these are being sent, and how they are being used.

We're also looking at a more accurate way to see how the statements are actually being implemented by schools themselves.
I just want to call out here on this screen, you can see the number of total number of statements that are read. That's 25,605. That number looks quite low because any statements that have been sent to non government schools or independent schools, we don't have a back end tracking system.

So if they're being emailed directly or printed off and sent as a paper copy to the school, we don't have access to whether or not that statement has been opened.

So as I mentioned previously, we're really looking at a more targeted way to better understand how schools are engaging with those statements. They're not just reading them, but how they're applying them to that kindergarten setting. Thanks, team.

So what makes a quality transition?
I think we often hear that term school readiness bandied around, but traditionally that's meant preparing a child for school, teaching them to follow instructions, how to write their name, and most importantly, to be ready to fit into a school routine.

But evidence suggests that this approach is not supporting a really successful transition for an individual child.
A contemporary and more effective approach is viewing the transition in a holistic manner where 4 connected and essential components work together resulting in successful transition.

So we really need to think about ready early childhood services, ready schools, ready communities and ready families and their willingness to promote and support a child's transition as part of the community around a child.

We all need to be ready to support the child according to their individual learning and developmental needs.
What does this actually look like in practice.

The ready early childhood services are those early child's professionals having access to sector based resources that provide a strong foundation for completing that transition statement and supporting transition practices.
Ready schools offer families guidance and resources to navigate the education system, ensuring families feel informed and empowered in supporting their child's journey to school. Schools that welcome children and families, understand each child's unique needs and create inclusive, responsive and learning environments are likely to have more successful transitions.

So we're really looking at this statement to come to schools to support the child to be known and valued from day one, and the schools to be really ready and aware of each child's individual learning needs.
Ready communities are communities that support families and schools with resources and work in partnership to engage successful transitions for every child in NSW.

And finally, ready families. Families provide invaluable insights into a child's unique strengths, needs and preferences, which really helps educators tailor their approach accordingly.

Families need to feel informed, empowered, prepared, and better equipped to support their child's successful transition to school.
A really successful transition happens when all four of these things are working together, sharing information, building relationships, and focusing on what's best for the individual child.

And that's exactly what the Transition to School Digital Statement has been designed to support and facilitate.

I'm going to hand to my colleague Melisa Giles, to talk to us about the Family Day Care integration and organisational structure of the Transition to School Digital Statement. Thanks, Melisa.

Speaker: Melisa Giles

Thanks, Michelle.

So as you can see on this slide that from the 1st of September, the Transition to School Digital Statement platform has been available for Family Day Care services.

And after the successful trial in 2023, it became really clear how important it was to fully integrate Family Day Care services into the Transition to School Digital platform. We had some really great feedback from educators. They felt like they were finally being valued and that their qualifications and experience were being recognised.

They wanted the same access as other early childhood settings so that every child in NSW could have a standardised, recognised Transition to School Statement.

So with Family Day Care integration into the TTSDS platform, the child truly is at the heart of the statement.

Whether they have been in Long Day Care, Preschool or Family Day Care, they will arrive at school with that same rich, consistent information to support their transition and most importantly, continue their learning journey. Thanks John.

So with 128 services throughout NSW, Family Day Care is a vital part of the early education and care network. Approximately 92 of these services are located in major cities, with 27 in inner regional areas and nine in outer regional areas.

This distribution highlights how Family Day Care plays a crucial role in bridging access to quality early learning, especially for families living outside those large metropolitan hubs.
Many families in regional and outer regional communities face challenges related to distance and limited availability of early childhood education services.

Family Day Care services, often embedded within these communities, provide that flexible, accessible care that meets the unique needs of children and families who might have otherwise not had, might have experienced barriers to actually accessing high quality early learning and not being able to participate.

So integrating Family Day Care into the Transition to School Digital platform closes that current gap, ensuring these educators can contribute to the same streamlined transition process as centre-based services.

This integration supports a more equitable approach by giving educators across all locations the ability to share important insights into a child's learning and developmental needs.
Ultimately, it strengthens continuity of care and learning, helping to support every child's successful transition to school, regardless of where they live.

The Family Day Care organisational structure differs from early education and care services, as you all know quite well.
In some cases, the same person may be the approved provider, coordinator and educator.

So with this in mind, the platform integration was adapted, allowing the creation of Family Day Care residences known as homes in the platform and the addition of multiple users to these homes. The structure you see here was the starting point for mapping out the Family Day Care user journey in the Transition to School Digital Platform.

So, the Family Day Care user journey is unique when compared to other centre-based services.
But this journey has been mapped out as shown in this diagram on the screen and includes the processes involved in the creation of a statement. So the journeys within the platform starts with the administrator and that is any individual involved in the management or setup of a Family Day Care service and that they have access to the services email. They create an account for themselves and they register the service.

The administrator adds residences or homes referred to in the platform and users.

These are coordinators, educators, or educator assistants working with children, and they are the people that will be filling out the statement.
So users activate their accounts through the steps outlined within the Family Day Care Resources Guide, allowing them to log onto the platform.
So users now have the ability to create the statements.

Once a user completes a statement, it will be sent to the administrator for review and approval.
When the administrator has reviewed and approved the statement, it can be sent directly to a NSW public school via the platform.

But if the child is not attending a NSW public school, then a PDF copy can be downloaded and emailed to their school of choice.
So the current Family Day Care user journey ensures quality control while also ensuring efficiency.
And I'm going to hand to my colleague John now. Thanks, John.

Speaker: John Walsh

Hi, everyone. So the Transition to School Digital Statement demonstration.

So the Transition to School Digital platform is accessed via the Department of Education account.
This process is outlined in detail in the Transition to School Digital Statement Family Day Care User Guide.

On the screen, you can see the landing page of the Transition to School Digital platform along with a QR code that will take you directly to this page.

The key features of this landing page are the account creation. All user accounts are created from this landing page log in and statements.
So, this section is where users log in to create Transition to School Digital Statements.

Once again, all access requirements and steps are outlined within the Family Day Care User Guide and as per the Family Day Care user journey.

The Transition to School Digital Statement consists of four sections. Number 1 is the Child's Details section. This is where you record the child's name and upload a signed copy of the consent form.
The Transition to School Digital Statement cannot be completed without this consent form.

Section 2.
About the Child. This section captures important information about a child's family and cultural context where culturally safe and appropriate.

Key aspects include cultural background, languages spoken, traditional lands connected to the child's culture, supportive relationships and groups within the community.
Additionally, this section highlights an overview of the the child's school attendance and enrolment and any specific requirements the child may have for additional support.

A crucial question included in this section is would making a call to the early learning service help to support the child's transition? This question was added based on educator feedback, recognising that it can be challenging to fully express a child's context and support needs in writing.

Section 3 is feelings about school.
This is an opportunity to capture and share the child's voice, feelings and expectations about school. And the final section of the statement, Section 4, is the child's development.
This section provides a holistic view of the child based on the outcomes of the Early Years Learning Framework, the EYLF.

Here we recommend using language from the EYLF to address the content required.

Think about how the child's learning outcomes may differ when in a primary school setting and remember to include any intentional teaching strategies along with any supports that you already have in place for that child. These supports are important for teachers and in a school setting, and also allows for that seamless transition for children who rely on these on a daily basis.

The following video is a visual demonstration of the Transition to School Digital Platform.
Please note that this resource has been developed for general ECEC sector so therefore references to job titles may differ from the Family Day Care setting.

Further information is contained with the Family Day Care Transition to School User Guide and this can be accessed from the Transitions website displayed at the end of this presentation.

A digital version of the Transition to School Statement is now available on both desktop and mobile devices and provides a streamlined, user friendly and consistent way to create, store and share the Transition Statements.

Step 1. Registering a centre.

The centre director or nominated supervisor creates a Department of Education account, verifies their identity and logs in.

Department of Education preschool principals can skip this step and can log in with their Department of Education staff account, the centre director or in the Department of Education preschools.

The principal then registers the service using their NQAITS service approval number through the website.

Step 2. Adding educators and teachers to a service.

Once the service is registered, educators and teachers can be added to the service and they will be given a Department of Education username.

Step 3. Crreating a statement.

The statements dashboard displays all existing statements for the service.

This is also where a new statement can be created and parental consent can be uploaded.
Statements can be worked on by multiple team members with the option to save and resume anytime.
The last page of the form is a confirmation page that shows a summary of every field in the form with the corresponding answers.

This is useful for review before the statement is completed.

Step 4.
Sharing the statement. The statement can be shared with NSW Public Schools who have access to a custom dashboard where they can see the statements that have been shared to their particular school.

If the child is going to an independent, Catholic or an out of state school, the statement can be manually shared with the schools or parents and carers.

Start the process today.
OK.
So as you can see from the video there, it gives you a very good visual representation of how the statement works and operates.

Once again, that video is available on the Transitions website for you to view at any time.

So as mentioned before, due to the unique nature of Family Day Care services, 4 specific resources have been created.

So on the screen now you can see the resources that we've created.
We have the Family Day Care Guide to completing the Transition to School Statement, the Family Day Care User Guide which outlines account creation, the addition of homes and users.

We have the Family Day Care frequently asked questions, and the Family Day Care Quick Start Guide for administrators.
So all resources, where possible, are Family Day Care specific and are located on our Transitions page hosted by the department.

The QR code on the screen will take you directly to this page where all resources to the Transition to School Digital Statement are located.

I'm going to hand back over to Michelle, who's going to go through our support options.

Speaker: Michelle Milnes

Thanks so much, John. Just kick over to the next slide.

There's a range of support available for all users of the Transition to School Digital Statement.

The Early Childhood Education Directorate Information and Enquiries Team, or I&E, are available for support via both phone and email.

We, the Pedagogy and Practice Team, the program managers of the Transition to School Digital Statement, are also available to take feedback via email.

If you have any questions or concerns directly with the statement, please feel free to send us an email. We're also really open to feedback.

So once you log into the statement and you start to engage with families, if you think there are areas in which we could improve the statement for the 2027 cohort, we're very, we're very interested in your feedback.

As mentioned previously, our comprehensive user guide with frequently asked questions is available and all support options are generally listed at the bottom of the TTSDS application pages.

The QR code that you can see on the screen will take you directly to the current Family Day Care User Guide. Thanks, John. We really appreciate your attendance and value your feedback in this session and post the session.

Also on the screen you'll see a QR code, so please feel free to scan this with your phone or click the link in the Q&A section. Please answer any of the questions by letting us know what you thought of the session today. And remember, the session's being recorded so you can view it again at a later date. Again, just want to thank the team for preparation of the session this morning.

I want to take the time to thank everyone of you who's joined us this morning.

We're really excited to have Family Day Care able to access the Transition to School Digital Statement and to support children accessing their services to have a successful and smooth transition into kindergarten in 2026. Thanks all.

I did mention previously if there was a question in the chat, really happy to answer those online. I can only see one question that hasn't been published, but it's a great question.

Children are attending both Long Day Care and Family Day Care.
Does that mean the child could potentially get 2 Transition to School Digital Statements for their kindergarten teacher?

Yes, most definitely. They could potentially get 2 statements.

I think there are a few options there.
It's really interesting to see different educators or different educational settings observations of children and how they interact in those sessions.

So it's definitely worthwhile completing a statement, even if you know a Long Day Care or a Preschool might be completing a statement because the child might be exhibiting particular interests or behaviours.

You might be noticing something different to the Long Day or Community Pre School setting.

Alternatively, sorry, it might be worth even reaching out to that service if you have a good relationship with the service and just kind of conferring around information that you'd like to include in the Transition to School Digital Statement.

It's really important also to engage with the family because ultimately we don't want to be putting things into the statement that might be something that the family might not be aware of, you know, and it's really ensuring that we're engaging with family's needs and interests and kind of their wishes around the completion of the Transition to School Digital Statements.

That's the only question that we have at the moment. The team has dropped a number of links into the chat as well in terms of support emails and documents.

But again, just want to thank everyone for your time and look forward to receiving any feedback you might have around the Transition to School Digital Statement.

[End of Transcript]

Speaker: Taryn Dilly

Good morning everyone.

I acknowledge the Bediagal people of the Darug Nation and I pay my respects to their Elders past and present, and I extend that respect to all Aboriginal people joining this webinar today. I took my children on a walk on the weekend in the Mount Annan Botanic Gardens on Dharawal land and there was a Stolen Generations memorial walk there.
It was a really good opportunity for me to reflect with my early primary school-aged children in age appropriate ways about the history of this land and what always strikes me is how much they already know about Aboriginal history and culture and it really does stem from their time in early childhood education and care. For the NSW Regulatory Authority,

Cultural safety for Aboriginal children is an integral part of child safety and I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge and deeply appreciate all the Aboriginal educators whose knowledge, guidance and dedication are fundamental in fostering culturally safe and supportive learning environments.

To some housekeeping matters. So today, microphone, video and chat functions are disabled. The Q&A function is available and we really do encourage you to ask questions and we're going to answer and respond to as many of those as we can in the session. The session is being recorded and will be available on our website shortly after today.

So child safe recruitment is why we're here. So thank you for joining.

For the NSW Regulatory Authority, child safe recruitment is an area where we do want to see an uplift in practice across the sector.

If child safe recruitment is practised and embedded, it's going to go a long way to preventing harm for children.

So today's session is all about exploring how we can strengthen child safety through effective recruitment and staffing practices.

So please do reflect on what you're here today and consider how you can better your recruitment practices for permanent staff, casual staff and crucially, agency staff. To support services ACECQA has published two new child safety guides. So I encourage all of you to visit the ACECQA website and have a look at these guides.

We're also going to drop the link in the chat for you to those.

And I also want to draw your attention to some free resources we have on the Office of Children's Guardian website.
It's an e-learning series and one of those is a module on child safe recruitment. So please go and do that module if you haven't already done so after this session.

So now it's my pleasure to introduce Craig Thacker from the Office of the Children's Guardian who is going to be walking you through this presentation today on Child Safe Recruitment. Over to you Craig.

Speaker: Craig Thacker

Thank you. Glad to be with you.

I've got just under an hour to go through Child Safe recruitment with you, so hopefully this will be a helpful experience.

At the end, there's going to be a QR code that I hope you'll hang around for to fill in the survey for the people who are hosting us today.

So we're talking about child safe recruitment.
What I would like to do is also add my acknowledgement of the traditional custodians of the land where we live, learning young ones play.
We celebrate the longest living culture in the world, the First Nations peoples and their continuous connection to Country, including land, waterways and skies.

I'm on the land of the Dharawal people, which if you're unfamiliar, starts out around Kurnell in the Sutherland Shire, goes out West to the Nepean River and down South as far as Nowra. Pay my respects to elders past and present, and a special welcome to any First Nations people who have joined us this morning.

Bit of content warning that what we're talking about today is the prevention of child abuse and in particular child sexual abuse.
So I do want you to be safe, if anything comes up that makes you realise something hasn't been dealt with properly, please talk to one of those hotlines or a trusted colleague or friend.

So the agenda today is to go through the child safe recruitment and screening of applicants, what it means and how to do the working with children check and verification process with your staff, child safe and effective staff inductions and ongoing effective supervision of all staff in the national quality standards.

We're going to be referencing Area 2, 4 and 7.
7 in particular is about leadership and governance, and this is really crucial to your induction and staffing.
And this will overlap quite strongly with the Child Safe standards, which is where I'm coming from.

So I'm not an expert in the national quality standards or framework.
I am, however, very familiar with the Child safe Standards.
So that's where I'm going to be basing a lot of what I'm talking about today.

In particular today, as was just mentioned, I want you to be aware that Module 5 of the e-learning for your sector is available. And I've just gone through it myself. Very helpful.

All the stuff that we're going to be talking about today can be found in there and also in the handbook that we'll be referencing as well. Now steps for child safe recruitment and induction.

We need to understand what you are looking for when you're trying to acquire new staff.

So you want to have a role description, you want to have your selection criteria including what your child safe perspective will be. You also need to be when you're looking for new staff. Understand the formalities.

Here you go around the salary, if it's a paid position or if it's a volunteer position, what that looks like, the hours that will be involved, any leave benefits, minimum training requirements, including around what it means to be a child safe organisation.

Your advertising will need to what you'll need to do is is draft an advertisement with your child safety expectations.

In that advertisement, we want to consider whether to use an employment agency or promote it on social media or being a professional networks or using all of those and you want to promote your organisation as being a child staff one to allow for self-selection.

Self-selection means that people who are looking to have access to children in an unsafe way, they will be looking for easier objects and places to do that.

And if you're making it very obvious that you won't tolerate that, they will self-select themselves out there is it comes from reviewing applicants.

Review those written applications and then create a short list from those written applications of which candidates appear to be prioritising child safety.

Our next step is to work out from your short listings who you're going to conduct interviews with and then ensure you have questions on child safety.

In that process you ensure that the qualifications are valid.

Consider any assessments, any either psychometric about their personality types or skill demonstration as part of that interview process.

When it comes to checks, reference checks are crucial. You need to have referee checks and when you're asking questions of the referees, we want them to be professional referees, as in people who have seen them working professionally.

Questions such as whether or not the applicant has been the subject of any disciplinary action or has engaged in any concerning or unacceptable behaviour are appropriate to be asking in this time.

Your background screening checks such as Working With Children Check and police check are also really important in this stage.
Then after you have done the checking of references and the compliance checks, then you can decide on who you would offer the position to.

Right, So you don't want to offer the position and then do the referee checks and other compliance checks. We can do that beforehand to make sure that you're offering it to someone who was suitable. And then after we have made the offer and presumably someone has accepted that offer, you will begin the induction process which will ensure that child Safety will have an emphasis in that component now in your child safe advertising.

So we're going to unpack this a little bit for you.
Your child safe organisation must have a statement of child safe commitment and it's important to have that either in its entirety or components of it in your advertisement. People will self-select themselves out, you won't even receive their applications if you have made it very obvious that child safety is a high priority in your organisation.

So people who are determined offenders will look for the easier target.
And if you're an organisation that is promoting how you do not tolerate misconduct, you will report any serious breaches and there will be consequences for that type of behaviour and you really value child safety, they're going to be looking for the place that doesn't mention any of those those sort of things.
So don't be that other place, right?

And make sure that your also being very clear around your role description and what's going to be expected in the role.
So you may need to specify what skills are required, you'll need to provide who is the person in charge of this particular worker and what would be the consequence of any breaches of codes of conduct in other policies.

And we want to be clearly showing that as an organisation you're upholding the United Nations Convention on the Rights of a Child.

If people are unaware of what that is, this is a really basic foundation for what it means to be someone who works in a child related organisation.
So we want to be making sure that people are aware of those child safe rights and know how to uphold them.

Now in your review of applicants, once you have received their written applications, you want to be sure that you have sufficient time to review those applications. So don't leave it too short.
Make sure you have a time to read through those. Make sure they're ticking off the essential criteria. You want to be having interviews that are planned.

So include questions around professional capabilities but also any attitudes towards child safety. So your interview interviewers need to be aware and have a sound interviewee. Sorry, need to be aware and have a sound understanding of what sexual misconduct is and what the consequence if that's detected.

OK, the people, after you've received your applications, you want experienced staff to be reviewing those. Please don't just rely on one person to do that.

Have at least a few of you look through those applications so that you are sharing the wisdom when it comes to looking out for the red flags when it comes to the interview and the review of skills.

You want to have your recruitment and screening to find out whether they have the skills for the job and any experience that they might have. We want to make sure that they understand the early childhood language.

In the interview you want to be asking situational and behavioural questions to see if the applicant understands how to respond to those situations with a child safe lens and focus and some questions you might like to think through.

So your example is have you ever had to respond to a worker whose behaviours around children concerned you?
What did you do?
And this will help flag any experience this person has in this space.
If they were the person who was the concern, they may not have any examples.

But if you've been around long enough, you will have seen unsafe behaviour and you should have an opportunity to say this is what I did about that, right?

And give that types of questions in your interview process when it comes to reference checks.
Here's a quote from the Royal Commission findings.
They suggested that child focused human resource practices help screen out people who are unsuitable for working with children. It will or it discourages the application to work in the first place.

Such practices make sure that child safety is prioritised in your advertising, in your recruitment, in your employment screening and the selection and management of all staff and volunteers.

So we want to ask questions to the referees and we want to make sure those questions have a child safe lens to them.

Your reference checks should be conducted before the selection criteria.

So check the referees, are they suitable, Right.
So I don't want to check them after you've made the offer. OK.

And you also want to be doing your reference checks via a verbal communication on phone preferably or in person, if that's if that's even possible.

There are a lot of people who want to and agencies will sometimes do this.

They will send out a survey on e-mail and get people to fill it in and send it back and that's their reference check. All right, anybody could be filling that in.

So we want to be having a verbal communication to confirm who you're talking to is the person who is the actual referee.

Pre-employment checks.
It's important that every educator who walks through the door of your service to provide education to your children has had these checks done before they start OK.

This includes permanent staff, temporary casual volunteers, and any person who is working with your children at the service. This includes your agency or temp staff.

Don't rely on the agency to do these checks right. It's important that they have done those, but you don't want to risk them not doing it right?

You do those checks as well before you get people working in your organisation.

Now I'm going to show you a very brief video that explains the Working With Children Check process better.

Then I can explain it. So let's just have a watch and see if we can understand this process a little better.

Video playing - The Working with Children Check

https://youtu.be/buxM9Fi7otM

The Working with Children Check reviews an applicant's national criminal history and workplace records.

It focuses on behaviours that indicate they may not be suitable to work with children. There are some things that will bar a person from child related work automatically. Most applications are cleared within 48 hours.

However, some records may need an in depth review or possibly a risk assessment.

Specialists look at what the offence or offences were and when they occurred during the assessment process. They might ask the applicant for more information.

They use this information to decide whether a person is fit to work with children.
Applicants who are cleared to work with children receive a Working with Children number. They are continuously monitored for five years. This includes any police or relevant workplace reports.

When a person obtains a working with children number, anyone who employs them is required to verify it. To do this, they need to go online and register as an employer with the Office of the Children's Guardian. They can then enter the employee or volunteer's surname, their date of birth and WWC number.
This act of verification links the employer with the check holder.

If the employees or volunteers check status changes due to new records, the OCG can immediately contact the employer to let them know.

Sometimes this requires the employer to remove them from child related work.

Since 2013, over 2,400 people in New South Wales who held a check were barred from working with children because of new offences.
For this reason, the check should not be the only thing you do to keep children in your organisation safe from harm and abuse.

Embedding the Child Safe Standards will help you create, maintain and improve a child safe environment.

To learn more about the Working With Children Check contact the Office of the Children's Guardian.

Speaker: Craig Thacker

Hopefully that's helpful for you and you can watch that animation and others on the OCG website where our resources are kept.

Now when it comes to checking and maintaining up to date staff records, it's important that you have templates that capture that information for you.

So in the Child Safe Recruitment and Working with Children Check handbook which will show you the cover of towards the end of this presentation. On pages 54 to 58, you will see they're Working with Children Check checklist to make sure you are covering everything that needs to be done.

And then there's also the record keeping template. Now you may have your own system, that's OK.

However this one is there also. Your working with children check, though we need to remember it's only one part of your child safe approach when it comes to keeping children safe. If we think about the 10 Child Safe Standards, Working With Children Check is crucial to standard 5 and is a component of standard 5.

But there's all the rest of the standards that also need to be in place in order to keep children safe. So it's a small tool in a bigger cog and machine.

Now Working With Children Checks only work if they have been verified, unlike some other states that just carry a card around and say look, I've got my number.

We need you to verify that with the OCG, like the video said, so that it can be linked to your organisation. And it said it's continually monitored for five years, which means it's not a snapshot in time, it's a continual monitoring and you'll be notified if anything happens that changes the status of that person's Working With Children Check.

Now when it comes to your induction process. So you've selected the person who is going to work with you.
What's the induction going to look like?

So you'll need to have your child safe documents, including your code of conduct and providing a child safe environment policy, which you can see on the screen.

You're going to have some mandatory reporter training and child protection training.
You want to build that into your induction process.

You have your child safe training, which is that picture at the top there, which is module one for your sector and then also your monitoring and supervision.

We want to have strategies that make sure new staff know who to turn to if they need to ask any questions and that person is there to help make sure they understand the processes and the procedures and do so safely.

Your staff inductions and child safe lens. What will leaders do when they're doing their inductions?

You need to demonstrate and prioritise keeping children safe right from the very outset.
You'll need to demonstrate the importance of reporting and how to do it.
And so you may have a complex reporting process.

However, having the one page summary from the Department of Ed, which has that you have access to that nice simple summary so that it's easy to understand and follow and find and you understand. The importance of keeping professional boundaries when working with children.

And we want to understand the importance of continuous child safe training as we as well as your child safe induction.

So Standard 7 of the child safe scheme is about continual training and making sure people have the skills and their most up to date skills. So we want to make a regular tradition of doing sort of training like what we're doing right now.

Now in your induction, you need to support your employees.
So you need to figure out what do new staff need and what about the child safe values and policies of the service?
They need to have access to those, need to have them well explained to them.
Want to know what to do? Sorry, what do staff need to know about their role and child safe practices within that setting?

How new staff will get help and feedback if needed.

So make sure you introduce them to the people and if preferably more than one person that they can go to in case one of them's away that day, you have a second person they can go to to get assistance if they require it.

New staff must understand their reporting obligations before they start working with the children. OK.
And what we want to do is understand the importance of the code of conduct.

So we're going to build this into your induction.

The child safe policies, including a code of conduct must be thoroughly reviewed and discussed during the induction process.

We need to spell out what the consequences or breaches or the code of conduct.
So they want to link to the disciplinary policy.

You want to have rules in your code of conduct saying whether it's permitted or not to do babysitting with people from the service.

We want to be spelling out what professional boundaries look like around online and physical environments and what is acceptable and unacceptable behaviours.

We're going to be clearly spelling those out so that there's no misunderstanding about how you interact with the children.

Now, what ongoing effective supervision looks like.
Well legislated child safe responsibilities of leaders must be front of mind.
So the leaders must be thinking about what is required of us legally.
We also need to have mentoring and have child safe professional development.

So pairing up new staff with more seasoned and experienced staff who know how to do this and have been doing it for some time.

You want to support for staff to continue to improve the child safe practices.
So in your team meetings you want to end in your one-on-ones with your supervisor.

People want me to be able to ask child safety type things so that you can keep on the agenda how to do this best, right?

If there's any challenges, we want to address those as they come up, not wait for your annual training, right?

You want to be able to support staff if there are any child safe allegations and concerns as well.

Now ongoing effective supervision, what does this look like?
Leaders need to create and maintain and continuously improve childhood policies and practices.

So if you have any allegations or incidents or accidents or disclosures come in, have we handled that well?

Could some of those things have been prevented?

We need to keep reviewing those as they come in because we don't want to have repeats of the same mistakes. You need to champion the importance of reporting. Creating a reporting culture is crucial. It's one of the hardest things to do.

But the important part of creating a reporting culture is to make sure that there is procedural fairness in that procedure, which means if a person has an allegation against them, there's opportunity for them to share their side of that story.

Because if you don't have that built in to the very framework of your reporting, people are not going to be feel confident to report others for fear that some people might report them and they won't get a fair hearing.

But if it's fair, then people will be confident that if you speak up, if it's unfounded, then that will be found out.

We're going to create a bully-free and trusting work environment where people can speak about their concerns openly and with confidence that they're not going to get in trouble for speaking about someone's misconduct.

And you want to appropriately respond to aggressive or abusive behaviour from workers. And so we want to make sure that that's being addressed to make sure it's a safe environment for everybody.

And you need to identify and appropriately respond to misconduct towards children.

OK, now we're going to show you a brief video around grooming. And this is a description of what grooming can look like.

What I want you to do is jot down all the different indicators that grooming might be happening in your service. OK. And then I'm going to do a survey, a little poll afterwards.

I want you to see if I can identify what could be considered grooming behaviours.
All right, so let's watch this one.

Video playing– About Grooming

https://youtu.be/wy0xV0LsoKY?si=tD9mi-y9I5tRJ6MG

Grooming is the manipulation of children in physical spaces like a sports ground, religious setting, classroom or performance space, and in online environments such as social media, e-mail, and text.

Grooming is a process of manipulation that prepares a child to be abused and tests their likely response.

Perpetrators work to convince the child not to say anything, while children are most likely to be groomed.

Abusers will also target protective adults, families and even entire organisations in order to get unsupervised access to a child or young person.

When grooming a child, abusers seek to build a sense of trust, despite intending to later betray this trust.

They will test the child's ability to keep secrets and may use threats of violence against them or people they love.
They may contact the child on their personal device where their conversations are less likely to be monitored.

Engaging the child in private messaging can lead to the adults sharing inappropriate conversations, photos or videos.

They may give the child gifts or preferential treatment to establish what appears to the child to be a special relationship.
They may encourage the child to meet with them outside the organisation or in areas where they can't be seen.

Grooming can also include testing the child's tolerance for inappropriate touching, with the intention of normalising this kind of contact.
They may try to isolate the child from their peers or the caring adults in the child's life so they feel dependent on the abuser.

They may encourage breaking rules or blame the child for their inappropriate actions so the child becomes reluctant to tell anyone what they have been doing.
This can include supplying cigarettes, alcohol or pornographic material in an attempt to reduce the child's inhibitions to the abuse.

The intention is always the same, to remove the child from the supervision of caring or protective adults and make them less likely to report abuse.

This testing and manipulating can extend to their adult colleagues.
Perpetrators want to know how much they can get away with.

They may appear to be a nice or caring person who goes that extra mile.

Often this is so there's less chance their illegal activities will be uncovered.
They may try and convince a parent or carer that they are vital to the child's success.

They may use this as motivation to encourage the parent to provide unsupervised access or to interact with the child in ways that would not normally be considered appropriate.

They may encourage the parent to allow the child to stay overnight with them or receive extra training, rehearsals or remedial treatment without adult supervision.

Perpetrators may work to build the trust of other adults so that they can convince the child that even if they're told, no one would believe them.
Reducing opportunities for grooming starts with your organisation culture.
How do you ensure that everyone, including employees, volunteers, parents, children and young people, know what appropriate behaviour looks like?

What rules are in place?
Does everyone in your organisation know who to report it to if they witness inappropriate behaviour?

Having a clear code of conduct, a child safe policy and trained people who know how to respond to and report incidents, even if they appear insignificant, will help you create a culture where abuse is minimised and children are valued.

Speaker: Craig Thacker

Now, if you thought that was helpful, there is a whole suite of animated resources on the OCG website that you may find can support your child type journey in your team meetings, for example.

Now thinking about what we've just learned about all the indicators that grooming might be taking place, I want you to think about the list of examples on the screen.

What behaviours do you think might indicate that a team member is grooming a child from your organisation?

Just have a look through giving gifts to a child, repeated incidental touching, having a child as a best friend, babysitting the child from your service, or forming close relationships with the child's parents.

Let's have a look from the video.
We actually have all of those things except for maybe 3.
But research shows that people who consider children as their closest friends as adults often don't have good adult supports in their life and can often see children as potential romantic partners as well as friends.
So that is a concerning type of flag as well.

But giving gifts to a child, if it's to an individual to the exclusion of others, if it's meant to be kept secret, if it's showing favouritism, gifts and benefits for that matter, that could be a grooming type behaviour.

If it's a gift to the whole class and everyone's getting the same thing, it's an end of year celebration, then that's not showing favouritism and isolating particular children, that's for everybody's benefit.
So not every gift is grooming, however it's how it's used and delivered.

Repeated incidental touching of a child, unnecessary touching of children and physical affection is one of the key tools to see if a child will recoil from a person or embrace that sort of physical contact and it can escalate.

So that's one of the tools we want to make sure we're minimising unnecessary physical contact with the kids.

Babysitting the children from the service is what we have saw in the Royal Commission and also continue to see in the reportable conduct scheme, is that a lot of harm is happening from workers who have convinced the children and their families to let them babysit the child.

And when they are unsupervised by other people, that's when the harm takes place. So we want to put in very clear boundaries in your code of conduct around that topic.
Forming close relationships with a child's parents may not seem like a grooming talk thing and in and of itself it's not.

However, if it's used to access the child's home and spend time with the family in the family home and do things together so they can have access to the children, then that might be something.

So that you can see these are all very vague type behaviours which may not breach some of them, may not breach code of conduct expectations, but they are concerning behaviours that we need to take seriously.

So be mindful of those sort of things in your professional development and in your induction training of new staff.

Now we're going to do a case study. This is from the Royal Commission into the Institutional Response to Child sexual Abuse.

Here we have Scott who's a 5 year-old boy at vacation care and the vacation care he goes to is an extension of before and after school that he goes to normally.
Now Scott came home from his vacation care experience and said to his mum.
We went on the bus to the playground and I sat on the casual helpers lap and we played tickling and the casual helper was a man in his 20s.
Now Scott's mum was concerned about that type of behaviour and reported that concern to another vacation care educator.
Nothing else was revealed at that time.
When Scott was interviewed about his experience, it turns out the tickling was under his shirt and in his pants, even though he was on a bus with other people around.
So that led to a police inquiry and they started an investigation and what they found and what it led to was 13 offences that received convictions involving 12 different children from this one service.
There was 11 counts of aggravated indecent assault and two counts of intercourse with children under 10. It's a very serious incident.

And as you can see, workers who people who are determined offenders will often have more than one victim, often have many.
So we want to prevent as many children as we can from being harmed by people like that.

So how do we do that?
How do we prevent this sort of thing from happening again?

So here are some questions to get you to think through.

And I want you to see if you can identify what measures could have prevented this educator from harming as many children as he did.
Have a look at the different responses.

They're asking referees about child safety concerns, induction training around code of conduct, verifying work with children check, training all staff to identify and report and age appropriate ways for children to raise safety concerns.

Which ones could have helped prevent that?

My suspect is that all of them could have helped, but the one that was already in place was that this person had a verified working with children check.

So what this tells us is your child safe approach to keeping children safe from harm by workers needs to go beyond having a verified working with children check.
The verified working with children check tells you whether a person has been reported in the past and had substantiated findings against them.
If they have never been reported in the past or they have come from overseas, then you are not going to have them in the system now.

Asking referees about any child safety concerns would have been helpful.
This person listed their previous employer as a camp over in Los Angeles.
They didn't put them down as referees, but that was their only child related work experience.
So if they had contacted the camp leaders they would have found out that he was dismissed for indecent conduct with the children. But that call never was made.

Induction training explaining child safe code of conduct expectations would have been helpful. They had a thorough code of conduct.

In fact, it was probably too big because it's part of that code of conduct.

What they used to do was just get people to sign it and start work. People didn't understand what was in it. And because it was too big, people missed the fact that you were not meant to, in this particular organisation, not meant to do babysitting for the children from the service.

And yet almost all of those convictions came from babysitting where the harm took place, their sexual offences.

Training of all staff to identify and report misconduct would have also been helpful because if they people knew that babysitting was a misconduct, then the majority of the staff at this service wouldn't have been babysitting.

But they were including at some points when the harm was taking place, even the manager at certain stages.

But if people knew that that was a breach of kind of conduct and knew to speak up about it, people could hold each other to account.
But because that wasn't part of the culture when this work it was doing it, people didn't notice that there was anything different in age appropriate ways for children to raise safety concerns.

If you're familiar with the SAFE series for early learning, I encourage you to look into that.
Teaching protective behaviours, teaching children bodily autonomy.
This is your undies rule.

If people want to look and touch in your private areas and you don't want them to, you need to speak up and tell your safe people about that.

If the children knew as soon as someone was asking to do that or try to do that, and they spoke up about it, that could have stopped the harm from the first child and those remaining 11 children as well.

So they're all crucial, it's all working together.
We're not just relying on one system, we're relying on all of them.

Now what can you do and keep doing in order to have child safe recruitment done?
You need to review your recruitment processes regularly, make sure they're robust and the best practice.
You want to inform staff of the importance of refreshing your child safe knowledge.
You want to work together and review and improve.
Please don't just let this ride on the shoulders of one person.

Consult the key stakeholders, the other staff and the families and use the OCG resources that we've referenced already. And I'm going to show you some more as well.

Now the Office of Children's Guardian resources, we have module 5 of for the hiring of child safe staff and it's for all the different early learning settings.

We have the Child Safe Recruitment and Working with Children Check handbook, which is the basis of what we've been going through today.

There's the child safe templates. So if you don't have a template, then we've got ones provided for you and the child safe self-assessment tool.

If anyone is in charge of other staff, I encourage you to do the self-assessment because what that will do is give you a report on how you're going with each individual standard and where the areas you need to improve.

It'll link to the training and resources to support you in that improvement.
So these are the contact details for the Office of the Children's Guardian.

But as we are wrapping up for today's training, there is a QR code, and I've been encouraged to get you to use your phones, log into that QR code and at least have the survey available so that you can fill it in, even if we've finished the webinar before that.

Now I'm going see if I can come back to the Teams meeting and see you guys as well. All right. So get your phones out, use the QR code and get that ready to fill in. If there's anyone who he is to help with the Q&A, if there's anything you'd like to talk about now is a good chance.
I'm just going to leave that slide up for a moment before I put the closing slide.
Oh, no, we don't have any other people wanting to unpack what we've been talking about.

So what I'm going to do is put on the last slide and thank you for your time and thank you and hopefully this is helpful for you and hopefully the recording will be something that can be used to encourage you and your staff and enjoy your child safe journey. Thanks.

[End of Transcript]

ACECQA Child Safety guides

Information on the Child Safe Standards

Office of the Children’s Guardian (OCG), implementing the Child Safe Standards eLearning series

Child Safe Recruitment and WWCC Handbook (OCG)

Responding to incidents, disclosures and suspicions of child abuse

Child Safe Code of Conduct

Department of Education, Child Safety

Speaker: Cassandra May

So I want to introduce myself. My name is Cassandra May and I'm the Director, Regulatory Policy and Practice at the ACEC Regulatory Authority. And I'm pleased to be joined today by Skye Taylor from the NSW Office of the Children's Guardian, who will be presenting this session.

And today we're speaking to you about keeping children safe by exploring how to identify risks across different service types and why it's crucial to know how to recognise and respond to child safety risks in your environment.

We're revisiting this really important topic following strong engagement with our webinar last year to provide more services, the opportunity to explore this content and to continue strengthening child safe practices across the sector.

This session is all about enhancing our collective ability to identify risks and respond effectively, ensuring safer environments for children in every setting. Before we kick off, I'd like to acknowledge that we're all joining from Aboriginal land.

Today I am on the lands of the Burramattagal clan of the Darug Nation. I'd like to pay my respects to Elders past and present and extend that respect to any Aboriginal colleagues joining us on the webinar today. And I'd like to take this opportunity to reiterate my personal commitment to making a safe environment for our littlest Aboriginal learners in NSW.

So if we can move to the next slide. Just had a few housekeeping notes.
So to ensure that everyone is able to get the most out of the session today, our team will be focusing on questions specifically relating to the session content.
So if you've got additional questions, our information and inquiries line is open and you can reach us on 1800 619 113 or we've got an email address ececd@det.nsw.edu.au and we'll be able to help you with other issues there.

In terms of the session today, I just wanted to let you know that the microphone video and chat functions are disabled.
The Q&A function is available for questions and we'll respond to those where we can. And just letting you know that the session is being recorded and it will be available later on our website.

Before I hand over to Skye, just wanted to give a few high-level messages about what we're hoping that you get out of the day today.

So as the NSW Regulatory Authority for early childhood education and care, we want to reaffirm a message that cannot be said often enough.

There is no greater responsibility than keeping children safe. The early childhood education and care sector is built on trust.

As you know, families entrust their children to our care every day and they believe, rightly, that we will protect them, that will nurture them and we'll keep them safe from harm.

Many of you will be aware of the recent and disturbing reports in the media involving serious harm to children. The stories have shocked us all and we won't be commenting on individual cases today.

But they do serve as a tragic and powerful reminder of why strong child safety practice matter, and why every adult working with children has a responsibility to act when something isn't right.

Children have the right to be safe, and adults have the responsibility to protect them. This includes protecting children from adults who may seek to harm them, whether that be within the service or outside of it.

If you witness or you suspect that a colleague, manager or any adult involved in your services behaving inappropriately or causing harm, you must act.

In NSW, every early childhood education and care service must comply with mandatory reporting obligations under child protection legislation and under the Reportable Conduct Scheme overseen by the NSW Office of the Children's Guardian.

There's a legal requirement for services to report certain types of concerning conduct involving employees, volunteers or contractors.
If you see something, or if you sense something that causes you concern, you must report it.

Reporting protects not just one child, but potentially many others.
Reporting isn't disloyalty to your colleagues, it's loyalty to children.

Today's session is led by the Office of the Children's Guardian and it will take us deeper into understanding the real and present risks that exist within early childhood education and care environment and how we can respond to those risks proactively and effectively.

We'll explore how the Child Safe Standards, when meaningfully and consistently implemented, can significantly reduce the likelihood of harm occurring in our services.

These standards are not just checklists or policies on paper, they are the foundation for creating environments where children are genuinely safe, respected and heard.

You'll also hear about the Reportable Conduct Scheme and how it works to protect children by ensuring that concerns about the behaviour of adults working with children are taken seriously and dealt with appropriately.

Every staff member at every level of a service has responsibilities under this scheme, not just managers or leaders.

Understanding your role and acting when required is critical.
Importantly, this session will also focus on grooming and manipulative behaviour, what they can look like in an ECE setting, how to recognise early warning signs and how to respond with confidence.

We must build cultures where such behaviours are immediately called out and report, not excuse or dismiss or ignore concerns.
And at the heart of all of these is a simple but vital principle.

Children's safety and well being must sit at the centre of every decision, every action and every relationship in our services. And I'll hand over to Skye now to present. Thanks Skye.

Speaker: Skye Taylor

Thanks Cassandra for that introduction. And yes, we do have a lot to cover. So welcome everybody.

And today we'll be looking at the Child Safe Standards and how risk and grooming happen in the early childhood and care sector and diving deeper into things you can be aware of with regards to risk.

I'd also like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands that I'm on, which I'm on the Wangal people's lands.

And I really like the line here in this acknowledgement country that was written by our First Nations cadets in the second paragraph.

We pay respect to elders past and present who continue to walk with us, offering cultural strength, guidance and knowledge which is passed on to Jarjum's children to hold for their future generations to come.

So remembering that all of you are working with children and those cultural connections to land have never been seeded by the First Nations people. So thank you.
Next, I'd like to acknowledge the experiences of those who have survived child abuse and might be joining us today.

We know that the effects of abuse are serious and long lasting, and we really owe it to survivors to prevent future abuse and neglect where possible.

So a word of warning that we will be covering some content that refers to child abuse today and it could trigger an emotional response in you. Please do look after yourself. If you need to take a break, please do so.

Come back, watch the recording another day if that's better for you.

If you are triggered by anything or feel distressed by anything, please do reach out to a trusted colleague or friend or one of the helplines that you can see on the screen now. So today we're going to cover risk.

We're going to cover reported harm and abuse in the ECEC sector by service type, and we're going to cover grooming.

Then I'll also show you some of our resources from the Office of the Children's Guardian.

Our resources are widespread and there is always training and support for people.

So implementing the Child Safe Standards has been mandated in child related organisations since February 2023 in New South Wales.

And the standards are based on the extensive research and consultation by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

They provide very clear guidance for organisations to create cultures, adopt strategies and act to put the interests of children first to keep them safe from harm.

So by implementing the standards you'll see that you find a good risk management plan weaves its way through many of the standards.

So having a good risk management plan and having your focus on risk management is a really crucial aspect of being a child safe organisation.
So these next few slides I'm going to show you how the standards mention your child safe risk management plan.

So we've look at standard one, which is child safety being embedded in your leadership and governance and culture.

We can see that risk management plans focusing on identifying, preventing and lowering risk to children and it's very important that leaders incorporate these risk managements of child abuse into decision making in and also actively monitoring the risk to child safety.

Standard two from the child safe standards relates to children participating in decisions affecting them.

So risk management strategies identify practices that disempower children and describe how to respond to them, skipping through to Standard 4, which is about equity being upheld and diverse needs being met.

Risk management plans identify factors that may increase the risk of abuse for children with vulnerabilities and then describes how they should be managed or mitigated.

Moving on to Standard 5, which I'm sure you're also familiar with, that people working with children are suitable and supported.

So some of you may have attended the session earlier about recruitment and that was all about Standard 5.

We know that ongoing supervision encourages people to follow the policies and that can help reduce the risk of harm to children.

Standard 6 is about processes to respond to complaints of child abuse being child focused.

So child safe organisations respond by immediately protecting children at risk and complaints are addressed promptly, thoroughly and fairly.

So children are at greater risk when organisations prioritise their own reputation over the safety of children.

Moving on to standard number 7 which talks about staff being equipped with the knowledge, skills and awareness that they need to keep children safe.

We know children, sorry, staff that are involved in roles and situations with higher risk need to be provided with more advanced opportunities.

So the following slides that I'm going to show you now are about child abusers.

And we know that stereotypes are not useful and that anyone could be a child abuser.

So I'm going to highlight a few real cases.

So this is kind of another content warning that some of you may find this disturbing.

So it's a myth to think that people that harm children have a certain look about them or have a certain profession or style.

We can see here an example of a Sydney teacher who was gaoled for sexually assaulting a 14 year old boy. She was 23 when she and the teenager began texting each other only months after she started working at a Sydney school.

The second example I have is about the UK's worst female paedophile and she was gaoled for a minimum of seven years but was in gaol for 10 years and that was for taking photographs on her phone of herself abusing toddlers at a nursery in Plymouth.

So again, sexual assault can happen by women as well.

Another example remembering that it's a myth to think that children are harmed by a certain kind of person in this case, it was an elite swimming coach who was arrested in March 2022 and he was an accomplished athlete and he'd used his talent to coach swimming at several clubs in both Victoria and Sydney prior to his arrest and he was arrested and charged with possessing and controlling child abuse material.

There were dozens of photos and videos stored in a Dropbox folder. And the final one that I have here just to indicate that there is no stereotype a child abuse, a child abuser or perpetrator could be anybody.

This is a former childcare worker who was found guilty of persistent sexual abuse in Tasmania.

The former childcare worker is was facing a gaol term after being found guilty on account one count of persistent sexual abuse.

The parents did tell the court how she had been changed by that trauma.

So now I want to play a video and it's begun without me. Please enjoy or learn.

Video playing- Understanding risk animation

https://youtu.be/flUE35vuWYA

There are different risk factors that contribute to the risk of abuse and harm to children in early childhood education settings.
The Royal Commission into institutional responses to Child Sexual Abuse identified four groups of risk factors.

Understanding them will help you reduce the chances of harm occurring.
The first is the environment.

The space where children engage with adults can affect the potential for harm and abuse to occur.
For example, children can be harmed if they can be unobserved in a space with adults who wish to harm them.

Similarly, harm can occur where children are left alone with an adult, out of sight of another adult.

The vulnerability of the child There are many things that can make a child vulnerable.

These include cognitive development, age, culture, family background and medical conditions.

Where possible, educators should be provided with information on enrolment about which children may require additional support.

They should also be supported to recognise hidden vulnerabilities such as identifying possible signs of abuse.

Propensity of the adult to abuse It's difficult to think that anyone in your service would abuse a child You know them.

However, research shows that some adults pose a risk to children if they have an opportunity to interact with them.

There is no typical offender when it comes to child abuse.
When considering whether an adult would harm a child sexually, we should refer to the research about different kinds of offenders.

There are determined offenders, opportunistic offenders and situational offenders.
Determined offenders are what we often refer to as paedophiles.

They have a sexual interest in children and can be quite skilled at disguising their behaviour and manipulating others, including adults.

Opportunistic offenders wouldn't normally abuse children, but if an opportunity to offend against the child presents itself and the organisation has a poor child safe practice, they will weigh up their options.

If they feel the perceived benefit outweighs the chance of being caught, they're more likely to abuse a child.

Situational offenders typically have no interest in children sexually, but because of their regular and close proximity to them, the lines of appropriate behaviour become blurred.

Organisational risk services where the rights of children aren't prioritised or which do not empower children to feel confident, to provide input or share their concerns are more likely to be places where harm occurs.

Services that don't have policies or procedures regarding adult interactions with children and a lack of awareness of the need for child safety are more likely to be places where children are harmed.

You can address and reduce the risk of abuse and harm to children in your organisation if you apply the Child Safe Standards.

You should develop risk management plans which identify all the possible risks to children and develop strategies to keep them safe.

Where possible, the physical environment should be altered to allow for a clear line of sight in spaces where children will be present.

Leaders in the organisation should remain mindful that some educators may find the work challenging and they should take steps to ensure workers are skilled, supported and understand that their duty of care is always towards the children they are looking after.

Children can be empowered with protective behaviours training so they know they can speak up if they have any concerns.

Research has shown that these children are less likely to be targeted by perpetrators.

When a service has a culture of putting children's safety first, such as having embedded Codes of Conduct, child safe policies and procedures, and a culture of reporting concerns, the likelihood of offenders succeeding is reduced.

You should have clear policies and procedures which describe how adults should interact with children.

They should be communicated to everyone involved with your service, including in a developmentally appropriate way to children.

You can create posters and other easy to understand prompts to support their understanding.

You should have clear protocols in place so adults and children who are concerned about the behaviour of others know how to report their concerns.

Everyone interacting with your service should know you prioritise being child safe.

Similarly, staff need to know what to do if a child behaves in a way that indicates they may have been harmed outside of your environment.

For more information on the Child Safe Standards and free resources, including videos, e-learning samples and templates, visit ocg.nsw.gov.au today.

Speaker: Skye Taylor

So I hope you found that interesting and helpful just to give you that overview of the dimensions of risk and the kinds of perpetrators that you may that exist in the world.

That video is very helpful for people to use as a training video.
So you can find that on the OCG YouTube channel if you're looking for it.

So as you heard, the research shows that there are four types of risk and we can think about those different four dimensions.

This is taken from the research conducted by Parkinson and Cashmore and we'll go into detail now with each of those.

So one of the first risks, which in the video was actually called the environmental risk or it can be called the situational risk.

So this is in physical and online environments, things such as being alone with a child, having an opportunity to create emotional closeness or a closed environment where this means that there is the opportunity to be alone, unseen, which means it's easier to groom a child, and also that opportunity to form close relationships.

And that could be physical contact or emotional closeness, closeness with a child that then may lead to a crossing of the acceptable professional boundaries or abusive behaviours so they can be classified as modifiable or unmodifiable.

And unmodifiable risk is something by its very nature is it has a higher risk and so allows more opportunity for a perpetrator to be alone with a child and can't be modified.

And an example would of that would be, for example, foster care settings where it's a family environment and a child may be alone with a parent or a foster carer.

The modifiable risks are those which with some effort could be more modified so that the risk can be reduced.

Child safe organisations are those that have sought to minimise these modifiable situational risks to the extent that it's possible, and we know that's not always possible, but being aware of what those risks are can help you with developing mitigation strategies.

The second risk in those quadrant of risks is vulnerability and the main factor influencing vulnerability is the age of a child.

All children are vulnerable to abuse because they are dependent on adults. And so obviously the younger a child is, the more dependent they are.

And also children might not understand what what's happening to them is wrong and they might not have the capacity to communicate what's happened to them as a younger child. That risk is higher.

The other reasons or the other characteristics of a child that would increase their vulnerability risk are, for example, characteristics such as a disability, in particular an intellectual disability, a First Nations background.

So for some First Nations children and young people, they may have a lack of trust in authority figures, and intergenerational trauma that has occurred may also stop them from speaking up about abuse.

A background of family breakdown or dysfunction may also be an increased risk for a child because it could disguise changed behaviour caused by harm perpetrated by a worker.
And then the final one on the list here is that history of maltreatment.

And that could be trauma from being a refugee, trauma from experiencing Indigenous oppression, or trauma from a previous child abuse trauma.

That prior history of maltreatment is a strong motivation not to disclose any current or future maltreatment or abuse.

The third one in the quadrant is a propensity risk, and propensity risk is really about a statistical risk or the statistical data that says who is more likely to offend.

And we have here the research has identified those three types of offenders and we will talk about those a little bit later in the session this morning.

We also know that gender can be a significant indicator. And although some women do sexually abuse children, the greater majority of perpetrators of child sexual abuse are male.

And so this means that institutions with a predominantly male staffing profile have a statistically greater risk of child sexual abuse happening. This doesn't mean that institutions should be discouraged from having male staff.

Children and young people need male role models and involvement.

And it is just a relatively small proportion of men who sexually abuse children.

And that really shouldn't cast a shadow over the great majority of non abusive men who work with children.

But it does mean that institutions with organisations that have male staff do have that elevated statistical risk.

So they need to give more attention to strategies to moderate that risk.
And this is when we're talking about this elevated statistical risk of child sexual abuse. It is only about sexual abuse.

You'll see that when we get to some information about the reportable conduct data later, that women are actually more likely to abuse children in different ways such as assault or neglect.

So it is only in that child sexual abuse context.

And then the fourth risk in these quadrants of risk that we need to consider is organisational risk.

And we know that the culture of an organisation really, whether they have a child safe culture or not, really impacts on the safety of children.

A close net and long standing relationships between adults can be a risk.

There can be this strong ethos of group allegiance and a difficulty in speaking up about someone doing the wrong thing.

If there are internal disciplinary processes that are inadequate, then this is also a risk, an organisational risk.

So when we think, for example, of the Code of Conduct and making sure that our child's safe code of conduct is upheld, if there are no consequences for breaches to the Code of Conduct, then that really doesn't send the message that child's safe is a priority in that organisation.

Also an organisation that discourages complaints.

So if we don't have that culture of reporting and speaking up, if we see something that we believe is not the right behaviour, like Cassandra said at the very beginning, it's not we're not being disloyal to our colleagues.

We are being showing our loyalty to the safety of children by speaking up.

If, oh sorry, if the invisible child protection and complaints policy. So if child protection and complaints policies are not visible, if people don't know where to find them or what to do in those situations, then that's also an organisational risk.

And finally, if there is a culture of not listening to children or respecting children, then that's also an organisational risk.

So thinking about those four different kinds of risk, I want us to apply them now to this scenario so you can think about how they work in your organisations.

So I'll read through this and I want you to be thinking about identifying four risks in this scenario, a situational, a vulnerable vulnerability, a propensity and an organisational risk. And remember, situationally is also known as environmental.

So Susie's been working at an early learning centre for about three months and she's really engaging to listen to when she reads to the preschool room children.

Susie started to take an interest in one of the four year old boys as she heard that his parents recently separated.

Susie arranged with the mother to look after the boy after preschool on Fridays and take him to the park for a few hours before dropping him home.
Other educators are aware of the arrangement and have some concerns but don't say anything because their position was very hard to fill and they don't want to risk her leaving.

So I would like you to think about identifying situational, vulnerability, propensity and organisational risks. I'm going to, for the flow of the session, just go through them now.

But if you're watching this recorded, you might like to pause and have a think about them with your team.
So the first one is situational or environmental.

So the risk here is that Susie takes him to the park.
No one else can see them.
They're in a different environment, not in the safety of the preschool environment.

Vulnerability.
So the child is young, he's only four year old, he's only four years old.And also there's the added vulnerability that his parents have recently separated.

So any changes in his behaviour, the boy's behaviour could be misunderstood as something to do with his parents separating. Propensity. So we don't know a lot about Susie. She's only been working at the early learning centre for about three months.

So that can be a risk that we don't really know what kind of person she is or what she might her intentions might be.

And then the organisational risk. So the other educators are aware of the arrangement and maybe recognise that it's not the right thing to be doing, but they don't speak up because they don't want her to leave.

So this is a really concerning risk for the organisation and something that really needs to be addressed by the organisation.

People should be speaking up if they see something or hear something that they think is in is not the right behaviour and it's something that should be addressed.

So hopefully you were able to identify those four different risks in just one scenario.

So when you're thinking about things that happen in your services, you can apply these four different risks in your breakdown of thinking about what risks do we need to mitigate against.

So now moving on to reportable conduct, I'd like to let you know that the reportable conduct email is available for anyone and everyone to email.

You can ask for urgent advice, you can ask for, you can ask if something is reportable or not and what you should do.

They can give you advice and support.
And then there is also training available for the from the reportable conduct team. They have an e-learning.

So when we're talking about reportable conduct, these are the categories that we're talking about.

So we have assault, neglect, ill treatment and then offences under section 43B or 316A of the Crimes Act.

These mean it's an offence of concealing a child abuse offence and also failing to remove the risk that a worker will commit commit a child abuse offence.

That's what the 43B and 316A are, behaviour that causes significant emotional or psychological harm, sexual misconduct and sexual assault.

So these are the reportable conduct categories, allegations.

It's an allegations based scheme which means you don't need to have proof or evidence to make that allegation.

So here we can see we can.
The Reportable Conduct Scheme illustrates the risk of abuse through the number of notifications that are received.

We can see here in the previous years that the numbers have been climbing.

Going to this part here we can see for the approved education and care services, your sector, the numbers have been climbing 38% increase in notifications from 2023 to 2024.

That's a 38% increase from 277 to 383.This might be in part attributable to the increased awareness across the sector, the jointly developed resources by the OCG and the ECEC regulatory authority, our e-learning modules, the podcast animations and videos.

Also, we believe that it could be attribute partly attributed to the widespread media attention about the sexual offence charges against workers in childcare that have been in in the media more recently.

So when we look at the kind of the primary allegation type that's received, we can see that the most common allegations that are received by the Reportable Conduct team are assault at 714 most recently and sexual misconduct and sexual offences combined roughly just over 700 as well.

So we can see that there are equally high numbers of sexual assault and sexual misconduct together versus assault.

And as in previous years, male and female employees were subject of reportable allegations and female employees were more likely to be notified primarily for assault, neglect and I'll treatment.

But almost half of the notifications involving male employees were of sexual nature. And that's what I mentioned earlier.

When we look at the Reportable Conduct notifications and we can see them by sector for the early childhood sector, we can see that centre based care, long day care, preschools, things like that are 90% of the the notifications that have been received.

So out of school hours care is 9% and Family Day care is very low with only 1%.

And this relative lack of visibility in Family Day care services is a factor contributing to the low reporting rates from these services given that a significant proportion of notifications usually come from an employee witness, which we don't have in a Family Day care environment.

So we know that of the 6000 services, roughly in quarter 2 of 2024, a sequence stated that of the 6000 services, 72% were long day care or preschool.

So a centre based care, 26% were out of school hours care, yet they're only making up 9% of our reportable conduct notifications and family daycare are 2% and they're making up just 1% of our reportable conduct notifications.

So this is something to keep in mind, something maybe that we want to try and improve the number of reports that we're receiving from those from the after school care and the family daycare sectors as well.

So when we look at some of this data, we can see some increases of some examples of the risk that could be responsible for the allegations that are made to reportable conduct.

So factors that increase in the ECEC services, these other centre based ones could be examples such as a high turnover of staff and a increased use of casual and agency staff.

This can mean that maybe staff aren't as well trained or as well supported to use the child safe practices and also like managing challenging behaviour or providing adequate supervision.

Conflicts of interest also can increase the risk if the relationships hinder the reporting processes.

So this could be the relationship between the educators and the director and if you think about if you're working in an environment where you have tight knit relationships, then it can be very difficult to be reporting on your colleague.

And then the final example here is about challenging physical layouts.

So some services really might have challenging physical layouts which might limit the visibility of interactions. And so these factors could be present across all service types as well.

What we have seen as allegations of assault that have come through to the reportable conduct team in centre based services, some other things that are on the screen now.

So we we've seen some physical assault and throwing. These are things that we see the reportable conduct team sees as allegations of assault.

Also allegations of neglect come through quite often as well, and that could include the poor management of allergies and also inadequate supervision.

So that's when we see maybe children leaving the service or someone else coming into the service, children being left on a bus or losing children in an on an excursion.

These are the kinds of examples that we might see. So again, I'm going to ask you to reflect a little bit.

What child safe practises do you think would prevent these types of reportable conduct in centre based services?

So we've got six different things there.

Which ones do you think will could help prevent any of those allegations that we just saw in the previous slides?

I'm going to once again for the flow and speed, give you the answers now, but again, if you're watching this and would like to reflect on it later, that would be a good idea.

So these things could prevent making sure we have a thorough induction of our staff, make sure we have ongoing training of our staff and clear policies and procedures on supervision, practise really clear Code of Conduct, a Child Safe Code of Conduct which has inspected interactions.

So number 4 this isn't going to help.
Making an example of educators with poor practice to deter others is not going to help people learn the best way to do things.

And verifying Working With Children Checks for all staff. Whilst this is very important to do, this may not prevent these types of conduct happening. It's simply telling you that your staff haven't been caught doing anything in the past.

But the information of policies and Code of Conduct with those clear guidelines are what's going to prevent these things happening in your centre based services.

So moving on to after school care or out of school hours care services, the things that we can see happening, behaviours that have been reported to the reportable conduct team at the OCG.

Of course not all after school educators or out of school hours care educators display these behaviours, but these behaviours can are some that we see often being.

Allegations being made about because we know that educators have really great relationships with the children they care for, but sometimes maintaining professional boundaries can be challenging in this context.

So there's been poor practices, have included things such as getting too involved with the kids during games and being a big kid.

So some of that physical contact and the also allegations of reckless or intentional conduct have been made.

And then allegations of ill treatment where an employee may have been forgotten that they are, their professional boundaries haven't been maintained and they've become angry or yelled at the children whilst playing with them.

We can see the reportable conduct scenario. Half of the slide shows some examples of allegations that have been made to the reportable conduct team of what could happen in the after school, out of school hours care service area.

So it really is about making sure that after school care educators have very strong boundaries and help to maintain help to learn about maintaining those professional boundaries.

So again, another reflection for you about what kind of child safe practises could prevent those types of reportable allegations in after school care or outside school hours care.

And again, for flow, I'm going to jump straight to them. So having a clear Code of Conduct that describes the expectations of educator interactions with children definitely would help prevent any of those behaviours that were reported allegations.

Having a good induction and ongoing training of educators also helps ensuring educators know what grooming looks like.

So that's what we're going to be looking at in the final section of today's session, making sure educators are aware of what to look out for and what to know about.

Making sure there's training on reporting obligations, making sure there's guidelines on how and what areas that educators need to supervise, and responding immediately to educators that breach that Code of Conduct.

So we talked about this earlier, the need for there to be a consequence for breaching the child's safe Code of Conduct.

Otherwise it's really not valuable as a Code of Conduct.

Of course number 5 that's not going to help hiring safe people that you personally know.

So finally, some examples from the family daycare service. So we know that family daycare educators and providers have quite different circumstances.

And some of the environmental context that we need to consider is that there may be other adults or people in the house and that early family daycare educators are working with can be working with children with diverse needs on their own.

So managing those challenging behaviours may be very difficult for them.

And so that's something that needs to be considered by the providers, by the coordinators to support the Family Day educators in knowing how to deal with diverse needs.

The final one, there is pools at home in the home of the educator. The pool isn't actually the problem, it's the supervision of children. And so making sure that that pool is inaccessible or making sure that there is constant supervision around children when they're up against or near the pool fence, those kind of things.

So a reportable allegation example is a toddler actually being left on super, super revised near the pool area and they were able to climb up and over the fence due to propping up bits of climbing equipment and things like that.

So it's being aware of those kind of things.

So a question we sometimes get asked is what do I do when my report doesn't meet the threshold? So of course you need to do something.

Just because it doesn't meet the threshold and the reportable conduct team at the OCG are not going to investigate, it doesn't mean mean that there was no harm done or that there's no need for action.

It actually means there's still a risk and more responsibility on you.
You need to put more safeguards in place, which might mean modifying your environment or your staffing or providing more support and training to address the incident or allegation.

So again, a poll something for you to think about which of these behaviours might not meet the reportable conduct threshold but still present risks to child safety.

So thinking about are these things something that would be investigated?

Are these things something allegations that would meet the threshold of reportable conduct allegations or are they something that just still represents a risk?

So again, just going through smacking a child obviously would meet the threshold and locking a child in a cupboard would meet the threshold.

The three others wouldn't necessarily meet the threshold of reportable conduct, but it would be expected that you would have something in your Code of Conduct, in your child's safe Code of Conduct that either said this was not allowed or it was allowed only in certain circumstances.

The main concern for me here is the secretly babysitting children from the service.

Some services do allow babysitting to occur, and that is OK if it's out in the open, if there's transparency, if families are aware that the educator is doing that of their own accord, not as part of the service, and the service is made aware of it as well.

Each service can make their own decisions about that.
But secretly that concerns me, so knowing what to report and when can be confusing. We're very aware of that.

The NSW Department of Education and the Office of the Children's Guardian do have resources to assist both staffing services and leaders understand their reporting obligations and some of these resources are on the screen now.

We also have the e-learning modules and there are some extra posters in those that you can download and I'll show you about those resources at the end of the session.

So going back to this idea of how people might harm children, thankfully not many people want to hurt children.

It really is a minority of people.

But most of the risks to children are because of a lack of training, skills and knowledge.

So educators who are not supported or don't receive training might struggle with the pressure of looking after children, dealing with those tricky situations and managing behaviour as well as managing their own behaviour.

So people who seek out to offend against children have an internal motivation to do so.

And even these people have an internal inhibitor, like a voice in their head saying that they shouldn't do it and that it's wrong.

But offending against children can happen for a variety of reasons in an organisation.

There are certain situational factors that can cause offending to occur.
Poor culture, lack of training, lack of knowledge.
So we can see here in this diagram that there are those four preconditions that enable an individual to move on, to offend.
And this is from the source is Hal 1994.

The first is that the offender must have that internal motivation.

The second is that they must overcome those internal inhibitors, rationalising or blocking out the voice or saying the voices, saying that it's wrong.
They may use drugs or alcohol to do that.

And three is overcoming those external impediments.
And this is where we think about grooming happening because they are making sure that they are convincing the parents, the other teachers, the other staff that they're a trustworthy person.

And then finally they need to come overcome a child's resistance.
And they can do this possibly by manipulation, perceived or actual vulnerability.

Again, looking at those three different kinds of offenders that we that was mentioned in the video, there are those committed offenders, the opportunistic and the situational.

We'll watch a video soon that will go through those in more detail.

We know that grooming is recognised as a really complex and commonly incremental process.

There are usually three main stages, gaining access to the victim, initiating and maintaining abuse and then concealing the abuse.

Part of grooming behaviour includes targeting the adults in order to gain access to the to the child.

Also, we know that grooming doesn't always lead to sexual abuse, but it is actually a breach of trust itself and not all sexual abuse inevitably involves grooming.

So it can child sexual abuse can commence in the absence of grooming.
Grooming can be short or slow.

And you might see grooming behaviours that are being used to conceal harm.

That's already happening.

And this is why having a Child Safe Code of Conduct that restricts behaviours such as gift giving, babysitting, transporting children is really important because these behaviours are known to be used by perpetrators when trying to gain access to children to harm them, which is what grooming is.

So we'll watch the grooming video now.

Video playing- About Grooming-Information for child-rated organisations

https://youtu.be/wy0xV0LsoKY

Grooming is the manipulation of children in physical spaces like a sports ground, religious setting, classroom or performance space, and in online environments such as social media, email, and text.

Grooming is a process of manipulation that prepares a child to be abused and tests their likely response.

Perpetrators work to convince the child not to say anything, while children are most likely to be groomed.

Abusers will also target protective adults, families and even entire organisations in order to get unsupervised access to a child or young person.

When grooming a child, abusers seek to build a sense of trust, despite intending to later betray this trust.

They will test the child's ability to keep secrets and may use threats of violence against them or people they love.

They may contact the child on their personal device where their conversations are less likely to be monitored.
Engaging the child in private messaging can lead to the adults sharing inappropriate conversations, photos or videos.

They may give the child gifts or preferential treatment to establish what appears to the child to be a special relationship.

They may encourage the child to meet with them outside the organisation or in areas where they can't be seen.

Grooming can also include testing the child's tolerance for inappropriate touching, with the intention of normalising this kind of contact.

They may try to isolate the child from their peers or the caring adults in the child's life so they feel dependent on the abuser.

They may encourage breaking rules or blame the child for their inappropriate actions so the child becomes reluctant to tell anyone what they have been doing.

This can include supplying cigarettes, alcohol or pornographic material in an attempt to reduce the child's inhibitions to the abuse.

The intention is always the same, to remove the child from the supervision of caring or protective adults and make them less likely to report abuse.

This testing and manipulating can extend to their adult colleagues.
Perpetrators want to know how much they can get away with.

They may appear to be a nice or caring person who goes that extra mile.
Often this is so there's less chance their illegal activities will be uncovered.

They may try and convince a parent or carer that they are vital to the child's success.

They may use this as motivation to encourage the parent to provide unsupervised access or to interact with the child in ways that would not normally be considered appropriate.

They may encourage the parent to allow the child to stay overnight with them or receive extra training, rehearsals or remedial treatment without adult supervision.

Perpetrators may work to build the trust of other adults so that they can convince the child that even if they're told, no one would believe them.

Reducing opportunities for grooming starts with your organisation culture.

How do you ensure that everyone, including employees, volunteers, parents, children and young people, know what appropriate behaviour looks like?

What rules are in place?

Does everyone in your organisation know who to report it to if they witness inappropriate behaviour?

Having a clear Code of Conduct, a child safe policy and trained people who know how to respond to and report incidents, even if they appear insignificant, will help you create a culture where abuse is minimised and children are valued.

Speaker: Skye Taylor

OK, so I hope that was useful for you to understand what grooming can look like. Obviously that was some, a lot of that was with older children, but when we're thinking about younger children, something as simple as some chocolates or some lollies might be enough bribery for the child not to feel that the behaviour that's being the way they're being manipulated and the behaviour that is happening is normalised.

So here's a list here about some behaviours of concern that may indicate grooming.

Grooming is difficult to to talk about sometimes and often the the the actual some of the behaviours are are not necessarily leading to grooming.

So some of the things that might be happening look like normal behaviours.

But often the escalation of childhood of sexual abuse could happen after grooming behaviours. And it demonstrates the importance of reporting and picking up on crossing professional boundaries as a first step.

And professional boundaries are the borders or limitations that a professional establishes in order to protect them and their clients, the children and families from developing unethical or unprofessional, confusing or conflicting relationships.

So some of the boundaries might be very clear, but some of them can be quite complex and blurred and they may change over time.

So it's very important to establish and reflect upon those professional boundaries and be aware that some of these behaviours may indicate that the professional boundaries are being crossed.

So to sum up what we've been talking about today, we really do want to create a safe environment for children. No, excuse me.

And one of the things that we can think of to start with is to increase the effort for any perpetrator or anyone trying to do the wrong thing, increase the effort needed for an engage, for an offender to engage in inappropriate behaviour if we also increase the risk of getting caught.

So we if we increase the likelihood of an offender being caught or being reported on and that we remove all the excuses that we have a 0 tolerance to professional misconduct, then that's how we can reduce abuse and have a safer child safe organisation.

So the things that we can put in place to kind of have this experiment work, these three things adding together to mean reduced abuse is having effective policies, having really strong code of conduct and having very careful recruitment.

Increasing the risk of getting caught. Can be making sure that we have situational prevention in place, that we're reviewing the environment and that we have a culture of reporting and removing all excuses.

Having that 0 tolerance to professional misconduct or abuse and really valuing children within our organisation and listening to them.
And this can lead to reduced abuse quickly.

The next couple of slides I have are just to highlight the resources that we have at the Office of the Children's Guardian.

You can find all of these for free on our website.

And we have further workshops and webinars available as well. The YouTube training videos are really great to be used in your team meetings or training sessions. We watched the Grooming 1 today and this is the early learning education and care e-learning.

It's pathway specific so we have centre based outside school hours care and Family Day care as three separate pathways.
So you can find scenarios and examples that are relevant to your service.
There are also some one page risk profiles.

Some of the information I shared today about the reportable conduct allegations that are found in different environment, different services were shared from there.

And we also have our child safe self assessment tool, which if you haven't done it yet, I'd really highly recommend that you do and it will give you a good indication of how you're going in your implementing of the child safe standards.

So handing over to Cassandra again.

Speaker: Cassandra May

Thank you so much, Skye. We just wanted to reiterate some of the key messages from today.

So just remembering that we're all mandatory reporters and report, report, report.

We'll add a resource document to the chat and we'll send it out to all participants at the end of this meeting.

And if you've got a chance, please just get the QR code where you'll find a survey about the webinar today. Thanks all for your time.

Thank you everyone.

[End of Transcript]

Information on the Child Safe Standards

Department of Education reporting resource

Office of the Children’s Guardian resources, including: podcasts, handbooks, workshops and one page risk profiles

Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) eLearning modules

Child Safe Self-assessment

Department of Education, Child Safety

Reporting concerns

NSW Police

• For urgent and immediate risk phone 000
• For all other criminal matters contact Crime stoppers on 1800 333 000

Department of Communities and Justice (DCJ)

• For concerns about the child, contact: Child protection Helpline – phone 13 21 11

Office of the Children’s Guardian (OCG)

• For concerns about a staff member, notifications can be made online using the forms available on the OCG’s Reportable Conduct Scheme webpage
• For enquiries about the Reportable Conduct Scheme please contact: reportableconduct@ocg.nsw.gov.au

ECEC Regulatory Authority

• For incidents which have occurred at a service, notifications are to be submitted through NQA ITS portal: https://portal.nqaits.gov.au/
• NSW ECEC RA Information and Enquiries team – phone: 1800 619 113 or email: ececd@det.nsw.edu.au

Speaker: Louisa Coussens

So good morning everybody and thank you so much for joining us.

This webinar is on child safety incidents and allegations.
I'm Louisa Coussens. I manage a team called the Quality Practise and Regulatory Support team at the NSW Early Childhood Education and Care Regulatory Authority.

My team delivers education and advice to those working in and providing services across NSW. I'm here with Brett Lalor from the Regulatory Authorities Compliance and Investigations team.

Together we're going to bring you some useful information and tips to help you keep children safe in your service in the context of incidents and allegations and concerns.

I am delighted and privileged to be joining you today from the lands of the Darkinjung people. I acknowledge the ongoing custodians of the lands and the waterways where we all live, work and come together today.
I pay my respects to Elders past and present, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people joining us today and working in early childhood education and care across NSW.

Here are a few housekeeping matters to help you and us navigate the session today. The microphone, video, and chat functions are disabled at the Q&A function is available and we have officers ready and waiting to answer your questions. The session is being recorded and will be available on our website. To ensure that everyone's able to get the most out of the session today, our team will be focusing on questions that specifically relate to today's content.
But if you have any questions relating to other topics, please do let us know and you can contact us via our information and enquiries team and our team will pin the details in the Q&A for you.

For that team, today we're discussing child safety incidents and allegations.
We'll explore how you can help prevent incidents across different service types and why it's crucial to know how to recognise and respond to child safety concerns in your environment.

I'll speak about reporting and we know this can seem an overwhelming topic with different places to report depending on the incident.

I'll try and remove some of that overwhelm for you and provide some clear guidance about why and to whom we report different things.

I'll then pass to Brett to talk to you about investigations.

This session is similar to a session we ran in April earlier this year.

It's such an important topic though, that we wanted to take this opportunity to share it with people who couldn't make the April webinar and as a refresher for those who did.

We're always refining our advice based on contemporary scenarios and questions we received from you working in the services every day.

Our goal today is to strengthen our collective ability to prevent incidents and allegations and to identify and respond effectively when they do occur, ensuring safer environments for children in every setting.

First a reminder about mandatory reporting.
It's important that all staff in ECEC services drive a culture of advocacy for children.

If you are concerned or have a suspicion that a child is at risk of abuse, harm, neglect or I'll treatment, you should talk to someone about it.
You should refer to your services, policies and procedures on child safety, child protection, or complaints handling to understand who you can talk to.

Every person working in ECEC is a mandatory reporter and is responsible for making sure that a report is made about any concerns regarding a child's safety, welfare or well being to the Child Protection Helpline in accordance with your services established procedures.

Your first step may be to report your concerns to the approved provider, nominated supervisor or a team leader.

It's essential to document that you have made a report and who you made it to and keep this somewhere safe.

After you've made your report to your supervisor, you should follow up with them to make sure that a report has been made to the Child Protection Helpline.
For any urgent immediate risk to a child, of course, contact NSW Police.

Additionally, concerns can also be reported to the NSW ECEC Regulatory Authority.

I'll talk about this more in a moment.

When it comes to reporting child abuse in early childhood education and care services, it's essential to remember that a services internal reporting structures should never delay or obstruct timely action.

Mandatory reporting is the legal and ethical responsibility of the individual who has witnessed or suspects that harm is occurring or could occur to a child.

Providers who maintain organisational reporting procedures must ensure that these are clearly communicated to all staff and support compliance with legislative requirements and enable educators to fulfil their legal obligation to report directly to the appropriate authorities when necessary.

Child safety is everyone's responsibility, but as an ECEC educator, it is also law that you report any concerns you have for the safety of a child at any time. So that was mandatory reporting.

Mandatory reporting is everyone's legal responsibility.

The mandatory reporting scheme is managed by the Department of Communities and Justice via the Child Protection Helpline and that number is 132111.

If you have concerns or suspicions that a child is experiencing abuse, neglect or is at risk of significant harm, you must report this to the Child Protection Helpline.
This includes both current harm and suspected future risk.
Reports should be guided by the Mandatory Reporter Guide, which helps you assess whether a concern meets the threshold for significant harm.

Even if you're unsure whether a concern meets the threshold for significant harm, it's still important to make a report to the Child Protection Helpline DCJ.

The Department of Communities and Justice keeps a record of all reports, so your information might connect with other reports made by different people and together they may meet the threshold for a stronger coordinated response in ECEC.

As I mentioned, there are other agencies you also need to report to.
The Reportable Conduct Scheme is managed by the Office of the Children's Guardian (OCG).

If you have a concern that involves a staff member or a volunteer in an ECEC service and there's a reasonable suspicion that they've harmed a child or behaved inappropriately, you must report it to the NSW Office of the Children's Guardian. This falls under reportable conduct obligations.

The OCG must be notified within seven business days of you becoming aware of the allegation.

And just a reminder, recent regulatory changes to time frames for reporting do not affect reportable conduct.

It remains as seven days a reportable conduct includes things like sexual offences, I'll treatment, neglect or psychological harm caused by an adult in a position of care in a work environment.

NSW Police If a child is at immediate or serious risk, for example you suspect physical or sexual abuse is occurring now or is about to occur, you should call 000 straight away.
Police are the first responders for urgent safety concerns.
For non urgent reports to NSW Police, you can call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 or your local police station.

For any serious incidents, including where a child has been harmed or is at risk of harm while attending your service, you must notify the NSW Regulatory Authority.
These reports must be made within 24 hours.

Examples include serious injury, trauma, illness or allegations of abuse while the child was in care.

Reporting can be done by the NQA ITS portal now.

When you report to the Child Protection Helpline your matter will be reviewed and if appropriate, referred to the Joint Referral Units known as the JRU.

The JRU is the single entry point into the Joint Child Protection Response Program.

This is a tri agency team involving the Department of Communities and Justice, NSW Police and NSW Health and they collaborate to assess and deal with serious child protection concerns.

If a report does not meet the criteria for the Joint Child Protection Response Program, it may still be referred to the local Community Services Centre, or it might go to NSW Police or NSW Health, or both, depending on the concern.

This means you can be confident that all reports are taken seriously, even if they don't trigger an immediate tri agency response.

Approved providers, service leaders and all ECEC staff have a responsibility to make sure that children feel safe, respected and supported to express their concerns in a way that makes sense to them.

Having policy, process and procedure in place that remain focused on the safety of children is imperative to fostering a child safe culture at your service.

It is also a requirement and a regulation 168(2)(O) where approved providers are required to have a complaint handling policy and procedures in place at their service that are child focused.
Placing the child at the heart of your decisions and reporting all concerns, suspicions, allegations and incidents keeps children safe.

Early childhood education and care services in NSW are required to implement the Child Safe Standards under the NSW Child Safe Scheme.

The NSW Regulatory Authority has collaborated with the Office of the Children's Guardian to develop resources to support services to strengthen their child safe practises and culture with practical guidance.

This guidance will assist you in implementing the Child Safe Standards and ensuring that children's well being remains at the centre of decision making across your service, including within your reporting processes.

The free resources are designed for approved providers, service leaders and educators within all ECEC service types. The e-Learning has three different pathways centre based such as long daycare and preschools, outside school hours care and family daycare. Each pathway includes 6 modules, 1 to 3 are aimed at all educators and staff, while modules 4 to 6 are aim specifically for service leaders.

Modules 3 and 4 I'd like to point out today because they're specifically on reporting for educators and leaders, and we'll share the link to these modules in the Q&A for you this morning.

We encourage everyone to engage with these resources, sharing and discussing with your colleagues and service leaders.

I'm now delighted to hand you over to my colleague, Brett Lalor, who is going to take you through the investigations portion of this webinar. Thank you, Brett, over to you.

Speaker: Brett Lalor

Thank you. Always a good morning, everybody. My name is Brett Lalor. I'm currently Manager of our Investigations team.

Today I'll talk with you about our investigation process and discuss our roles as mandatory reporters. So without further ado, let's talk about investigations which commence in response to the reporting of a complaint or incident.

Accurate reports are critical to ensuring evidence is sufficient to support a positive outcome for children.

Any delay in reporting may compromise evidence and child safety in your service.

This slide shows an indicative time frame that may adjust depending on our work with other agencies including NSW Police.

I will now take you through the process of an investigation by discussing each phase.

So phase one, the initial assessment, the investigation is assigned to an investigator and the investigator assesses information to determine required action.

The investigator will contact the service to introduce themselves to advise the service of the incident they are investigating and to foreshadow they will be requesting documentation from the service and attending the service in due course.

Speak with the approved provider, nominated supervisor or other educators at the service.

Phase two planning. An investigation plan is developed to inform direction and ensure consistency of the investigation.

The plan will detail the offences an investigator will be looking at and will detail possible evidence they will be looking to obtain to determine whether any offence has been committed.

Evidence that an investigator will need to collect will include documentation from the service such as enrolment records for the child, attendance records, staff records and working with children records.

Other evidence may include CCTV footage and statements from educators of the service and potentially from parents of the child.

Phase three, Conducting the Investigation. Investigator conducts field inquiries, obtains and examines records, interviews witnesses and affected parties.

One of our key stakeholders throughout this process are the parents of the children impacted by an incident involving their child.

In most cases, when a matter is allocated to an investigator, you will be contacted and a time will be arranged for that investigator to attend the service so visits are generally announced.

The process of the investigation will be explained to you and at this time the investigator would generally request specific documents.

This may include enrolment forms, staff rosters and other evidence including CCTV footage.

At times other agencies including NSW Police may be involved and only limited information can be provided to you.

Attendance at the service occurs under Section 199 of the Children Education and Care Services National Law.

That section provides an authorised officer may exercise the powers under this section to investigate an approved education and care service if the authorised officer reasonably suspects that an offence may have been or may be being committed against this law.

The authorised officer, with any necessary assistance, may, with or without the consent of the occupier of the premises, enter the Education and Care Service premises at any reasonable time and do any of the following.

a) Search any part of the premises.
b) Inspect, measure, test, photograph or film or make audio recordings of any part of the premises or anything at the premises.
c) Take a thing or a sample of or from a thing at the premises for analysis, measurement or testing.
d) Copy or take an extract from a document at the premises.
e) Take into or onto the premises any person, equipment or materials the authorised officer reasonably requires for exercising the power under this subsection.
f) Require the occupier of the premises or a person at the premises to give the authorised officer information.

The authorised officer to help the authorised officer rather in conducting the investigation.

Investigators will always attempt to mitigate any disruptions at the service which may affect children's activities and the maintenance of ratios at your service, sometimes to address intermediate risk of harm to children.

An unannounced visit will occur when an investigator attends the service.

They will seek to speak with educators and any other relevant staff to determine whether they have any information that is relevant to the investigation.

If they do, a formal statement may be taken from that person by the investigator after all relevant evidence and information is collected and analysis is conducted by the investigator to determine whether there may be a breach of the national law, consistent with our focus on procedural fairness.

Should it be determined a breach may have been committed, an invitation affording an opportunity to the educator, nominated supervisor or approved provider to attend an interview may be extended.

That interview, which is voluntary, will be electronically recorded.

Questions relevant to the investigation will be asked by the investigator to provide the person with the opportunity to provide their versions of events.

Information provided by any person interviewed will be considered in making a decision on whether the national law has been breached.

If a person declines an interview, a decision on whether there has been a breach of the national law will be made based on the information available.

Phase 4 Finalising the investigation. The investigator prepares a report of the investigation, including evidence identified, findings and recommend recommendations as appropriate.

The final report is then reviewed by the senior investigator and manager.

Where the evidence is not strong enough to establish a breach of the national law has been committed, the investigator will make this conclusion and recommend no further action be taken.

If the evidence shows that a breach of the national law has been committed, the investigator will recommend an appropriate sanction be applied to the educator, nominated supervisor or approved provider.

Any sanction that is recommended must be reasonable and proportionate to the circumstances of any breach.

For example, if a service has incorrect details on the enrolment record of a child, it's unlikely an investigator will recommend a serious sanction such as a prosecution.
For example, regulatory guidance may be provided in this case.

Once an investigation has been completed, the investigator will contact relevant parties to advise them of the outcome.

Relevant parties may include any persons who were subject to allegations, most often an educator, nominated supervisor or approved provider.

Parents of children impacted and complainants are also advised of the outcome.

It should be noted though that on occasion only limited information can be provided as investigators are bound by confidentiality. Focus on departmental investigations. General approach. I know that it can be stressful when an investigator attends a service and starts gathering evidence and speaking to educators and staff, but this is just part of our process.

An investigator needs to follow to gather all the evidence that might be relevant to an incident.

The main focus of for the investigator is to get to the bottom of what happened and if there has been a breach of the national law to make recommendations on what the best response to any breach is. It is not about punishing a service or staff at a service.

Investigators are expected to comply with the Department's Code of Conduct policy as well as the Code of Ethics and Conduct for NSW Government sector employees.
Investigators have key legislated and procedural responsibilities when conducting an investigation.

These include showing their identity card upon entry, introducing themselves and explaining the purpose of the visit, signing the visitors register if applicable and making reasonable requests and where applicable, providing feedback, directions and regulatory guidance.

Risk of children National Law offences and standard of proof as you were on, are no doubt aware.

There are a number of offences under the national law and for an investigator to conclude that an offence has been substantiated, they need to be satisfied that the evidence establishes beyond reasonable doubt that an offence has been committed.

If there is any doubt in the evidence collected, an investigator will not find that an offence has been committed.

As I mentioned earlier, the Department may also take specific action to address risk to children in education and care, including prohibiting a person or issuing an emergency action notice.

In this case, the evidence will need to establish that it is more likely there is a risk rather than establishing any risk beyond reasonable doubt.
These are two different standards of proof that an investigator will apply when looking at any alleged National Law breaches or potential risk to children.

Procedural fairness. Investigators are expected to act in a manner that is procedurally fair when dealing with approved providers, nominated supervisors and educators.

So what does this mean exactly?
It means that an investigator is impartial and free from actual or apparent bias, Will ensure the person whose interest will be affected by proposed decision receives a fair hearing, including the opportunity to respond to any adverse material that could influence the decision, and will ensure findings are based on evidence that is relevant and logically capable of supporting the findings made.

What this means is that an investigator has evidence that an approved provider, nominated supervisor or educator may have breached the National Law.

That person will be provided with an opportunity to attend an interview, to answer questions and to provide their views and their response to any allegations.

The investigator will then objectively assess all the evidence, including information provided by that person, and make a decision on whether the evidence substantiates any breach.

If the evidence does not, no further action will be taken.
It is important to note that procedural fairness does not require an investigator to provide a person with all the evidence they have in relation to a breach they are investigating.

Interaction with services.

Most services engaged positively with investigators provide one full assistance and a very responsive.

While it is rarely an issue, there is an expectation that all providers and services engaging with investigators display respectful conduct and comply with their lawful requests.

This includes supporting the investigator to undertake their duties and displaying professional courtesy and communicating respectfully with the officer.

Inappropriate behaviour may call into question a provider or nominated supervisors fitness and propriety.

It may also indicate that a person may be an inappropriate person as defined in Section 171 of the National Law.
Section 171 of the National Law provides that an inappropriate person means a person who may pose a risk to the safety, health or well being of any child or children being educated and cared for by the service or whose behaviour or state of mind, or whose pattern of behaviour or common state of mind is such that it would be inappropriate for him or her to be on the service premises while children are being cared for by the service.

It is also an offence for a person to obstruct an authorised officer as provided by Section 2O7 of the National Law. Fail to assist an authorised officer as provided by Section 2O8 of the National Law. Provide an authorised officer false or misleading information or documents as provided by Section 295 of the National Law. Or to take serious detrimental action against another person who has made a protected disclosure to an investigator as provided by Section 297 of the National Law.

Earlier, I spoke briefly about procedural fairness.
The National Law provides for a formal show cause process to occur when the Department is considering taking specific action against an approved provider, educator or nominated supervisor.

Where a matter is serious and the Department is considering prohibiting a person or cancelling or suspending a provider or service approval, the department is required to issue a letter, called a show cause notice, to the approved provider or person telling them that action and why we are taking that action and asking them to provide a response.

Any response provided must be considered by the Department before it makes a final decision on whether it should issue a prohibition or cancel or suspend an approval to operate.

Services will often need to undertake their own internal investigations into an incident they have reported to the department. This may be because an incident constitutes A reportable conduct or it may be the service needs to assess whether disciplinary action is warranted.

In most cases, an internal service investigation can proceed and it should not have any detrimental impact on the department's investigation.

If for some reason it may jeopardise the departmental investigation, the investigator will advise the service of this.
It may be that some evidence collected by a service can be used by an investigator, but in most cases, as the proofs required under the National Law are different, an investigator will need to collect their own evidence.
At the end of the investigation, an investigator will advise the service of the outcome.

If no breach of the National Law was substantiated on the evidence, the investigator will tell the approved provider and the nominated supervisor and no further action will be taken.

If a compliance notice or compliance direction is issued, a service will generally be required to provide evidence about what they have done to comply with the notice or direction.

An example may be evidence that all educators have undertaken refresher training on supervision practises of the service.
For example, if a gate failed to latch properly because it was defective, we may ask for evidence the gate has been replaced or repaired.

Investigators will also advise a complainant of any outcome and any parent of any child involved in the incident being investigated.

It needs to be noted, however, that under Section 273 of the National Law, as officers exercising functions under that law, investigators are not able to disclose to another person information that is protected.

Protected information is defined to mean information that is personal to an individual that identifies that individual.

So investigators may not be able to advise parents or complainants of the detailed action taken in response to any substantiated breaches due to these confidentiality requirements.

Before I move on to the next topic, just a reminder, if you have any questions regarding investigations, Investigator Neil Herron is standing by to answer your questions in the chat. Thank you, Neil.

Information sharing. To address any potential risks to children.
The department may also share information with other agencies.

The provisions of Chapter 16A of the Children and Young Persons Care and Protection Act provides that a prescribed body may provide information relating to the safety, welfare or well being of children to another prescribed body if the provision of that information would assist in making any decision, assessment or plan, or to initiate or conduct any investigation or to provide any service relating to the safety, welfare or well being of the children or to manage any risk to children.

These agencies include NSW Police, the Office of the Children's Guardian and the Department of Communities and Justice. Taking responsibility for child safety policies and procedures.

Legal responsibility for compliance with the national law rests with the approved provider and nominated supervisor.

It must ensure all children are adequately supervised, all reasonable precautions are taken to protect children from harm hazards and that no child is subjected to inappropriate discipline or corporal punishment.

That obligation is an absolute one.
If supervision policies are not followed and a child leaves the service, the approved provider is ultimately responsible.

So it's critical for the approved providers to have excellent recruitment practices to get the right people into their services and to have excellent policies and procedures to ensure that everyone at the service is aware of the details of these policies and procedures and to ensure they're followed.

Compliance monitoring. So how do you provide?
How do providers ensure policies and procedures are followed?

By having robust governance frameworks and internal audit function, or simply regularly checking that everyone working at a service is aware of the details of the policies and procedures and that they are being followed.

If any concerns are identified in this regard, arrange for a discussion on the relevant policy or procedure at a staff meeting where matters can be addressed.

Mandatory reporting.
Everyone would no doubt agree that the safety, health and well being of children in education care is paramount.

If you or anyone at your service identifies anything that indicates a child may be at risk of significant harm, it is critical that any concerns be reported to DCJ, the Department of Education and Police.

If you have any concerns regarding an interaction or incident at your service involving an educator and a child, you must report those concerns to NSW Police as soon as practicable.

This would include any concerns you have regarding incidents of physical or sexual abuse, any potential grooming behaviours or inappropriate interactions with children, or any other indications that a child may be at risk.

Whether these concerns relate to the child at home or in education and care, we all need to take our child protection obligations seriously.

If you have any concerns, report them to DCJ, the OCG, the Department of Education or NSW Police and make sure you keep a record of that report.

The investigations team often encounter individuals who, for many different reasons personal to them, chose against making a mandatory report.

We have always asked people do you understand your obligations as a mandatory reporter or what would you do if you suspect that a child was at risk of harm with the focus on testing their knowledge and awareness of their mandatory reporting obligations?

Yet why do so many choose to stay silent?
Investigators often encounter situations whereby a mandatory reporter failed to make a report despite having full knowledge of their obligations to do so.

Common reasons provided have included fear of retribution from the alleged offender, nominated supervisor or the approved provider, fear of not being believed, not believing or listening to the child, not wanting to get in trouble or not being sure if they are correct in what they suspected may have occurred, or fear of getting someone wrongly accused terminated by their employment.

Perhaps in addition to asking questions framed around their knowledge of mandatory reporting, we can also ask questions aimed to draw out and discuss the barriers that would deter people from making a report.

We can then have an open, nonjudgmental and honest conversation about them because failure to make such an important report can have dire consequences for not only the child but for you and your staff.

Remember, all adults in NSW are required to report information to the police if they know, believe or reasonably ought to know that a child has been abused.

Failing to report information to police without a reasonable excuse is an offence punishable by up to two years imprisonment.

Please also bear in mind that if you receive new or updated information concerning a child or matter that you have reported, you must also report that updated information as it could signify an increase of risk to that child.

Sector wide risk. The Department of Education, by virtue of its role, takes a sector wide view of risk and can take action to address risk that a person may present to all children in education and care.

This includes prohibiting a person from being involved in any way in the provision of an education and care service.

It is an offence for a person who is prohibited to work in an education and care service in any jurisdiction and is also an offence for an approved provider to employ a person has been prohibited.

Approved providers can check whether a person has been prohibited via the NQA ITS portal.

However, if you're unsure how to do this, please contact our Information and Inquiries team who can assist you.

The Department of Education may also take action to address immediate risk by directing an approved provider to exclude a person who may pose a risk to children from education and care services while children are present.

It is an offence for an approved provider to not comply with that direction.

So this brings us to the end of this webinar. We hope this will help you all understand the process of investigations and will encourage some meaningful conversations on reporting. Please scan the QR code to provide feedback on this webinar.

You may also refer to the SQL website where you will find the National Decision Tree, which assists approved providers in deciding whether a notification is required and the time frame in which that notification should be made.

Thank you to everybody who's joined us and listened into this session this morning. Please keep an eye out for our upcoming sessions.

Have a great day and thank you for your ongoing diligence in keeping our children safe.

[End of Transcript]

Mandatory Reporter Guide

Office of the Children’s Guardian, implementing the Child Safe Standards eLearning series

Reporting concerns:

NSW Police

• For urgent and immediate risk phone 000
• For all other criminal matters contact Crime stoppers on 1800 333 000

Department of Communities and Justice (DCJ)

• For concerns about a child, contact:
  Child protection Helpline phone 13 21 11

Office of the Children’s Guardian (OCG)

• For concerns about a staff member, notifications can be made online using the forms available on the OCG’s Reportable Conduct Scheme webpage
• For enquiries about the Reportable Conduct Scheme please contact: reportableconduct@ocg.nsw.gov.au

ECEC Regulatory Authority

• For incidents which have occurred at a service, notifications are to be submitted through NQA ITS portal: https://portal.nqaits.gov.au/
• NSW ECEC RA Information and Enquiries team – phone: 1800 619 113 or email: ececd@det.nsw.edu.au