Safeguarding in Childcare Settings: Best Practice

In August 2023, a trusted childcare worker was exposed as one of the most heinous paedophiles. A trusted childcare worker made offences against 91 children.

Our children are the next generation. They are the future leaders of countries, businesses, and households.

We want them to prosper and thrive in their early years, learning, growing, and most of all, feeling safe in their environment.

There are many steps involved in creating a safe environment within a childcare. Australian Childcare settings have many legislative obligations, policies and procedures to comply with at all times.

You are breaking the law if you undertake child-related work without a valid working with children’s check or equivalent. Your organisation is breaking the law if they allow an individual to undertake child-related work when they do not have a valid working with children’s check or equivalent at all times.

In Australia, daily revocations of WwWC checks range between 1 to 8, in each state. Additionally, numerous checks are suspended pending investigation. These checks are critical to ensure the safety of the children in your care, as they are revoked for investigations or crimes against vulnerable people.

The reality of safeguarding.

Too often, schools, childcare centres, sport groups and other organisations working closely with children will complete a police check and collect a WWCC when an employee is onboarded, and at best complete a validation within a year or 18 months.

This enables individuals with malicious intent to gain access to young vulnerable children.

Operation Tenterfield is a prime example of a heinous paedophile that evaded discovery for too long, a formerly trusted childcare worker.

The negative implications of a situation like this for a child are immense. The childcare sector needs to step in to prevent situations just like this. The need for heightened vigilance and robust safeguarding measures is more important than ever.

Lapses in checking worker credentials allows our worst child sex offenders to slip through the net, and like all criminals they know how to exploit loopholes between our states and territories and target organisations with poor organisational risk controls.

Best practice for childcare organisations

Collaboration between childcare providers, regulatory bodies and the community is crucial to creating safe environments for Australia’s young people.

1. Comprehensive training and ongoing processes to ensure staff are well equipped and certified for working in a childcare centre.
2. Stringent screening processes to ensure rigorous background checks on hiring , and ongoing verification of employee credentials to ensure suitability at all times during tenure.
3. Transparent communication and resources to provide all parents, staff and other stakeholders with access to the safeguarding policies so everyone understands the measures in place for the safety and wellbeing of the children.

How can you know that your employees are suitable to work and have the necessary right-to-work credentials?

Fulfilling these obligations is a real dilemma for HR managers who are ultimately responsible for the WWWC database, whether in childcare/education, business, sporting groups or organisations that have a constant need for staff, volunteers and various specialist activity providers who enter the programs on a regular basis.   Ensuring all have a valid check, and ensuring it remains valid is a significant manual task, until Oho.

Oho was born out of the confronting testimonies of the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Abuse, and the lived experience of survivors. Failure to monitor and verify right-to-work credentials can result in child abuse, breaches of standards, director liability and fines.

In 2023, Oho identified 38 revocations and an additional 1,200 irregularities requiring review.

Oho provides screening and continuous monitoring of a wide range of credentials relevant to child facing organisations and those that support them including national coverage of working with children checks and teachers licences, national disability worker cards, AHPRA (health and allied health), Visa Entitlement registrations (VEVO) and other background checks.

Oho rapidly notifies you of a status change so you can act quickly and intervene where necessary, keeping your vulnerable people safe.

The Oho platform provides:

• Cost savings: Oho’s automation in HR and recruitment processes can significantly save on costs. Oho clients have reported a minimum 3x Return on Investment (ROI) through our system automation.
• Increased efficiency: Oho conducts validations on recruitment and every 7 days of tenure, more frequent than most organisations, who may only complete verification once a year or not even at all after initial screening! Manually validating credentials is labour-intensive, inefficient and error prone. For instance, verifying credentials monthly for 6,000 employees and 7,000 contractors would take 5,200 hours annually.
• Risk mitigation: Oho minimises risk and the consequential financial implications. Accountability for ensuring the suitability for all workers, lies at the highest organisational level, directors. The average abuse claim costs $150,000, with some reaching as high as $3.7 million and with increasing exclusions and conditions from insurers, this represents a real and substantial financial risk.
• Audit trail: Oho maintains a permanent audit trail of checks completed, enabling organisations to meet various regulatory screening obligations and audit requirements and demonstrate weekly compliance.
• Visibility and centralisation: manage all accreditations from Oho’s platform and see all your staff, volunteers and contractors at a glance. Deal only with exceptions.

Oho protects over 2.9 million vulnerable Australians and has completed more than 8 million verifications.

Alexandra Ash, CEO of Gymnastics Australia, says “We have a zero-risk tolerance in terms of safeguarding children and young people and Oho’s platform really feeds into that. Oho is making sure we have ongoing verification of our Working With Children Checks enabling us to be the safest we can be.  Oho removes the administrative task and human error and really de-risks the WWC verification program for us. The favourite aspect about the Oho system for us is that instant verification, that’s what provides us the value and the real assurance that we are doing the right thing.”

Find out more here.