Press conference - Narwee, NSW

ZHI SOON, MEMBER FOR BANKS: Good morning, everyone and welcome to the electorate of Banks, but particularly welcome to the wonderful suburb of Narwee. Thank you to Goodstart Learning, the leadership, but also the centre leadership and all the educators and staff that work here at Goodstart Learning in Narwee. But also thank you to all the kids who gave us the opportunity to do a bit of drawing, a little bit of painting, and on my side of things, a little bit of hairdressing as well. 

We are on the land of the Bidjigal people, so I wanted to acknowledge their continual custodianship of the land, waterways and airways of this area for generations. You might not know this, but Narwee actually means sun. And look, it’s a rather dim and wet day in Sydney at the moment, so we can definitely with a little bit more sun. It’s an absolute pleasure today to be able to welcome the Minister for Education, Jason Clare, as well as the Minister for Early Childhood Education and Youth, Jess Walsh. Early childhood education is something I’m profoundly passionate about, both at a professional level, making sure we’ve got accessibility but also high-quality early childhood education, but also on a personal level, because I’ve got a little daughter called Dorothy, who’s 15 months and is currently in early childhood education. So, look, I wanted to say a huge thank you to all the early childhood workers and staff all across the country for what they’re doing for our kids. But I’ll hand over to my ministerial colleagues now to get on with the discussion. Thank you. 

JASON CLARE, MINISTER FOR EDUCATION: G’day, everyone. Thank you very much for coming along. And to John and Ros and Nicole and the whole team at Goodstart, thank you for welcoming us into the centre here at Narwee. We had some fun with the kids just a minute ago. You can probably tell I’m a father of a four-year-old. So that’s awesome, really appreciate that. What you do here is important. What happens in the first five years of life makes the people that we become. And everything that you see, that you hear, every smile, every lesson, shapes the people that we become. And so the work that happens in places like this matters. And I don’t need to remind anybody about the shocking allegations that every Australian learned about last year – allegations of serious crimes being committed in our child care centres. It shocked the country, it sickened the country, it shocked and it sickened me. And I made the point then – I was pretty blunt – I said that not enough action had been taken and not quick enough. And that’s on state governments, it’s on federal governments, it’s on Labor governments and it’s on Liberal governments. And with Jess we brought ministers from across the country together and developed a plan on the action that we need to take to make our centres safer, to protect the most important people in this world – our children. And that includes a number of things. It includes the legislation that we passed through the parliament last year to enable us to cut funding to centres that aren’t meeting quality standards. It also includes a trial of closed-circuit television cameras in about 300 centres across the country. And I can tell you that Federal Police have now agreed to help oversee that trial and that’s now rolling out across the country. And it also includes banning personal mobile phones in our centres. I don’t think I need to remind you why that is so important. And today, two other very big and important parts of the plan that we announced last year begin – and that’s the national register and mandatory safety training. 

The events that happened in Victoria last year I think remind us why a national register is important. I ask you to think about the work that the Victorian police had to do and the work that they had to do to try and find out where that individual worked. And where they thought he worked wasn’t always where he worked. I said at the time we should have a system that allows us to press a button so that we know where workers are, where they’ve worked, the centres that they’ve been at and the states where they’ve worked as well. That’s what this register is all about. That’s why we’re investing about $45 million in it to set it up, and it’s been tested and trialled over the last few months, and it becomes mandatory for every centre to fill in the details in that register from today. And every provider will have a month now to do that. That’s the national register. Mandatory training for all workers, but not just the people who work in our centres, for the CEO, too – Ros, I’ve got to let you know – the board of directors, that all starts today as well. And of all the things that we’re doing here, I really do think this is the most important because it’s the people who work in our centres who are our best assets here – 99.9 per cent of the people who work in our early education and care system love our kids, care for our kids, educate our kids, protect our kids, want the best for our kids. Can I use this as an opportunity to again give a shoutout to you and thank you from the bottom of my heart for everything you did. I am personally invested in this because you look after my child, too, as well as millions of other children around the country now, in the past and in the future. And we’re counting on you. And we want to make sure that you’ve got the skills that you need to be able identify someone who might be hiding in clear sight, somebody who might not just be grooming a child in a centre but be grooming you, trying to distract you from the work that you’re doing, and make sure that you’ve got the skills that you need to be able to identify them, to be able to call them out and to act. And that’s what this training is all about. 

It's been developed by the Australian Centre for Child Protection, it starts today. There’s about 100,000 educators who have already registered for it. We’ve got the next six months now to train the workforce for it. And as part of that, centres will be able to close a couple of days a year from 5pm. And I know that this is going to be a disruption for mums and dads across the country. I know it’s going to be an inconvenience for families across the country, but I want you to know that I want to make sure that this training is done properly. And part of that is making sure it’s done in places like this. And that’s why we’re doing this – because I want the training done and I want to make sure it’s done well, because I want to make sure our kids are safe. And so that’s what this training is all about, and it starts from today, too. Just finally, I want to give you an update on the legislation that we passed through parliament and the actions that we have taken since then. That legislation, as I said a moment ago, gives us the power to cut off funding to centres that aren’t meeting quality standards. And so far, we have put notices on 60 centres across the country. These are centres that haven’t met quality standards for seven years. 

They’re centres that have been identified through the work that my Department has done with State and Territory regulators as well. And for 30 of those centres, the deadline for them to meet that standard has now come. I can tell you a couple of things. The first is that of those 30, 19 of those centres have now met quality standards. Now, that tells me something – I hope it tells you something as well – and that is that the threat of having their funding cut off has forced them to act. Centres that haven’t met the quality standards for seven years have suddenly done it because they realise that we are serious here. This is not an idle threat. One other centre has closed. Another centre is still waiting for the regulator to check to see if they now meet the quality standards, and nine other centres have failed to meet those standards. Most of those are in family day care. The next step is for my Department to contact those centres and ask them to show cause why we should not take the following step in the legislation to either suspend their Child Care Subsidy funding or cancel it altogether. I’ll have more to say about that in the next few weeks. I’ll just hand over to Jess now to say a few words about the decisions that were taken by Education Ministers last week and the next steps we’re taking there. 

JESS WALSH, MINISTER FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION: Thanks very much, Jason. And as Jason said, our top priority is keeping children safe in early learning. And our nation’s dedicated and passionate and committed early childhood educators are our best asset in keeping children safe. That’s why we asked the national quality authority, ACECQA, to do a review of safe staffing and supervision practices across the sector. Today we are releasing that really important review and Education Ministers have accepted all four recommendations in ACECQA’s review. ACECQA found that on the whole, the majority of providers are doing the right thing. They’re working hard to keep children safe in their services. But they also found that a number of providers are using an unsafe business practice. 

They’re using a bad business practice of misusing under-the-roofline ratios to understaff their services. And they told us that that is not safe for children. So we have accepted ACECQA’s recommendations about changing that. And in accepting those recommendations, we are banning the bad business practice of misuse of under-the-roofline ratios. To do that, we’re accepting ACECQA’s advice to remove the provision that they tell us allowed this practice to occur. In 2018, a change came into place allowing services to plan their ratios across the service. ACECQA told us that we should remove that reference to ‘across the service’ from the national law, and we will do that. ACECQA told us that we should replace that with new guidance from ACECQA about the exceptional circumstances where it is OK to have a flexible ratio in place that helps keep children safe. And we will do that. ACECQA will provide that guidance and regulators will enforce that guidance. Again, we’ve asked ACECQA, the independent quality authority, to do this important work. 

They’ve found that the majority of providers are doing the right thing. They’ve found that some providers are using an unsafe business practice of misusing under-the-roofline ratios. They’ve told us how to end that practice. We’ve accepted their recommendations, and as a result we are banning the unsafe practice of misuse of under-the-roofline ratios. And we will also accept their recommendation to better define adequate supervision. We want all children to be adequately supervised in every service every day. ACECQA has told us that that should be better defined in the law and that providers and regulators should have the tools to ensure that that adequate supervision is occurring. And, again, we have accepted all four recommendations of ACECQA’s report. And I’ll now hand over to the CEO of Goodstart, Ros Baxter. 

ROS BAXTER, CEO OF GOODSTART EARLY LEARNING: Thanks, Minister. I’m Ros Baxter, CEO of Goodstart Early Learning. We’re Australia’s largest provider of early childhood education and care, and we’re also one of the only not-for-profit organisations in this country that devotes every dollar that we earn to improving children’s outcomes, quality and safety. So we’re excited to welcome you all here today to beautiful Goodstart Narwee. Particularly excited to welcome our local member and our ministers and our representative of our union, who’ve been a great partner to Goodstart and to our people, certainly in the time that I’ve been in this role and well beyond. We are really excited about the work that the Government has done in really focusing on early learning over the last few years. We’ve been thrilled to see the changes that have been made to affordability, to accessibility, to the 3 Day Guarantee and to now really focus in on quality and safety. The changes that take effect today are important to Goodstart. We’re an organisation that not only cares for and educates children but also has a really strong role in driving reform that is good for children. And many of the things that take effect today are things we’ve called for for some time. So Goodstart undertakes mandatory safety and safeguarding training for all of our workers right across the whole organisation. 

And it’s great to see that from today there’ll be nationally consistent child safe training. And we’re really looking forward to reviewing that and implementing that across our centres. We’re also really pleased to see the mobile phone bans which have taken place from today, and it was great to see the ministers checking their phones in at the front door before they came in to join us at Goodstart Narwee today. In particular, I’m excited to here today from Minister Walsh about the changes that are being worked through to this business practice of under the roofline ratio. Goodstart has raised this practice in several of our submissions that we’ve made over the last few years, and we know that it is often used in an inappropriate way. For Goodstart, we always staff to minimum ACECQA ratios and in many cases well beyond where the needs of the children, the needs of the centre, the needs of safety and quality demand it. So we are really excited that ministers have committed to working through these changes with high-quality providers to get them right. I always say that the people we need to be talking to are people like Nikki and her staff here on the ground, and that’s certainly what Goodstart will do. They have been the voice of the call for many of these changes for a long time. 

I’ve been to 180 Goodstart centres over the last three years and I can tell you that our people are as devastated by the revelations of the last couple of years as everyone in the community is. We take our obligation to keep children safe and to help transform their lives very seriously. And so we are really excited to work with your Government over the coming weeks and months as we work through, implement and embed some of these changes. And we’re really happen to have you all here today to see what a centre that exceeds the national quality standards looks like and what it can offer for the children of the country. So thanks, everyone. I’d like to give a special shoutout to Nikki and her team for being here very early this morning to help get everything ready and for the children who came to just make our day that little much brighter. Thanks, everyone. 

JO SCHOFIELD, NATIONAL PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED WORKERS UNION: Thank you. Hi, everyone. I’m Jo Schofield, I’m from the United Workers Union. I’m the National President. Look, I’m here to really thank the Labor Government for this really groundbreaking change on behalf of educators. Educators have long argued and fought for the closing of the loophole around under the roof ratios. Motivated as always by their absolute commitment to quality education for every child, to safety and also the impact of under the roof ratios has just resulted in too much staff burnout and pressure and stress on educators on the job, so this is a really important change. Part of an ongoing transformation of this sector that educators have been passionate about and fighting for for many, many years. So we really welcome this change. We are committed to working with the Government. I note that both ministers have spoken about the critical role of educators on the ground in being the eyes and ears of how the sector is operating. We look forward to continuing to fulfil that role and to make sure that these changes deliver the sort of outcomes that they’re intended to deliver, you know, across the sector. So, I want to thank both ministers and the Labor Government for listening and for taking fast action to close these loopholes and put the sector onto a much stronger footing into the future. Thank you. 

JOURNALIST: Can you please provide some specific examples of what these nine centres either did or failed to do in relation to failing to meet these national quality standards? 

CLARE: I’ll give you some examples of where centres failed to meet the national quality standards. This is not specific to those nine centres, but just – feel free, Ros, maybe you can elaborate on some examples of this – but point number one is if the centres aren’t safe, it can be shut today. And centres have been. So if the State or the Territory regulators have evidence that comes to them that says that children are unsafe in a centre, they can turn up today and they can close it, and that is happening. We’ve seen examples of that in New South Wales just in the last few months. But we also say that we’ve set national standards for a reason, and we want all centres to meet them. Now, some of those standards that centres may not meet might not be having safety signs, may be a dodgy step, it might be that the workforce don’t meet the sort of ratios and requirements that we’re talking about, or that they may not have an emergency response point when a child is injured. They’re the sorts of things, the sort of basic things, that every centre should have. And in the case of these centres and all 30 – actually, all 60 centres that have been put on notice so far – they’ve failed to do this for seven years. I think any reasonable Aussie hearing that for the first time would think, well, if you’re not prepared to meet the standards, then you shouldn’t be receiving taxpayers' money. And this is not an idle threat. I’m not mucking around here. The threat of cancelling the funding has forced 19 centres so far to act. And if the other centres aren’t prepared to act, then the powers in the Act are there to cut off their funding. 

JOURNALIST: Why haven’t you named those centres? 

CLARE: We haven’t named those centres so far because under the processes of the act the first step for us is to notify them and ask them to show reasons why they shouldn’t act. Following that, the powers are vested in my Department to issue a notice to them that they are cutting their funding. At that time, they will be required to tell the mums and dads and the children in that centre, and at that time those centres will be named. 

JOURNALIST: On the national working with children check database, why is that going to take three years to implement? 

CLARE: I think you’re talking about Working with Children Checks, maybe, rather than the register? 

JOURNALIST: Yeah, the Working with Children Check, yeah. 

CLARE: On that point, Attorney-Generals are meeting right now. There’s a meeting of Attorneys-General that’s happening today. That’s being chaired by Michelle Rowland. I think she’s made the point that this needs to happen ASAP. One of the problems with the way Working with Children Checks has worked is that there’s not a continuous update of them, so that information is shared from one State to another, because we know that some of these predators move from one State to another. So, Michelle has made the point – I’m sure she’ll make it again today – that we need continuous updating, and that means the sharing of information between States. The Commonwealth is investing millions of dollars to make that happen. 

JOURNALIST: On the under the roofline ratios and reviewing those, is there going to be an associated increase in fees if centres have to hire extra staff? And if centres do choose to increase fees, is the Government going to monitor how they do that? 

WALSH: So the answer to your question is no, there’s no implications for fees. This is a rule that was put in place in 2018, and it allowed services to calculate these really important staff-to-child ratios across the service. What that means is that some providers gamed those rules when they counted people who might not be with children and supervising children – who might be in the office or the kitchen – they counted them to ratios. That is not adequate supervision and it’s not safe. And that’s why we’ve accepted ACECQA’s advice to ban that unsafe practice and put an end to the bad business practice of misuse of under the roofline ratios. Your question went to fees. As a government, we want every child to have the benefits of access to quality early education because it gives children a great start in life. And that’s why our reforms have made early education more affordable. We’ve capped fee growth across the sector at 3.5 per cent, and our Cheaper Child Care reforms mean that the average family is paying around $3500 a year less than they otherwise would. So, we want more families to have access to the benefits of early childhood education. That’s why we’re making it safer. That’s why we’re making it more affordable. 

JOURNALIST: Minister, you said you won’t name the centres here. Do parents deserve to know if they’re in a community where their kids could be at risk? 

CLARE: Yes, and they will. It’s an important part of this process. Parents were required to be notified by all of these centres when we put conditions on them six months ago. OK? And parents will be informed when and if my Department makes the decision to cut their funding. 

JOURNALIST: Minister, you might have seen the stories in Victoria, Ilim College, an Islamic college that has been tracking young girls’ periods and has been accused of separating them from the rest of the cohort while they’re on their periods. The local Education Minister has responded to that, but the school will be funded by Federal and State sources. Are you concerned about the allegations that are coming out of Ilim College, and will the Federal Government be investigating given its funding [indistinct]?

CLARE: Look, I haven’t seen those allegations, and I haven’t seen what Ben has said. So, I’ll follow that up and give you a more fulsome response. But I would have thought at first instance the relevant State authority would be taking action in Victoria. And then when and if they do that, my Department also has the powers to act in this area. But I won’t make a more fulsome response until I have the details. 

JOURNALIST: And on universities as well, Julian Leeser, the Shadow Education Minister, came out and said that he wanted to see an end to group assessments at universities saying they should be based on individual skill and the universities should scrap these group assignments. What’s your thoughts on group assignments? Should they be scrapped? 

CLARE: Well, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that the Liberal Party are against teamwork, should we? You know, after all, you know, two study partners couldn’t complete an assignment without breaking up twice in the last couple of months. They did some work together the other day and 34 came up with one idea and 17 came up with another. So I get that the Liberal Party has some problems working together. I can see muffled laughter. 

JOURNALIST: Do you have advice for universities on that matter? 

CLARE: Look, it’s a matter for universities. But let’s get serious here, right? Most of the jobs that everybody does here behind the cameras require you to work together. We need individual people, whether they’re little, two, three, four or five or whether they’re teenagers to get all of the skills that they need as individuals. But one of the other great skills that you learn here when you’re little and that you learn when you’re big is how to work with others – how to work as part of a team. That’s why team sport on the weekend is so important as well. You can achieve more as a team than you can as an individual. And I started this press conference talking about my little rascal, four-year-old Atticus. He comes home and says, ‘Teamwork makes the dream work’. Right? And there’s a lot of truth in that. As I said, most jobs require you to be able to get on with each other, work with each other, get the best out of each other. And I’m not telling you anything that you don’t know. I’m sure you know the same in the job that you do. And so part of everything that we do – whether we’re little or whether we’re big – is about making sure that we’ve got the skills we need to work as part of a team.