Staffing and supervision are essential components of ensuring children are safe in ECEC. This theme focuses on robust child safe recruitment and induction processes to ensure all staff in ECEC are suitable to work with children and understand their roles in keeping children safe.

It also highlights the importance of maintaining adequate supervision at all times, and how supervision requirements and educator-to-child ratios work together to create environments that focus on the needs, safety and wellbeing of children.

Upholding a strong reporting culture is critical to safeguarding children. Additionally, it is against the law to fail to report child abuse.

This theme focuses on the responsibility all staff in ECEC services have to report allegations of abuse and what to do if they witness or suspect that a child is at risk of abuse, harm, neglect or ill-treatment.

It covers child protection awareness, ensuring staff can identify signs of grooming or harmful behaviours exhibited towards children. It also focuses on the importance of having clear policies and procedures in place.

Safe physical environments are critical to protecting children from harm and ensuring their wellbeing in ECEC.

This theme looks at the importance of having premises and spaces that support adequate supervision and offer clear lines of sight at all times.

It also looks at the importance of effective risk management policies and procedures to identify and address potential hazards throughout the ECEC spaces, including in family day care services. Having effective risk management processes and practices in place reduce the likelihood of children being harmed or abused. By focusing on this theme, the program aims to increase ECEC services’ compliance in risk management and supervision practice.

Building positive and respectful relationship with children is a key step in ensuring they feel safe.

This theme focuses on fostering supportive interactions with children and creating and maintaining environments where they feel safe, valued, understood and supported to learn. It emphasises the importance of using trauma-informed practices to recognise and respond to the emotional needs of children.

Theme 4 also aims to build awareness about appropriate interactions with children and what is considered an offence of inappropriate discipline under the National Law.

Creating child safe online environments is a key aspect of protecting children in the digital world. This theme focuses on promoting a child safe culture when it comes to taking, sharing and storing images or videos of children in ECEC settings, referencing the National Model Code. It aims to build awareness among educators and service providers about the potential risks and responsibilities involved in using digital media around children and provide services with regulatory knowledge and practical guidance on implementing a safe online environment for children.

Legislative requirements relating to child safe recruitment and employment in NSW require approved providers to embed robust child safe practices across the full employee lifecycle. This includes ensuring that their staffing policies and procedures clearly set out how services will attract, recruit, onboard and continuously support staff in a way that prioritises children’s safety and wellbeing.

This theme will support the sector to understand these reforms in a practical and consistent way, reinforcing that child safety is not a one-off check at recruitment, but an ongoing responsibility throughout employment. It will build capability across services to strengthen systems, reduce risk and ensure all staff are suitable and supported to uphold the rights and best interests of children. It will have a key focus on:

• developing a child safe recruitment policy
• record keeping
• the responsibilities of recruitment agencies in implementing robust child safe recruitment practices
• child safe onboarding practices
• child safety training and child protection training requirements in NSW
• legislative requirements relating to recruitment and employment practices.

Legislative requirements relating to child safe environments in NSW require approved providers to specifically address key elements of how they will provide a child safe environment in their documented policies and procedures. This includes clear reporting steps and responsibilities, and ensuring staff are familiar with and can easily access the NSW Early Learning Commission’s reporting decision tree (currently referred to as the reporting guide).

This theme will build on earlier guidance from Reporting culture, and will focus on capability, confidence and consistency in recognising and responding to concerns. It aims to support approved providers, service leaders and service staff to move beyond awareness to action – ensuring they know what to look out for, what to do and feel supported to speak up. This will included guidance on:

• recognising and reporting grooming behaviours
• uplifting understanding around whistleblower protections
• legislative requirements relating to inappropriate conduct
• trauma-informed responses.

This theme will build on guidance provided in the Staffing and supervision theme, with a stronger focus on how effective supervision is applied in practice across different environments and scenarios. It will provide practical advice to support services to identify risks, make informed decisions and strengthen their supervision practices in a way that prioritises children’s safety at all times. This will include specific guidance on:

• family day care environment, recognising the unique risks of home-based settings
• maintaining clear lines of sight
• the link between ratios and supervision
• physical environment security and unaccounted for children
• high risk activities such as transitions
• developing and updating risk assessments
• rostering for children’s safety
• guidance on single educator models.