The troubling picture of children left at risk shows the slim resourcing of the state regulator at a time when reports of sex offences had tripled in five years.
Sex offence reports against children in Victorian childcare centres tripled in the five years before accused paedophile Joshua Brown was charged with abusing children.
Despite this, the childcare regulator’s internal strategy reveals concerns about slim resourcing – which in June this year left an average of one authorised officer for every 66 services across the state.
Governments have been warned for years that predators exploit gaps in childcare regulation.
The troubling picture of children left at risk is contained in police data compiled by the Crime Statistics Agency for The Age and documents tabled in the last parliamentary sitting days of the year.
The crime data shows that recorded sexual offences against children under five years old at early education sites climbed from six incidents in the 2020-2021 financial year to at least 18 last financial year. Assaults reported against children in childcare were also up 73 per cent in that time.
That data does not include the more than 150 charges against childcare worker Brown who police arrested in May after the alleged discovery of a cache of child sex abuse material. The 26-year-old has since been charged with abusing babies and toddlers in at least four childcare centres across Melbourne between March 2019 and May this year.
The state’s childcare regulator, the Department of Education’s Quality Assessment and Regulation Division (QARD), is tasked with checking that services meet national minimum standards and can penalise those that don’t.
Melbourne childcare worker and accused paedophile Joshua Dale Brown.
But this masthead has revealed how serious safety problems have continued for years at centres that the regulator has issued with sanctions, including at the two large childcare chains where Brown worked – G8 and Affinity – and, in at least one case, during the time when .
Since the Brown revelations, the Allan government has repeatedly failed to produce either data or detail on abuse reports in childcare across the state, despite similar information being handed over in New South Wales by order of parliament.
When the same request was made by the Victorian Greens, the government produced only partial documents outlining policy, not individual incidents.
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Those tabled documents reveal the childcare regulator’s internal strategy for the next three years, and the department’s own concerns that understaffing in the sector is putting “children at risk”.
Though bureaucrats told a recent parliamentary inquiry the regulator had a “significant presence” on site inspecting centres, the internal strategy speaks repeatedly of slim resources.
On June 30, there was just one assessor for every 66 services in the state, on average.
These authorised officers are responsible for conducting ratings assessments, unannounced compliance visits and other investigations and inspections.
The department said extra authorised officers had been employed since June, but it takes nine to 12 months to train them in the specialist skills needed for them to work at full capacity.
In the case of family daycare, assessors are instructed to visit the provider head office and are only required to inspect a handful of actual centres, run out of individual educators’ homes, though hundreds might be on one provider’s books.
“As a rule of thumb, if the approved provider has 30 educators, it would be reasonable to visit at least 2-3 educators,” the policy reads.
That means most family daycare centres aren’t being inspected at all – despite a known problem with illegal operations.
The Brown case has sparked urgent national reforms, including the creation of a register to share information on childcare workers between states and departments and a new, independent regulator for Victoria with more powers.
But Greens MP Anasina Gray-Barberio, who is chairing the childcare inquiry, said the Victorian government had “failed to keep pace with the growing risks in the childcare sector”. It was now more interested in secrecy and “damage control” than cleaning up the crisis in the industry, she said.
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The inquiry this month heard that warnings in 2022 from both the ombudsman and the children and young people’s commissioner that Victoria’s working with children check system needed an urgent overhaul were not acted on for more than three years.
Brown had worked at 24 childcare centres across Melbourne and had been fired from at least three of them by the time of his arrest, this masthead revealed in July. But he attracted little notice from employers and regulators, who missed errors on his resume and chose not to review his working with children check.
It was a symptom of what providers called the “black box” of bureaucracy, where complaints about workers were often not shared with them, or even between departments.
The ombudsman is now investigating the existing childcare regulator, which was excluded from the remit of the Allan government’s “rapid review” into childcare after the Brown charges.
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“Only after sustained pressure and a parliamentary inquiry, have we forced a fraction of the information to be released,” said Gray-Barberio of the Greens’ push to obtain detail on abuse reports. “But Labor still refuses to give us the full picture of regulation and enforcement in the childcare sector despite other states releasing the same information.”
The state government did not answer questions or provide data on incidents or enforcement actions, but has previously confirmed that reports of abuse in childcare have climbed even higher since the Brown revelations emerged in July.
A government spokesman said the new beefed-up regulator would begin from January 1 and carry out “more than double the frequency of compliance checks, because nothing is more important than the safety and wellbeing of our youngest Victorians”.
