First Sydney centre shut under major childcare crackdown
SOURCE:Sydney Morning Herald|BY:Emily Kowal
A Sydney childcare centre that failed to meet national standards for more than 12 years has become the first to be closed under a major crackdown on the scandal-plagued sector.
A Sydney childcare centre that failed to meet national standards for more than 12 years has become the first to be closed under a major crackdown on the scandal-plagued sector.
Fun2Learn childcare centre in Rosehill was forced to permanently shut its doors on Friday, after decades of breaches, including emergency fire exit doors being padlocked shut, not having appropriate plans for children with severe allergies and unlabelled chemicals lying around in children’s bathrooms.
Under tough new measures introduced after a series of scandals exposed problems across the sector, low-rated centres that fail to improve have been put on notice, and the new early learning commissioner has vowed to crack down on services that pose an “unacceptable risk through sustained poor performance”.
The Fun2Learn early learning centre in Rosehill.Credit: Sitthixay Ditthavong
Acting NSW early learning commissioner Daryl Currie said that while the centre had never had a serious incident, it had failed to improve despite having extensive time and support.
“We will not hesitate to take action against providers who place children at risk by consistently failing to address safety and quality concerns, even where a serious child safety incident has not yet occurred,” Currie said.
He said the commission did not cancel centres lightly, but Fun2Learn posed an unacceptable risk to children.
The centre at the weekend after closing its doors on Friday.Credit: Sitthixay Ditthavong
Over 12 years, the department visited the centre 18 times and offered specialist help. Not once did the centre meet basic standards of supervision to protect children from harm and hazards, and standards related to having and practising incident management plans.
“The commission does not have confidence that the provider can make the necessary changes to provide the expected level of quality of early childhood education and care,” Currie said.
According to official breach documents seen by The Sun-Herald, breaches included consultants working without proper working with children checks, children playing with dangerous objects and poor hygiene.
In one instance, an unenrolled child was left at the centre for several hours without appropriate medical records.
The centre’s owner and director, Lisa Thai, said she was eager to work with the department to improve and questioned the commissioner’s decision to close her centre first, when facilities where children were seriously harmed continued to operate.
She said that when she looks at her centre’s history, she “totally understands” the department’s perspective, but she has been working with officers to improve her centre and was devastated by the direction to close.
Thai defended her centre’s record and said that all previous non-compliances had been addressed, rectified and deemed adequate by the department.
She attributed the acceptance of an unenrolled child to a language barrier after a grandparent mistakenly dropped the child at the wrong service, and said the chemical breach was a “one-off” incident from 2018.
“There are centres which have even more risky compliance, and they seem to be fine,” Thai said.
Sanja Stevancevic, with daughter Camilla, 3, has been sending her children to the centre for two years and is disappointed at its closure.Credit: Sitthixay Ditthavong
Parent Sanja Stevancevic, whose children have attended the centre for more than two years, said the service was “like family”.
“I would never trust anyone else with my child. It was such a surprise when Lisa notified us, we thought it was a joke. I couldn’t believe it. I can tell, you know every single child there gets on like brother and sister, and there has never been an incident report. It is so unjust,” Stevancevic said.
“Teachers and parents were travelling to Fun2Learn because of the security and the safety that they were getting at the centre and the care.”
While acknowledging the centre’s history, Stevancevic maintained that she felt safe leaving her children there. “It’s not like the other centres. You could have a centre who has up-to-date paperwork but a revolving door of high staff turnover which, to me, is a red flag.”
Acting Minister for Education and Early Learning Courtney Houssos said the government would not hesitate to take action against providers who failed to meet quality standards.
“Parents deserve to know that their children are being left in safe hands,” Houssos said.
Macquarie University early childhood education policy expert Gabrielle Meagher criticised the regulatory body for its infrequent inspections, noting that the centre was only assessed four times between 2012 and 2024.
“The regulator has left too long between assessments and allowed failure to meet standards to drift on over many years,” Meagher said. “This regulatory environment has sent the wrong message to providers, who can reasonably infer that they don’t need to improve.”
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She said that parents and children are now without a centre; “why doesn’t the government have a contingency plan to take over failing centres and ensure they offer high-quality services,” she said.
Chair of the NSW parliamentary inquiry into early childhood learning services, Greens MP Abigail Boyd, supported the centre’s closure.
She said the centre had “obvious risks” and “near miss situations”, including once accepting a child who wasn’t enrolled in the centre, keeping them for hours without knowing their medical history.
“I have sympathy for the fact that they haven’t had serious injuries before, but this is the sort of centre that if they did have a serious incident occur, and then we looked back at these records, we would ask the question, why hadn’t the regulator intervened earlier to prevent something more serious happening,” Boyd said.
She welcomed the crackdown but said the government needed a plan on how to manage services that fail to meet standards, given their prevalence in the community. There are 386 centres in NSW at present working towards improvement, and five with significant improvement required.
“There needs to be other options for families to make sure they get that continuity of placement for their child,” Boyd said.
