One of the most important things governments - federal and states and territories - do is to enforce standards on centres to ensure they are meeting the law to keep children safe and well.
The agencies are called ‘regulators’ and they have the power to improve the quality of individual early learning centres by acting to close a centre or restrict the operators of centres, prohibit individual educators and teachers from working or order a centre operator to carry out urgent repairs.
Goodstart is a strong supporter of careful regulation of the ECEC sector … it helps keep children safe and ensures every provider is working to improve the quality of their centre – and that will help to keep all children safe. It’s also important that both state and federal governments fund regulators so that they can regularly assess centres, carry out regular inspections and respond to complaints and reports quickly and effectively.
Our educators and teachers are trained to Look. Do. Tell and every team member has a responsibility to report any issues or incidents involving the safety and well-being of children. We have built a strong reporting culture – which means that each year we advise regulators of accidents, issues and mistakes in following our processes and this helps our teams learn and improve.
When Goodstart receives correspondence from a regulator we:
• Review the concern or recommendation and share it with the right teams.
• Create an action plan to fix any issues quickly and safely.
• Work with the regulator to confirm when actions are complete.
• Learn from every situation – not just at one centre, but across all Goodstart centres – to help make our practices even stronger.
This process helps us continuously improve and ensure every child receives safe, high-quality early learning every day.
Here’s a simple explanation of each of the types of compliance in order of severity from least serious – Educate - to the most serious - Suspend or Cancel (which might also include prosecution of the service’s operator or senior staff).
1. Educate (information and guidance)
The regulators provide information and guidance either through campaigns to the sector or when they visit a centre to conduct quality assessment and ratings. The ratings test centres on seven key areas and are designed to help families identify if a centre is offering high quality educations and care. We publish the ratings on the websites of each of our centres and you can read more about the National Quality Standards here.
2. Compliance Tools (notices and directions are ‘direct and deter’ measures)
Using warning letters, directions and emergency action notices, regulators who find areas where a centre/educator must improve their practices or the centre environment, can ensure centres make changes immediately.
• Infringement Notice: A fine for minor breaches (for example a nappy changing area needs a deep clean)
• Compliance Direction: Requires compliance with specific legislation (for example directing a centre to comply with the regulation which says the centre, its furniture and equipment must be safe, clean and in good repair).
• Compliance Notice: Requires compliance with any part of the Law or Regulations (for example failure to adequately supervise children).
• Emergency Action Notice: Requires immediate action to remove a risk to children (for example children found being placed to sleep contrary to safe sleep guidelines).
• Enforceable Undertaking: A formal agreement for an educator or a nominated supervisor (usually a Centre Director) to take or avoid specific actions (for example to stop using poor behaviour guidance strategies and undertake mandatory training in appropriate behaviour guidance).
• Direction to Exclude Persons: Requires the exclusion of unsuitable individuals from the premises (for example an educator might be excluded as they pose an unacceptable risk to children as they have used inappropriate discipline).
3. Changes to Approvals
Amendment to Service or Provider Approval: Adds conditions that must be followed to continue to operate a centre (for example a centre might have to employ an additional educator if the shape of a room makes it difficult to see all children with the usual allocation of educators).
4. Service or Provider Restrictions
• Suspension or Cancellation of Service Approval: Temporarily or permanently prevents operation of a specific service.
• Suspension or Cancellation of Provider Approval: Temporarily or permanently prevents operation of any services.
5. Prosecution
Legal action through courts or tribunals for offences under the National Law.
Child safe
Goodstart is a child safe organisation, and the safety and wellbeing of children are central to everything we do. Without exception, all staff know we're responsible for the safety of every child in our care. Our commitment to safety and safeguarding starts with the following minimum requirements:
✔ All our employees have a current and valid working with children check.
✔ All Goodstart staff do mandatory child protection training yearly. This also applies to students, volunteers and contractors that work or volunteer directly with children, and our operations, service and corporate teams who don't work in our centres.
✔ We've developed our own clear set of Child safe policies, and we use these policies to guide educators across all centres and hold ourselves accountable for the safety of all children in our care.
✔ We've committed to The National Principles for Child Safe Organisations and state-based child safe standards and frameworks. These principles help create organisational cultures that foster child safety and wellbeing.
✔ Educators cannot use personal devices to record photographs or videos at our centres.
✔ Educators should never be alone with a child without a valid reason.
✔ Every child must always be in learning environments that are safe and supervised.
Learn more about our code of conduct, child safe behaviour standards and our safeguarding children program by reading our child safe policies.