Safety in Early Childhood Education and Care

There has been a lot in the media recently regarding safety in long daycare settings. This reporting has been extremely distressing for the profession, and for families. Our own experience in the sector tells us that this reporting does not reflect the practice in most centres, but that doesn't mean that incidents of this kind don't still happen - they do.

When we created Futuro we put a lot of thought into systems and processes to support safety in our centres, so that the critical elements required to support quality practice were in place from the very beginning. Today, every decision that we make starts with a consideration of child safety, and goes from there.

Read on to learn a bit more about what our commitment to safety looks like in our centres.

Private, with purpose

MANY a rant-y email has been written over the last 6 months about the purported negative correlation between the provision on long daycare by private providers and quality. In one such email we noted:

This kind of generalisation is not only inaccurate but harmful — both to the thousands of committed private providers who deliver high-quality education and care, and to the families who rely on our services. There is a wealth of evidence demonstrating the benefits of quality early learning for children, families and society more broadly...

My business partner and I chose to operate as a for-profit provider because it allows us to work for ourselves, to work independently, stay true to our values, and make decisions that reflect our own standards. The truth is that no provider — regardless of their tax status — can sustainably operate at a loss. Cost-cutting pressures can and do arise in any model. What truly matters is not the label, but the leadership, the culture, and the day-to-day choices that shape children’s experiences. Suggesting that private operators are motivated solely by money overlooks the reality that quality care exists — and thrives — across all service types.

This summarises our position fairly neatly. When it comes to quality, what matters is leadership, integrity, and culture. These are the things that shape the day-to-day experience for children in long daycare settings.

Trust

You can't do the work that we do every day without trust. Our families entrust us with the care of their children, our children trust us to look after them, and our team members trust each other to engage in high quality practice and to respectfully question that practice when necessary.

Twice a year we organise random 1:1 meetings with families across our centres to get feedback on a range of topics. A few weeks ago we sat down with families to talk about safety in our centres, amongst other things. The overwhelming feedback that we got was that families trusted our team with the care and education of their children, and had enormous respect for the work that the team does every day.

Families told us that they enrolled their children with us following positive feedback from friends and colleagues enrolled in our centres regarding our approach to safety and best practice, and that they feel that we have the right systems and processes in place to ensure our centres operate safely every day.

When we asked families if they are familiar with our policies and procedures, we were often told "No! We don't need to! we trust the team to know and follow the policies". While I came away with a few action items off the back of that discussion, it was heart-warming to know that this is how much trust our families have in us and our team.

Relationships

Trust within the team, and between our team and our families takes time to build, because it is based on connection and relationships. We put a lot of work into creating environments that are conducive to the development of these trusting relationships, focusing on:

Careful recruitment and reference checking - we are looking for more than a team member with the right qualification! We interview candidates multiple times and we look at the person's attitude towards children, towards their co-workers, towards families. We are looking at their work ethic and their willingness to join the rest of our team on a life-long quest for personal and professional growth.
Ongoing professional development and thorough onboarding - our new centre teams come together for a dedicated induction before we open our centres. Team members that join us after we open our doors complete an induction programme over the first 3 months of their employment, that covers not only our systems, policies & procedures, but our centre philosophy, programming and planning, safety and our overall approach to learning.
Each team member gets regular career checkins with their manager - not just something that is 'meant' to happen on paper, it's something that actually happens in practice. Career checkins at 1, 3 and 5 months post-commencement, and then on a rolling bi-annual basis are so important that it's a KPI for our Head of People & Culture that these happen on time, as well as being a performance metric from our Centre Managers.
You can't draw from an empty well, so we do everything that we can to reward our team members - from above-Award pay and the Worker Retention Payment, to the provision of a free hot lunch each day, to paid miscarriage leave and paid parental leave, to individual bonuses for each and every team member.

Body safety

Our services run incursions for children with Bravehearts, a leading child protection organisation. However, conversations about body safety are part of our every day practice. Our Educators talk with children about consent, privacy, safe and unsafe touch, and their rights to say no. These conversations are always age-appropriate and grounded in dignity and respect.

We also encourage families to continue these discussions at home. Bravehearts 'three safety rules' are a great place to start:

We all have the right to feel safe with people.
It’s OK to say ‘NO’ if you feel unsafe or unsure.
Nothing is so yucky that you can’t tell someone about it.

For more info, check out this post on the Bravehearts website.

Environments

The amount of thought that has gone into the design and construction of our centre's environments is second-to-none. Collectively, we've designed and opened over 60 new centres over the course of our careers, and every centre we open we tweak and improve based on our experience opening the last centre. Now that we are designing and opening centres for ourselves, we get to funnel all of that experience into our beautiful centres.

Here's what this looks like in practice:

The use of CCTV in our services, governed by a CCTV policy and procedure, and with consideration given to what footage is captured (nothing of a sensitive nature), where it is stored, how long it is stored for, and who has access to view/review the footage
The use of PIN code entry and exit controls, controlled by software that allows us to revoke an individual's access to the centre within moments if required
Design of the centre to maximise opportunities for supervision