Child Safety

Child safety and wellbeing is embedded in the entity’s organisational leadership, governance and culture.

Every organisation should be a model of children’s safety and wellbeing. Leaders set the tone and example by embedding children’s safety and wellbeing into policies, procedures and culture and ensuring these are followed and reviewed. Leaders also ensure there is a healthy reporting culture and they support people to report concerns, take reports seriously and act to investigate and make improvements to ensure children’s safety and wellbeing is protected.

The aim is to create an environment where everyone in the organisation understands their role and responsibilities to protect children, and that they act accordingly. All members of an organisation are accountable for providing a safe environment for every child.

Creating spaces where children are knowledgeable about their rights and confident in their ability to express concerns, provide input, and participate in meaningful ways is an important aspect of being child safe.

The adults who support children in your organisation need to understand and respect children’s agency and take steps to ensure they are treated as competent and capable. This means adults tailor their approach based on the age, developmental stage, culture and any other specific needs of the child. Decision-making processes should centre on the perspectives of children and demonstrate genuine respect for their views.

Processes to respond to complaints and concerns are child focused.

Effective, child-focused complaint and concern processes are essential for protecting children. Children, families, carers, staff and volunteers involved in your business or organisation should feel safe and supported to speak up about concerns. Complaints must be managed in a timely, transparent, trauma-informed and respectful way, with the child’s wellbeing and safety at the centre of every response.

Staff and volunteers of the entity are equipped with the knowledge, skills, and awareness to keep children safe through ongoing education and training.

Staff and volunteers are the backbone of child safe organisations.

It’s important that staff and volunteers are not only screened and qualified/trained, but also receive ongoing education, training, mentoring to build the knowledge, skills and awareness required to proactively safeguard children in all interactions. Training should be tailored to specific roles and equip your staff and volunteers to identify risks or harm, respond appropriately, and create environments where children feel safe and supported.

Implementation of the Child Safe Standards is regularly reviewed and improved.

Ensuring children’s safety is a core priority means building an organisational culture that is responsive to challenges and new situations and is willing to learn and change.

Continuous improvement is a dynamic process where constant reflection on what is working and where challenges or gaps exist is prioritised. A child safe organisation ensures that progress and outcomes are set, measured and monitored based on a range of different success indicators, not just the normalised standards and methods. Continuous quality improvement processes contribute to a culture of accountability and a commitment to ongoing quality assurance and elevated practices.

Policies and procedures document how your organisation is safe for children.

Staff and volunteers at all levels of your organisation need to understand their individual responsibility to ensure transparency of all aspects of service delivery in a child safe organisation.

This means your organisation’s policies and procedures should clearly prioritise the safety and wellbeing of children and adequately equip staff and volunteers with a working knowledge to identify and prevent harm.

The Universal Principle is about creating environments that make Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children feel culturally safe, which broadly means welcome, safe, valued, included and respected.

In culturally safe organisations:

• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples define cultural safety and how it is measured
• workers develop the knowledge, skills and attitudes to recognise and address biases and stereotypes, and
• systems are transformed so they work better for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.