33 minutes agoMon 10 Nov 2025 at 6:38pm

Suzy Edwards, one of two co-chairs of the group, says “now is the time for change”. (ABC News: Scott Jewell)

In short:

A group of 55 early childhood academics have urged federal, state and territory governments to take six actions to restore public trust in the childcare system.

These include lifting workforce quality through better pay, conditions and training, lowering staff-to-child ratios and better resourcing regulators to conduct frequent, unannounced inspections.

The group is also calling for the creation of an independent national early childhood commission to oversee and coordinate the system.

Some of Australia’s leading early childhood education professors have joined forces to release a six-point action plan to help fix the country’s “broken” childcare system.

It comes as experts warn that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s pledge to make universal childcare a reality in 2026 could be overshadowed by the sector’s crumbling safeguards and regulatory gaps.

A year-long ABC investigation uncovered widespread physical and sexual abuse, chronic understaffing and systemic regulatory failure across the $22 billion childcare sector.

The revelations sparked a series of inquiries and government reforms including tougher penalties, CCTV trials, mobile phone bans, funding cuts for repeat offenders, and an overhaul of Working With Children Checks to share data in real time across states.

But experts warn these measures need to go a lot further to fix the structural issues.

The Early Childhood Professorial Advisory Council (ECPAC), formed in July, brings together 55 of the country’s foremost early childhood education professors and associate professors.

These include Professor Marianne Fenech from the University of Sydney and the two co-chairs Professor Suzy Edwards from the Australian Catholic University, and Associate Professor Kate Highfield at the University of Canberra.

In a letter sent to state and federal ministers on Monday, obtained by ABC Investigations, ECPAC said with its range of early childhood academic expertise it was uniquely placed to assist governments with the task of ensuring children in early childhood settings were safe and thriving.

It said “courageous and bold leadership” was needed to rebuild public trust in the system.

“We say no to more disjointed and reactive policy bandaids. We say yes to coordinated, multi-pronged, and transformative policy levers that provide a strong foundation for high quality [early childhood education] that promotes children’s learning, safety, development and wellbeing,” the letter says.

The advisory council said it welcomed recent reforms in national workforce strategy, investment in improved wages for teachers and educators, and the recent passage of the Strengthening Regulation of Early Education Bill, but the sector “continues to be plagued by systemic failures that decades of reviews have not addressed”.

It said children were still exposed to low quality and unsafe settings.

“Too many early childhood teachers and educators are still overworked, underpaid and undervalued,” it says.

“Too much government funding is propping up a broken system.”

A six-point plan

It outlined six national policy action principles to reset the sector around long-term quality.

They include putting children’s interests first, arguing that “a spotlight on quality early education will ensure children’s safety and have a longer-term impact on children’s learning, development and wellbeing”.

Other actions include funding and governing early childhood education as a vital public good and the foundational stage of Australia’s education system, and lifting workforce quality through professional pay, better conditions, and consistent, rigorous teacher training.

A fourth and controversial proposal calls for tougher quality controls across the sector, including better supervision by lowering staff-to-child ratios from 1:4 to 1:3 for children under two, ensuring a qualified teacher in every room, and introducing benchmarks to limit the expansion of low-quality for-profit providers and expand public provisioning of long day care centres.

The fifth action is greater transparency and accountability, urging governments to properly resource regulators to conduct frequent, rigorous and unannounced inspections and to shut down unsafe services when necessary.

Mandatory public reporting of financial and operational data for all providers, similar to the aged care sector, is also part of this action, to enable parents to see how centres perform and where taxpayer money is going.

Its final call to action is for governments to establish an independent national early childhood commission, a body that would act as a system steward, with the authority to oversee, coordinate and plan the childcare system.

Professor Suzy Edwards told the ABC it was important to listen to the voices of the educators and work with them, and governments, to advance the policy.

“Now is the time for change, now is the moment for us all to do better together … these are the youngest of our citizens and they must have the best,”

she said.

“It is always the vulnerable in society that get let down… at what point as a society do we say ‘that’s enough’?”

‘Not political — just urgent’

It comes as the Coalition forced an urgent Senate hearing into child sex offenders in childcare on November 19, following shocking revelations by Four Corners that predators have infiltrated centres under existing regulations.

Shadow Minister for Education and Early Learning, Julian Leeser, said the issue was “not political — just urgent”.

“We want Australians to know that we are leaving no stone unturned when it comes to ensuring children in childcare centres across Australia are being protected,” Mr Leeser said.

Julian Leeser says politicians must do all they can to ensure the safety of children in child care. (ABC News: Matt Roberts, file photo)

The call for an independent national early childhood commission is a reform backed by a growing chorus of voices — from the Productivity Commission and the Centre for Policy Development to the Greens, The Parenthood’s Georgie Dent, and former National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds.

Federal Minister for Early Childhood Education Jess Walsh said in a statement she had received the ECPAC’s six-point plan and would be happy to meet with the group to discuss it.

She said the Albanese government’s $189 million reform package was already strengthening safety and quality in early childhood education.

Senator Walsh said further reforms would continue to improve coordination across the sector “including consideration of a role for a commission”.

Jess Walsh says the government is open to considering a national early childhood commission. (ABC News: Matt Roberts)

Some experts say the National Quality Standard (NQS) — administered by the Australian Children’s Education & Care Quality Authority (ACECQA) under the National Quality Framework (NQF) — is in urgent need of reform.

While ACECQA oversees consistency and policy, it has no power to investigate or enforce compliance, relying on state and territory regulators to do so.

The ABC can reveal that the childcare centres where convicted paedophile Ashley Paul Griffith worked were all rated as meeting or exceeding the NQS.

In some centres he was able to set up a tripod and film the abuse without being detected.

Ashley Paul Griffith allegedly abused children in centres that were rated as meeting or exceeding the quality standard. (Supplied)

Explore and Develop Camperdown, the centre in inner Sydney where Griffith allegedly abused 23 children between 2014 and 2017, was rated exceeding the national quality standard in 2015.

It was reassessed in 2020 and granted the same top rating. The centre is now under new ownership.

In another case, a Queensland parent who reported her child’s sexual abuse to police said the centre where the abuse occurred was reassessed soon after the incident and awarded an exceeding rating.

“The system doesn’t care about kids … We need to know what’s happening behind those closed doors. There needs to be accountability,” the mother said.

There are also questions over the timeliness of the ratings.

Services are reassessed on average every three to four years, and one in 10 have never been assessed at all.

As one insider put it: “The ratings system isn’t worth the paper it’s written on … How is it that centres rated as meeting or exceeding the NQS can have paedophiles operating within them?”

Current ratios ‘not realistic’

Katrina Broadbent saw the flaws in childcare first hand.

As an auditor of major childcare providers at consultancy firm PwC and more recently as head of quality assurance at childcare giant Only About Children, she said current staff-to-child ratios in the sector were unsafe and led to poor supervision, a problem she links to the industry’s profit-driven model.

“When you put a dollar sign on the care of a child, that’s when you start having problems,”

she said.

“A ratio of one educator to four babies [birth to 24-month-olds] seems reasonable on paper but once you consider feeding, changing, naps, comforting and play time, it’s not realistic,” she said.

Katrina Broadbent links many of the issues in the childcare sector to the drive for profits. (Four Corners: Rob Hill)

Senator Walsh said education ministers had asked ACECQA to undertake a “rapid review” of safe supervision and staffing in early learning by the end of the year.

Ms Broadbent said regulatory bodies in each state varied in how they adopted and enforced early childhood standards, which added to confusion and complexity.

“Each state has its own [mandatory] reporting system — some online, some phone-based, some involving direct notification to police or child protection agencies, meaning national training is difficult, particularly for the large cross-jurisdiction providers.”

Ms Broadbent said Working With Children Checks were only effective if properly managed, but poor oversight in the centres left major gaps.

“Someone can walk in with a Working With Children Check potentially that’s expired, but providers are completely unaware of that unless they’re proactively checking it,” she said.

The ABC had access to more than 200,000 pages of regulatory documents from NSW — the largest childcare jurisdiction in the country — and found hundreds of centres with invalid, expired or missing Working With Children Checks.

In most cases the regulator gave the centres weeks or months to fix the issue.

“Parents deserve to know that every worker is suitable to be there, not just on day one, but every single day they engage with children. Getting worker suitability right isn’t technically hard. The systems exist, the data exists, the verification mechanisms exist,” said Liv Whitty, the CEO of Oho, a company that helps organisations verify Working With Children Checks (WWCC) for their employees.

Oho monitors more than 220,000 workers who have access to children, such as childcare educators.

“The complexity of the system is a problem,” she said.

“Continuous monitoring needs to become standard practice, not optional.

“Our estimate is that approximately 27 per cent of the WWCC workforce is unmonitored.”

Children falling through the cracks

Georgie Dent, CEO of advocacy group The Parenthood, which represents 80,000 families and carers, told ABC Investigations the Productivity Commission’s 2024 review made clear that governance arrangements in early childhood education and care were “not fit for purpose”.

She said what that meant in practice was that shared responsibility between federal, state and territory governments had too often translated into no accountability at all.

Georgie Dent says policymakers need to fix structural failures in the system. (ABC News: Adriane Reardon, file photo)

“There are endless bodies, frameworks and agreements but no-one clearly responsible for ensuring that every child is safe, supported and learning in a high-quality environment,” Ms Dent said.

“This fragmentation has created cracks in the system, and it’s children who fall through them.

“Unless we confront this structural failure, more rules or regulations won’t fix the problem. We’ll keep treating the symptoms rather than the cause.”

Former national children’s commissioner Anne Hollonds says child safety and wellbeing has not been prioritised. (AAP: Mick Tsikas, file photo)

Recently retired National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds said Australia’s childcare system was never built on an evidence-based blueprint.

“The shocking revelations this year have exposed the extent of the system’s failures caused by a mess of laws, policies and fragmented regulation that resulted in adults being protected, not the children in their care,”

she said.

“There are potentially multiple points of failure. Government accountability gaps explain why recommendations from a decade ago were not implemented.

“Child safety and wellbeing is not a national priority.”