Outcome of children’s health and safety targeted compliance campaign

Our targeted compliance campaign was implemented to ensure the health and safety of children and support education and care services to be better prepared for their next assessment and rating visit. It also served as a ‘health check’ for services.

Twenty-four services, who had continually received a ‘Working towards’ rating for Quality Area 2: ‘Children’s health and safety’, were visited by authorised officers during February and March.

As a result, most services visited during the campaign had made improvements to children’s health and safety. Common improvements as a result of the visit included:

• policies were reviewed and updated
• risk-minimisation and communication plans were developed
• supervision practices were reviewed.

Services had time (usually 24 hours) to prepare for the visit; and, because of this, they advised that they felt able to provide more informed responses when compared to unannounced visits.

They also found the visits to be collaborative and felt confident to ask for help in areas they were unsure about. Many said this approach would be helpful for other quality areas too.

YMCA, St Francis of Assisi OSHC received such a visit. Director Loreena Pollard said the experience was “fantastic”.

“It was not stressful at all,” she said. “It was completely straight forward and quite a pleasant experience.”

She said it had “reinvigorated” staff, reminding them of processes and how to find information quickly.

Targeted campaigns are a way for us to engage with the sector to support continuous improvement and monitor compliance. 

In the future, more campaigns may be planned in response to intelligence and data received.