Childcare workers will be put on a national register in a sweeping safety overhaul of the sector that includes a CCTV trial at hundreds of centres, mobile phone bans and mandatory staff training.
The commonwealth will put $189m towards the reforms and work will begin immediately.
Federal, state and territory education ministers met in Sydney on Friday and agreed to major changes in the childcare and early education sectors.
The federal education minister, Jason Clare, said the CCTV trial will begin in October or November and run at 300 centres across the country. The trial will consider who holds the data and how the data is stored. The safety training regime for childcare employees will be rolled out early next year.
“Is it everything that we need to do? No, of course it’s not, but it’s the next thing that we must do,” Clare said at a press conference.
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Governments have been under immense pressure after a series of horrific allegations of abuse in childcare settings were uncovered in recent months. Clare said all levels of government and industry needed to improve standards.
“Over the course of the last few weeks, we have made some changes to keep our kids safe but not enough and not fast enough,” the minister said. “We have all got to step up here if we are serious about keeping our kids safe. That means the Australian government stepping up, states and territories stepping up, and regulators stepping up, and it means the people who run our centres stepping up”
Concerns have been raised on how the system can catch red flag behaviour.
Clare said the new register will be rolled out in stages in February 2026 by the Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority. He said the system would monitor and spot workers moving between centres and eventually embed information from working with children checks. But Clare admitted it would not be a magic bullet.
“Over time, we want to build all of that information into [the register] so we can see employment history, so we can have the information that’s needed to identify red flags to tell us that someone’s moving quickly from centre to centre to centre, to be able to identify that somebody … might be up to no good.”
He said none of it was a “guarantee” of safety. “But it is an essential component in what we need to do if we’re going to keep our children safe.”
The ministers also agreed for commonwealth officers to complete an extra 1,600 spot visits – something that had been flagged by the government.
The commonwealth has conceded reforms have been too slow, with some recommendations to improve childcare safety dating back to the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse in 2015.
The federal government recently named 37 childcare centres that were not meeting standards, after legislation was passed in July.
Clare said those centres will risk losing access to the childcare care subsidy.
“If taxpayers’ money will be invested to operate in early education and care centre, we expect them to meet the standards and keep our kids safe. Fundamentally, that is what the legislation is all about – 37 centres on notice already. There are more to come.”
On Wednesday, Victoria released the findings of a snap review by the former South Australian premier Jay Weatherill and senior Victorian bureaucrat Pam White. It made 22 recommendations, all accepted by the state government, but half are directed at the federal government.
“Where there are vulnerable systems and vulnerable people, there is indeed risk. And so the more we can build national systems that will keep children safe, both across borders and between sectors that work with children, that is critical,” the Victorian minister for children, Lizzie Blandthorn, said.
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