Abuse allegations have prompted distress and outrage - but will Australia's childcare system be fixed?

The Guardian

10 hours ago

On Tuesday, Victoria police announced that a 26-year-old childcare worker, Joshua Dale Brown, had been charged with sexually abusing eight children, aged between five months and two years old, in his care.
He has been charged with more than 70 offences, among them: the attempted sexual penetration of a child under 12, sexual assault of a child under 16, sexual activity in the presence of a child under 16, and producing child abuse material for use through a carriage service.
Authorities contacted about 2,600 families whose children attended 20 childcare centres Brown worked at across Melbourne between January 2017 and May 2025. Distressingly, 1,200 children were advised to undergo testing for sexually transmitted infections.
The news has exploded across the country. Politicians have demanded answers and promised action. An urgent safety review has been ordered, new measures to protect children have been announced and calls for a full-scale review of the early childhood education sector has been urged by advocates.
Around office lunch tables, at playgrounds as parents watch their children, on social media parenting forums, among experts and politicians, the same questions are being asked: how does such serious and damaging alleged perpetrating happen in a place where children are meant to be safe, allegedly at the hands of someone trusted by thousands of parents to look after their children?
And if this alleged perpetrating has been able to occur in a childcare centre, what changes can be made in order for the early childhood education sector to be made safer?
'I can't imagine reading anything worse than 1,200 babies having to be tested for sexually transmitted disease because they might have been infected in the very places that were supposed to care for and educate them,' says Lisa Bryant, a consultant in the early education and care sector.
'It's beyond unthinkable. It's the exact opposite of what these places are supposed to do and I know that so many educators and so many education and care centres would be feeling exactly the same way that I'm feeling.'
All of the experts spoken to by Guardian Australia stressed that offending, such as that alleged to have been perpetrated by Brown, is extremely rare, and that the most common place where children experience violence, including sexual violence, is in the home.
But Bryant says that abuse of children in early childhood education settings happens 'more regularly than it should' and that issues around workforce makeup, regulation and oversight of the industry have contributed to an environment where perpetrators can commit crimes against children and get away with them.
Between 2013 and 2023, the number of early childhood education and care (ECEC) places available to Australian children increased by 50%; at long daycare centres, places increased 69%. In 2023, nearly half of one-year-olds and 90% of four-year-olds attended some form of ECEC, and currently, more than 1m Australian households use childcare.
This growth has happened, says Georgie Dent, CEO of The Parenthood, as more women have returned to the workforce, the benefits of early childhood education for childhood development and educational outcomes have been recognised more widely, and due to the 'economic and social reality' that 'it is far more difficult for families to survive on one income than it once was'.
But the explosion in the sector has caused issues, Dent says.
'We've seen early education and care grow really rapidly, but I think that we can say that regulation and oversight has not kept up with the pace of that growth,' Dent says.
The bodies that regulate ECEC centres – responsible for performing checks to make sure centres are meeting safety and education standards and that workers have appropriate credentials – are run at a state level, with little national oversight.
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A Productivity Commission report into ECEC, released in September 2024, found that the regulatory system was not functioning as it should.
'We observed that many of the state and territory agencies were very resource-strapped, so we recommended additional resourcing for those agencies,' says Prof Deborah Brennan, an associate commissioner and co-author of the report.
'It is a complicated picture, because we're dealing with eight different jurisdictions, each applying the regulations their own way, but the fact that we have something like 10% of services 'working towards' the national quality standard, is of great concern.'
Brennan says that services repeatedly getting scored as 'working towards' the national quality standard – government-set benchmarks for ECEC in Australia – either means that regulators aren't doing the work to get those services up to scratch, or childcare providers are reluctant to work with regulators, because 'there haven't been any consequences in terms of loss of funding'.
Complicating the picture, is that while regulation of ECEC happens at a state level, it is largely funded at a federal level, through the childcare subsidy.
The federal education minister, Jason Clare, announced this week that the government was preparing to introduce new laws to parliament in the first sitting week, which would prevent childcare providers that are persistently failing to meet minimum standards from opening new centres, and cut off childcare subsidy funding for repeat offender operators and those guilty of egregious breaches.
Brennan says that this move by the government was significant, and in keeping with the recommendations of the Productivity Commission.
'I understand that governments and regulators have been cautious about pulling that lever, because it does have immediate and dramatic impacts on families. A lot of services are very big now, so if a service approval is withdrawn you might potentially leave hundreds of families without access to childcare … It's not a simple issue, it has to be done, but it's going to be really complicated.'
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Adding to the complications of the sector is that within ECEC there are various types of care – long daycares, community preschool, family daycares, home-based care and more. Some of these are not-for-profit services, run by community groups or local councils, but the majority – almost 70% of centre-based daycare services – are private for-profit services.
Dr Caroline Croser-Barlow, a former senior public servant with experience in early childhood education and CEO of The Front Project, says that for-profit centres have been 'really important in expanding access' to childcare in the last few decades.
'In the 90s, the commonwealth government opened up its funding subsidies to allow for-profit provision and that's because, under the previous model, which only funded not-for-profit provision, it wasn't growing fast enough … And there are also very high quality for-profit providers.'
However, the Productivity Commission report found that overall, for-profit providers spent less of their total costs on labour (63% of their overall costs, compared with 77% for the not-for-profit sector), paid staff less (64.3% of staff were paid above award wage, compared with 94.5% of staff at not-for-profits) and fewer of their staff were employed full-time than at not-for profit centres (25% compared with 47%).
As a result, the Productivity Commission found lower staff turnover (27% compared with 41%) and lower staff vacancies (9.7% compared with 22%) at not-for-profit centres.
Croser-Barlow says that having more full-time staff and better staff retention helps create a safe environment for children. 'It's about embedding child safety in the way you operate your business and I do think that if there is constant change, constant new people in an organisation, obviously that increases the child safety risk.'
Bryant is deeply concerned by the casualisation of ECEC, pointing to the fact that more than 50% of the early childhood education workforce have worked in the sector for less than three years.
If someone was looking to offend, Bryant says, this casualisation of employment gives them 'the chance to shop amongst services and work out which ones would be the easiest to get away with it, where were the poor sight lines in the centre? Where was the supervision the least? Where would they be likely to be able to get a child by themselves?'
Higher rates of casual employees also makes it harder for children to disclose abuse, given they may not recognise or know the name of their abuser, Brennan acknowledges. It also makes it less likely that other employees will report concerns.
'If you have a service where there's a really high proportion of casual employees who come and go, they're going to be much less likely to take the very big step of making a report to authorities,' she says.
Part of the reason for a highly casualised workforce is that the ECEC sector faces a critical workforce shortage and high rates of employee turnover and burnout, which that means staffing gaps are frequently plugged with casual employees.
The 2024 Productivity Commission report found that workforce shortages were considered by many as 'one of the most significant challenges facing the sector', with educators citing less attractive pay and conditions than in similar industries, increasing responsibilities and burdens, staff needing to use personal time to study for required qualifications and the impact of Covid-19 on international workers.
A 15% pay increase for childcare workers, funded by the federal government, the first phase of which was introduced last year, has been helpful in slowing the loss of workers from the industry, Croser-Barlow says.
But at the heart of fixing the problems facing the sector, according to all the experts spoken to by Guardian Australia, was the need for some form of national oversight.
'I think the sector would be much better off if it was clear who was responsible for what,' Croser-Barlow says. 'Whether that's a national partnership agreement, whether that's an early learning commission, I don't really mind. I just think there needs to be a mechanism that somebody is responsible for the question of improving quality … because at the moment, that's nobody's job.
'The challenge, I think, right up until this last couple of weeks, has always been the early childhood education and care system is very complicated and very hard to put your hands on the levers.'
But Croser-Barlow feels that the outrage of the last week, the federal government's willingness to withhold funding from providers, as well as recent announcements from the New South Wales and Victorian governments about introducing CCTV in centres and other security measures, are all signs that people want to take action.
'I genuinely think there is more momentum and real commitment to action than I have seen.'