2025-07-07
After months of minimising and denying the systemic nature of the rolling scandals and devastating instances of breaches of child safety in early childhood education and care services, the Federal Government has finally taken some small steps towards acknowledgment of the issue, following the horrific reports of abuse in Victoria.
However, Greens NSW MLC, Abigail Boyd, has today criticised the responses of governments at state and federal level as remaining wholly inadequate and in their failure to address or even acknowledge the corporatised early childhood education industry as being a key driver of poor child safety.
Quotes attributable to Abigail Boyd, Greens NSW MLC and Chair of the NSW Parliament inquiry into the early childhood education industry: “Early childhood education is overwhelmingly dominated by for-profit providers, with about 70% of services operating for profit – and that number grows by the day. This means that by definition these services responsible for the education and care of our youngest and most vulnerable are motivated to prioritise profits over quality care and safety.
“Like any business, these corporate early childhood entities can extract profit in two ways – they can charge more for their services or they can cut operating costs. Often what we are finding is they are in fact doing both.
“I’ve read literally thousands of instances of child safety breaches that I succeeded in compelling the NSW government to provide through a parliamentary order, ranging from low level breaches up to unspeakably heinous cases of child abuse. In nearly every single instance, a common element that created the conditions for the incident to occur was a lack of adequate supervision due to understaffing. It is this understaffing, and overworking of educators, that endangers child safety more than any other factor, educators often left to supervise children in the room on their own, or in some cases as the only educator working in the entire service at that time.
“Under the national law, there are minimum staff to child ratios that are meant to be complied with. Typically, these ratios are already inadequate for the genuine child safety needs of the service, even if they are complied with. But if I were to pull any case out at random it’s a near certainty that you would find that even these meagre minimum ratios were not being complied with.
“Lax, and under-resourced, state based regulators don’t tend to take these breaches of ratios seriously, going so far as to preemptively grant waivers to these minimum ratios for certain services that request one. Large providers, like the ASX listed G8 Education, or private equity owned Affinity and Only About Children, are masters at gaming this system and have a disproportionately high level of staffing waivers. That’s fewer workers on the payroll and so dollars straight in the bank for these billion dollar companies.
“Research and analysis has proven for years that for-profit large providers consistently deliver a lower quality of education and care, and significantly higher instances of child safety breaches, compared to community-based, council run or government run early learning settings. But you wouldn’t know that from the comments and responses from state and territory Ministers.
“Investors are well aware that company profits are built on lax regulation and cost cutting at the expense of quality – that’s why we saw hundreds of millions of dollars being knocked off market valuations following the latest shocking revelations.
“What is evident from the delayed action on these long understood issues is that this is simply a political response to a particularly heinous and disturbing case that has rightly shocked and appalled the public. Only now has the apparent threshold of unacceptability been breached and is deserving of the appearance of a response, and even then not one that will address the business model that is driving and facilitating this apparent pandemic of abuse and mistreatment of children.
“If the government is serious about their desire for universal high quality and safe early years learning, then we need to get serious about what is the structure we need to deliver that. The evidence is abundantly clear that the regulatory light touch, heavily corporatised for-profit model is incapable of delivering that. The time for bold, decisive action is now.
Further comment and information: Angus Hoy 0416 130 969