2025-07-30
The Victorian Greens will lead the charge of a powerful inquiry into Victoria’s early childhood education and care (ECEC) system, after a motion to establish a select committee successfully passed the Legislative Council.
The Greens say that a select committee was urgently needed to fill the gaping holes in Labor’s narrow departmental review - which fails to examine the role of the Department of Education as regulator. The move comes after further revelations today that complaints regarding supervision were ignored while children were being harmed in care.
The committee will provide greater transparency with the powers to call for documents, compel witnesses and experts. It invites the community’s voices to be heard with parents and educators able to participate and a final report to be made available by 30 July 2026.
The terms of reference for the inquiry to investigate include:
- Whether current safety and quality standards in early childhood services are adequate
- The quality and oversight of educator training, qualifications, and Working with Children Checks
- How privatisation impacts affordability, accessibility, safety and outcomes - compared with public and not-for-profit models
- Educator workforce conditions, including pay, workload, job security and how this affects retention and quality
- Whether current staff-to-child ratios are appropriate and applied correctly across services
- The role of the Department of Education in monitoring services and maintaining child safety broader issues around how child safety standards are implemented, enforced and complied with across the sector
The Greens said that while urgent reforms to improve safety and oversight must begin now, the inquiry will ensure those reforms are grounded in transparency and accountability, not political damage control.
Quotes attributable to the Victorian Greens spokesperson for Early Childhood, Anasina Gray-Barberio:
“The Greens have led the charge to get this inquiry up because families deserve real answers, not the Labor government marking its own homework behind closed doors.”
“Labor has been dodging accountability, finding every excuse not to produce key documents, but this independent inquiry will help hold them to account and make sure nothing is swept under the rug.”
“We’ve heard too many stories of children being harmed while complaints were ignored. This inquiry will help uncover what’s gone wrong and how we fix it.”