The ACT government has announced plans to review educator-child ratios and consider mandatory registration for early childhood teachers, following the release of nearly 2,500 documents revealing serious safety failures in Canberra childcare centres.
Education Minister Yvette Berry told the ACT Legislative Assembly on Wednesday that the government is exploring measures to improve child safety, including mandatory registration for early childhood teachers to ensure only qualified individuals can teach in early childhood education and care settings.
The documents uncovered incidents such as teachers hitting, yelling at, and locking children away; staff unaware of allergies or how to locate EpiPens; unsupervised children escaping facilities; a child ingesting a death cap mushroom; and reports of students touching other children's genitals.
Berry stated that the government is also reviewing educator-child ratios to better support effective supervision practices across all services. Currently, ACT centres must have one teacher for four babies up to age two, one educator for five infants aged two to three, and one teacher per 11 children aged three and above.
Independent politician Thomas Emerson, who pushed for the release of the documents, supported the announcements but called for additional changes, including closing loopholes in the Working With Vulnerable People scheme, increasing funding for the regulator, and imposing fines on centres that repeatedly breach child safety laws.
Emerson also wants changes to land use laws to support community-run centres over for-profit centres, arguing that current policies have allowed major corporate for-profits to cannibalise small community-run centres with disastrous consequences for children.
