First published in Region Canberra, 24 February 2026

Content warning: this article contains references to child abuse.

Almost all of the respondents to my recent survey on early childhood sector reforms – 98 per cent of them – agreed or strongly agreed that reform is needed to ensure children’s safety always comes first in the ACT.

The ACT’s early childhood strategy, Set up for Success, doesn’t address safety or safeguarding in the sector at all.

Thousands of government documents released on Christmas Eve show that this failure to prioritise safeguarding measures in our early childhood sector has exposed some of our children to significant harm.

Less than two months before those documents were released, at a time when only the government had access to them, the Minister for Education and Early Childhood asserted “we have a robust and comprehensive regulatory system”.

Now that we’ve all got access to these documents, it’s apparent that it may have been an overstatement.

Children being verbally and physically abused by an educator who had been allowed to work in early childhood in the ACT despite having been convicted of assaulting a child in NSW.

Communication failures between a centre, the regulator, police and families meant it fell to the mother of a child who had been sexually abused to notify other parents – in the centre’s carpark at pick-up time – that the same educator may have assaulted their children. Her efforts led to a second conviction.

Chronic understaffing causing inadequate supervision that led to serious injuries including broken bones, dislocated jaws and untreated head injuries.

A centre that reported and sacked an educator who’d faced three separate child sex abuse allegations spread over six years. It then took the regulator 12 months to bar that educator from continuing to work elsewhere in the sector.

Extreme cost-cutting by some profit-maximising providers is creating immense pressure on under-resourced, overwhelmed, and unappreciated educators, with one exhausted educator complaining to the regulator that staff were being denied breaks. She said her centre, which is rated as “exceeding the National Quality Standard”, was operating below the required staff-to-child ratios “almost every day”.

And none of the hundreds of breaches revealed through the document release led to a centre being fined.

That’s despite new Productivity Commission data showing the ACT had the second-highest rate of confirmed breaches of the Education and Care Services National Law in the country last year.

It turns out the ACT Government never even set up a mechanism to issue those infringement notices. All Australian Education Ministers agreed last August to triple the penalties for child safety breaches in the sector, but here in the ACT, we’re unable to administer those penalties.

What was that about a “robust and comprehensive regulatory framework”?