Chapter 3: Ensure best practice screening and recruitment

The best way to protect children from abuse and harm is to prevent an unsuitable person from entering an ECEC service. This chapter makes recommendations to require best practice in recruitment, screening and induction, including through rigorous and proactive reference checks.

3.1 Ensuring staff are safe and suitable: Improving screening and recruitment practices

Appropriate staff screening and recruitment practices are crucial in ensuring that the workers that care for, and are in contact with, children are safe and suitable.

These practices need to be urgently improved in the sector.

Hiring managers need to undertake due diligence when assessing candidates for positions. They need to verify a person’s credentials and work history. They should include child safety requirements in position descriptions and staff contracts, as well as child safety focused questions as part of key selection criteria and interviews. Hiring managers should also undertake proactive checks and child safety screening by speaking with previous employers. These principles also need to apply to agency or casual relief staff. Services should, for example, ask their casual staff agencies about their onboarding and screening processes and seek past references. The Review’s recommendation for a National Early Childhood Worker Register (discussed in Chapter 2) will make it easier than it currently is for employers to meet these responsibilities. Everyone has a role to play to safeguard and ensure a suitable workforce – both employers and authorities.

The Review heard that providers and services are unsure of their ability to share information about current or past employees, particularly when there is an unsubstantiated allegation or complaint, for privacy reasons. Providers are concerned about speaking inappropriately about a person or sharing information they are not permitted to share. This can mean that patterns of behaviour may be missed, and other providers unwittingly employ a person who poses a risk to children. There is a need for clearer guidance to providers and service managers on this.

There should be no barrier to providers or services proactively contacting current or previous employers of applicants to conduct reference checks, even where the employer is not listed as a referee. The applicant should provide their consent, but this can be included as a condition of applying. Verbal reference checks can elicit more information than a written response and allows the hiring manager to ask follow-up questions if more information is needed. Current or previous employer responses should be factual and should share their view on the employee’s character and suitability to work with children, and whether there have been any conduct complaints, concerns or investigations regarding the employee. Hiring managers should take notes of the conversation.

The Review heard about evidence-based psychometric testing used as part of recruitment processes for workers in other social service and care sectors. There is value in examining whether this could be adopted in the ECEC sector, using high-quality providers.

3.1.1 Induction and child safe culture

Once recruited, new staff, including temporary or agency-based staff, need to be provided with appropriate induction training into the service’s specific policies, procedures and risk management strategies. Induction should ensure new starters are aware of their responsibilities to keep children safe, including staff codes of conduct, expected behaviours, and how to report or raise concerns. A new staff member’s adherence to child safety requirements should also be considered as part of staff probation processes.

Like any workplace, the culture of ECEC settings relies on the people in them. This is especially true for creating and maintaining a child safe culture. High turnover and casualisation of the ECEC workforce can lead to a weaker child safe culture, as staff members or behaviours that are out of step with the service’s existing or desired culture or values are less visible. ECEC services with a strong child safe culture put child safety and wellbeing first, at all levels of the organisation. This Review recommends increased regulatory focus on the aspects of the Child Safe Standards that support this through clear, committed and strong leadership, governance and codes of conduct.

Guidance to staff needs to support early protective actions when there are departures from established practice. If staff wait until a suspicion or concern becomes undeniable, it can allow abuse to continue and worsen and place other children at risk. However, it is also important to recognise staff members can make minor mistakes due to inexperience or being overwhelmed, which can be resolved through conversation and education. Reporting a concern should not be viewed as an accusation, rather as a protective action. Managers need to be alive to the possibility that early warning signs (in the form of boundary breaches) may indicate a bigger problem that requires more serious and careful intervention.