A New WCCC System
A national system will be established to track the criminal history of people who hold a Working with Children Check.
BY HEJIRA CONVERY, KINDICARE
When you leave your child in the care of someone else, you need to be absolutely certain that that person (or team of childcare professionals) will keep them safe.
And although a Working with Children Check does provide assurance that the caregiver can be trusted - and so many childcare professionals are doing amazing work - the system isn’t perfect.
There hasn’t been national consistency when it comes to checks, or clear communication between jurisdictions, meaning someone with a bad track record in one state or territory may be able to skip to another and keep working with children.
This is a worry, however, there is some good news today.
Ten years after a Royal Commission recommended a national model for Working with Children Checks, the Australian government is getting this system this up and running.
It’s been announced that a national system to continuously monitor the criminal history of those with a Working with Children Check will be established.
The pilot of the National Continuous Checking Capability (NCCC) program will receive $37 million from the Australian government, over five years; and this system will enable Working with Children Checks around Australia to be monitored all the time.
Although the states and territories currently have very different databases and approaches to checks, the Federal Attorney-General, Michelle Rowland, says all the governments will, “Be able to plug their systems into this capability.”
And this will enable, “Near real-time monitoring of national changes to criminal history information, for example, on Working with Children Check holders.”
This change has been a long time coming, but the current Australian government isn’t wasting one second now.
Ms Rowland says Australia is on track to have a ‘banned in one, banned in all’ regime up and running by the end of 2025; and the, “States and territories will actually be able to onboard to the NCCC pilot before the end of this year.”
This will help to protect our precious children, and make it much harder for terrible people to slip through the cracks.
So, we look forward to seeing all the states and territories plugging in to the new system.
And it's good to know that today, all the governments have endorsed an agreement to deliver national reform of the Working with Children Checks system.
Ms Rowland says, “The agreement sets out six priority actions and timeframes to strengthen child safety through a consistent national approach.”
She says the governments’ ambitious reform agenda, “Addresses existing gaps and inconsistencies and will improve protections for children and young people."
You can read more here, and if you’d like to see how the Working with Children Checks currently operate in your state or territory, see below:
