Queensland released its “Growing Child Safe Organisations in Queensland” consultation paper earlier this year to seek feedback on options for the implementation of child safe standards and a reportable conduct scheme in Queensland.

These options were developed in response to recommendations of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (Royal Commission). The Queensland Government sought feedback from the public by 22 September 2023.

Ideagen CompliSpace is a leading provider of Governance, Risk, Compliance and Policy programs and consulting services to a variety of organisations, from a range of industry sectors, across all Australian states and territories. One of our main client groups are our approximately 800 non-government schools, including a large number of schools in Queensland. We have been engaged by six Catholic Education Offices, as well as most of the leading Catholic orders that provide education services. We also assist community housing providers, churches, aged care providers and financial services companies.

It is in this context that Ideagen CompliSpace has previously been involved in helping our clients to implement child safe standards (or their equivalent), reportable conduct schemes or both in Victoria, Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania. Accordingly, Ideagen CompliSpace was well placed to provide feedback on Queensland’s consultation paper.

Part Two of this article sets outs Ideagen CompliSpace’s feedback on the proposed Queensland Reportable Conduct Scheme along with feedback on the implementation of both the Reportable Conduct and Child Safe Standards Schemes. Part One set out Ideagen CompliSpace’s feedback on the proposed Child Safe Standards Scheme and Oversight Body (together with some background information).

Proposed Queensland Reportable Conduct Scheme

Format and Language

Child-related institutions in Queensland, particularly those that operate in more than one jurisdiction, face similar time and resource challenges in implementing a Reportable Conduct Scheme as they do with Child Safe Standards.

One way to minimise this burden for cross-jurisdictional organisations is to ensure that Queensland’s Reportable Conduct Scheme remains consistent with those already in place across Australia. This has the benefit of allowing Queensland organisations that also operate in the ACT, NSW, Tasmania, Victoria, and WA to rely on their existing systems and processes for managing reportable conduct allegations. It also ensures that employees who relocate to Queensland from these other jurisdictions will have a good understanding of their obligations under the Scheme, therefore reducing the administrative burden on organisations to provide significant training on new requirements.

With this in mind, we agree with most of the proposals for the Queensland Reportable Conduct Scheme, such as allowing any person to report allegations of reportable conduct directly to the oversight body and including protections for all persons making reports or complaints in good faith. These proposals broadly align with most of the current schemes in other jurisdictions.

We strongly recommend that Queensland implement a Reportable Conduct Scheme that is nationally consistent.

Scope of Organisations

In jurisdictions where Reportable Conduct Schemes currently exist, these Schemes usually apply to a narrower range of organisations than the Child Safe Standards.

For instance, in Victoria, all organisations that provide services specifically for children, provide facilities for use by children under their supervision or engage a child as an employee or volunteer must comply with the Child Safe Standards. However, some of these organisations, such as clubs and associations or teaching, coaching, commercial or transport services for children, are not required to comply with the Victorian Reportable Conduct Scheme. The ACT also has a limited scheme that excludes these services.

Although Tasmania has included clubs and associations and coaching or tuition services for children in the scope of their Reportable Conduct Scheme, they also still exclude transport and commercial services for children.

This approach is in line with the Royal Commission’s recommendation that Reportable Conduct Schemes should cover organisations that have a high degree of responsibility for children or that engage in activities that involve a heightened risk of child abuse. It also helps reduce the regulatory burden on regulators and on smaller organisations.

Consistent with the other schemes, we recommend that a narrower scope of organisations be covered under the Queensland Reportable Conduct Scheme than the Child Safe Standards Scheme, to reduce the regulatory burden on both the oversight body and organisations. However, the scope should include, at a minimum, the organisations recommended by the Royal Commission in its Final Report.

We also recommend that the Queensland Government, consistent with the Royal Commission’s recommendation, periodically review the operation of its Scheme, and in that review determine whether the Scheme should cover additional institutions that exercise a high degree of responsibility for children and involve a heightened risk of child abuse.

Compliance Activity Required of Organisations

Register of Organisations

The independent oversight body will need to know which organisations in Queensland are required to comply with the Child Safe Standards and Reportable Conduct Schemes in order to properly monitor and enforce compliance.

We recommend that all organisations to whom these Schemes apply be required to formally register as a child-related service.

Sector regulators would already have registers of the organisations that fall within their own regulatory regimes, as would government agencies that have funding agreements with relevant organisations, so the independent oversight body should require annual registration of organisations that fall outside those regimes. While this could be a difficult undertaking given that, particularly with respect to the Child Safe Standards Scheme, these organisations could include numerous small and possibly unstable not-for-profits and commercial businesses, it will not be possible to monitor and enforce compliance without such a register.

Child Safe Standards Scheme Compliance

Once a register is established with respect to Child Safe Standards compliance, we suggest that the independent oversight body should require those organisations that it monitors to complete (annually, biennially or on another regular review cycle) a self-assessment document that enables them to identify for themselves how they comply with the Child Safe Standards and any areas that require action.

The independent oversight body should also develop a short annual survey – containing no more than five simple ‘red flag’ questions – that must be completed by all organisations when they register or re-register with the independent oversight body. The survey could then either be re-completed annually by all organisations, or it could be required of a sample of organisations either across sectors or within particular sectors that might be considered at risk of non-compliance.

Using these short surveys will enable the independent oversight body to identify those organisations that appear to be at risk of non-compliance with the Child Safe Standards Scheme and that should be targeted for additional assistance, monitoring and/or review, through a risk assessment framework developed by the independent oversight body.

Like in the proposed Reportable Conduct Scheme, we recommend that the head of each relevant organisation should be held personally responsible for ensuring compliance with the Child Safe Standards Scheme. For the Child Safe Standards Scheme, this should be done by requiring them to provide (annually, biennially or on another review cycle) a Declaration of Compliance which is based on the self-assessment document and sets out those Standards with which their organisation complies and giving an action plan for complying – by a common date for all organisations within a sector – for those Standards with which they do not.

Support for Organisations

Child Safe Standards Scheme Support

The difficulty with a broad principle-based approach to Child Safe Standards is that their broad nature, and in particular the need for each Standard to be written in such a way as to be able to be implemented by a wide variety of organisations across a number of sectors, gives little direction as to how specific organisations can in fact comply and how that compliance will be measured.

Therefore, although we support the proposal that the Child Safe Standards are overseen by a single independent regulator, we recommend that – through the proposed the collaborative model – other relevant regulators or government departments should have significant input into guidance developed by the single independent regulator so that it is sector-specific.

For example, in those jurisdictions that require compliance with the National Principles for Child Safe Organisations (National Principles) as part of registration/re-registration requirements for non-government schools, the relevant registration regulator provides significant guidance on what it expects to see with respect to compliance. While this guidance is often provided because these regulators have oversight responsibility for compliance (the co-regulatory model that we do not support for Queensland), the guidance itself is generally sector-specific, very detailed and highly useful. We note that, where there is no co-regulation (such as in NSW, for example), sector-specific guidance is – while anticipated – currently still lacking for some sectors

We recommend that organisations in Queensland are given very detailed guidance that sets out the sector-specific evidence that will demonstrate compliance with Child Safe Standards for their sector. These sector-based evidence guides should then be supplemented by physical resources that give sector-specific written advice, guidance and examples of how to meet the requirements, as well as the possibility of online/phoneline contact for general advice and assistance. Training is also an essential component for capacity building, and again should be tailored to the various sectors and set out the evidence that will be required in these sectors to demonstrate compliance.

Examples of sector-specific guidance that could be drawn on when developing such guidance for Queensland include:

• the Victorian Department of Education’s significant advice, templates, examples and guidance – aimed at schools and early childhood education providers – on how to implement Ministerial Order 1359 and the Victorian Child Safe Standards

the WA Department of Education’s Guide to Registration Standards for Non-Government Schools which sets out the kinds of evidence that will be required to prove compliance with the National Principles, as well as explanatory notes about that evidence.

The oversight body for the Reportable Conduct Scheme should take a ‘supportive’ approach to compliance, and provide significant advice and guidance to organisations about how to implement and comply with it. The NSW Office of the Children’s Guardian (OCG) and the Victorian Commission for Children and Young People’s approach to Reportable Conduct regulation and capacity building, including their online fact sheets, training programs, advice lines and educative approach to regulation are useful models for this purpose.

Reportable Conduct Scheme Support

The oversight body for the Reportable Conduct Scheme should take a ‘supportive’ approach to compliance, and provide significant advice and guidance to organisations about how to implement and comply with it. The NSW Office of the Children’s Guardian (OCG) and the Victorian Commission for Children and Young People’s approach to Reportable Conduct regulation and capacity building, including their online fact sheets, training programs, advice lines and educative approach to regulation are useful models for this purpose.

Gradual Implementation of the Child Safe Scheme

Our experience in helping our clients to implement these new requirements in multiple jurisdictions has taught us that the implementation of Child Safe Standards and Reportable Conduct Schemes will be a journey that requires a sustained period of cultural change. Particularly with respect to the Child Safe Standards Scheme, it will not be possible for many organisations to be immediately and fully compliant with such requirements from the moment that they are proclaimed.

Other jurisdictions have recognised this when commencing their Child Safe Standards Schemes. For example, the recent Child and Youth Safe Standards Framework in Tasmania gave organisations between six months to a year after the Framework commenced to become compliant. In NSW, the OCG advised that it would not take any enforcement action against organisations for a year, instead focusing on assisting and supporting organisations to comply with the NSW Child Safe Standards.

In addition, Queensland should learn from mistakes made by other jurisdictions when they commenced their Schemes. For example, when Victoria first commenced Ministerial Order 870 (the predecessor to Ministerial Order 1359) which set out how Victorian schools had to implement its original Victorian Child Safe Standards, the main stressors in the above process were:

• Ministerial Order 870 was promulgated in mid-December 2015 and gazetted on 7 January 2016, and the compliance regime commenced on 1 January 2016. Schools then had until August 2016 to comply.
• However, for schools, and many other organisations, both the announcement and the commencement date occurred in the middle of the holiday period. This meant that they were not aware of the new requirements until after they returned from holidays in late January/early February and it therefore reduced the amount of time they had to comply by several months, significantly increasing the panic levels.

Our experience with helping our non-government school clients to implement Child Safe Standards across multiple jurisdictions leads us to make the following recommendations:

1. Announce a timeline for compliance with the Scheme, with a start date for the Scheme, from which date organisations will begin to determine where they already comply, where they do not, and any actions they need to take to comply, and from which date they must begin to take those actions, and an end date by which they must be able to demonstrate full compliance.
2. Implement a staged commencement for different organisations, starting with government, government-funded and government-regulated organisations.
3. Give organisations at least 12 months, from commencement of the Scheme, to demonstrate compliance with it: long enough to enable self-assessment, development of policies and commencement of training but not so long as to reduce the urgency to act.
4. Make sure that this announcement, the commencement of the Scheme, and the end date for compliance, are at times that do not conflict with major holiday periods.
5. Make the head of each organisation personally responsible for ensuring compliance by requiring them to provide to the independent oversight body an annual Declaration of Compliance (setting out those Standards with which they comply and giving an action plan for complying – by a common date for all organisations within a sector – for those Standards with which they do not).