The Child Safe Podcast

This episode discusses compliance with the Child Safe Scheme. It also talks about available support for organisations to help them build capabilities, knowledge and skills of the Scheme – and includes a preview of the new Child Safe Self-Assessment from the Office of the Children's Guardian.

Louise Coe is the Director of Child Safe Organisations at the NSW Office of the Children’s Guardian, and was previously the Director of the Working with Children Check team. She holds a Bachelor of Commerce/Laws (honours) and Executive Master of Public Administration and has experience across both government and non-government organisations in a variety of legal and regulatory roles. 

Sean Brohier has held a career in compliance and investigations for over 20 years. He has worked for the Office of State Revenue, NSW Fair Trading, and is currently the manager of the OCG’s Compliance and Investigations teams.  

Lisa Purves came to the OCG in 2011 and is currently the Manager of the Child Safe Organisations team. She has a compliance and regulatory background, and currently manages a team that creates training and resources. 

Office of the Children’s Guardian resources - https://ocg.nsw.gov.au/our-resources 

Child Safe Self-Assessment - https://cssa.ocg.nsw.gov.au

Looking for support from an OCG Child Safe Officer specific to your sector, or book a training webinar for your staff - childsafe@ocg.nsw.gov.au 

Simon Luckhurst 

Hello, my name's Simon Luckhurst. Welcome to the Child Safe Podcast from the NSW Office of the Children's Guardian. This episode is called Compliance with the Child Safe Scheme.  

I'd like to acknowledge that we're recording today on Gadigal land on your country and pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging, and any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander listeners. On the podcast today, we're going to hear about the intention of the child safe scheme. What the OCG's attitude to compliance activities is, and the new child safe self-assessment. And we've got a great panel to talk about it.  

Louise Coe is the director of Child Safe Organisations at the NSW Office of the Children's Guardian, known as the OCG and was previously the director of the Working with Children Check team.   

Sean Brohier has held a career in compliance and investigations for over 20 years. He's currently the manager of the OCG's Compliance and Investigations teams, and he's passionate about working with the community to help keep children safe.   

Lisa Purves came to the OCG in 2011 and is currently the manager of the Child Safe Organisations team. While she has a compliance and regulatory background, her preferences to create training and resources that make it easy for people to comply with their obligations because she recognises that most people want to do the right thing if they know what to do.   

So, Louise, we'll start with you. Could you give us an overall sense of the intention of the Child Safe Scheme? 

Louise Coe

So the scheme adopted in NSW is the one that was recommended by the Royal Commission, so applying the Standards in NSW is mandatory, not optional for child related organisations. However, the regulatory approach that we've taken is principle based and outcome focused. What that means is each standard represents that aspirational endpoint and being principle based allows there to be flexibility in how organisations apply the Standards.  

Simon Luckhurst 

So Louise, if I'm understanding it when you say it's principle-based, you're saying that there's not sort of a check box kind of approach. Like can you explain that a bit more?  

Louise Coe

So being principal-based means that we're focused on the outcomes, so we don't dictate how organisations are to apply the Standards. The benefit of being principle based is that it allows for innovation and it allows organisations to apply the Standards in the way that works for them and works for the children they serve in the communities they live in. So that's the approach that has been recommended, and one that we implement. I guess the tension then is sometimes organisations say, well tell us what to do, just tell us what we need to do. That's when we're trying to avoid the ticker box situation. We also recognise that they need some guidance, so the way the schemes been set up in NSW is that we have a really clear capability building function. And then, because the scheme’s mandatory, you need to have a compliance function to make sure that the Standards are being implemented across the board and there's a level playing field for organisations.  

Simon Luckhurst

So that brings us to you then Lisa, so some of the organisations are going to need a bit of support to realise what they should be doing. What are some of the things the OCG is doing to help them capability build?  

Lisa Purves

Yeah, sure, but the OCG have been developed and resources and training and information for organisations. For the past. Since 2009 in fact, but over the last year I think what we've really focused on is aligning those resources and the training that we developed to align with the Standards. The Standards themselves provide a really good framework for organisations to make sure that they are looking at each aspect of it. And knowing that not one Standard is not more important than the other, but the set of skills that sit behind those Standards for organisations need is what we're really focusing on. So we focused on delivering some handbooks recently. Which are, you know, the Code of Conduct handbook, how to do child safe reporting and how to recruit for child safe practices. And also you know, how to develop child safe policies, so these are all the skills that people need in order to be able to apply the Standards.  

Simon Luckhurst

You have Child Safe Officers as well, don't you who work with individual sectors?  

Lisa Purves

We do, we do. We have 7 Child Safe Officers, and so each one of them are there to provide bespoke tailored support and to really be able to understand the risks and the identified mitigating factors that would really help those organisations build their capabilities in being child safe. I think as well, more importantly, is to understand the sector and what they need and to work closely with them to address any gaps that they've got, but also to focus on their strengths and to focus on what works well for them and how do they best share that with the sector, because what we don't want is anyone going off in isolation. Child safety is everyone's responsibility, and I think really spreading that communities of practise where we all help each other in this journey is what's important for everyone being child safe.  

Simon Luckhurst

So it really is a 2-part kind of thing then, that's a carrot and a stick if you like, and that's obviously a carrot. So, Sean, I'd like to talk to you about the stick a little bit. What's the OCG's attitude to compliance activities?  

Sean Brohier

Simon, to answer that probably I should start off by dispelling the myth around what compliance isn’t. Compliance isn't us kicking down doors and issuing penalties and prosecuting organisations. What we do try to do is work with organisations to help them comply. So we've been regulating the space of working with children check and children’s employment for many years and undertaking compliance activities there and our approach has always been to try to work with organisations to encourage them to become compliant.  

Simon Luckhurst

So on the 1st of February 2023, the new part of the Children's Guardian Act, the part that relates to the OCG being able to undertake compliance activities comes into effect. What's going to happen?  

Sean Brohier

Look, I, I know that there's a lot of anxiety experienced in the sectors around what's going to happen around that date. For people of these sectors, it's not going to be much different. We're not going to be turning on a switch that starts compliance activities. We've already been meeting with organisations and talking to them about how to implement the Child Safe Standards we'll continue that. From the 1st of February, we do have enforcement powers which come into effect, but that allows us to escalate the matter if the organisations aren't engaging with us, and so we have a number of different enforcement options which we could use to encourage organisations to work with us.  

Simon Luckhurst

So I believe you have sort of what's called an enforceable undertaking and a compliance notice. What's the difference between those?  

Sean Brohier

So the compliance notice is what we would issue once we get to a point where we don't believe the organisation is going to comply. And so that basically sets out a in a prescriptive way what the organisation must do to comply, and then if they don't engage with that and they don't rectify those issues, then we do have options such as issuing penalties or entering into enforceable undertakings. So the enforceable undertaking is an agreement between the organisation and the Office of the Children’s Guardian about what things the organisation will do or will cease doing in order to make sure that they comply with the Child Safe Standards.  

Simon Luckhurst

Great, so I guess like complying with the Child Safe Standards is one of the key ways that we're going to be able to find out whether organisations are compliant with the Child Safe Scheme. So, Louise should organisations be worried if they haven't totally implemented all of the Child Safe Standards?  

Louise Coe

Oh gosh, no Simon. The whole point of the Standards is that it's an evolving, ongoing process, and there's actually a Standard on continuous improvement itself. What I would say if organisations are struggling that they do go to our website, they look at the resources that we've got there. If they still need help, they can contact the friendly people in Lisa's team and they're happy to help them in a number of ways. So the message is that we want people to reach out if they need help. We don't expect there to be compliance 100% of the time because what we're after is a cultural shift. We want organisations to embed the Standards and it becomes part of their bread and butter and it's the way they go about doing business.  

Simon Luckhurst

So Louise, I guess in terms of the Child Safe Standards if an organisation’s actually a national body and they've got offices around Australia, in NSW, do they still have to comply with the NSW Child Safe Standards?  

Louise Coe

Yes, if they operate in NSW, they need to comply with the Standards. However, there are National Principles of Child Safety, and so a national organisation may be applying those principles and we consider if you're applying the principles you're already applying the Standards.  

Simon Luckhurst

So Sean, there are things in the Children's Guardian Act, which are described as minimum requirements for child related organisations, what are these and what should organisations show that they’re meeting?  

Sean Brohier

OK, so the head of a child safe organisation must ensure that the organisation implements Child Safe Standards through systems, policies and processes, and these include such things as a statement of the organisations commitment to child safety, a child safe policy, a code of conduct, a complaint management policy and procedure. A human resources policy, risk management plan and, for those relevant organisations, a reportable conduct policy.  

Simon Luckhurst

So I think the Act technically says organisations may include these things. So what happens if an organisation doesn't have all of those things?  

Sean Brohier

Well, like I said we would work with them and provide assistance in being able to develop those documents. We have a number of resources on our website which will help them as well, and Lisa's team works in that space.  

Louise Coe

The other thing to remember Simon is that we said ‘may’ because they might have those policies under another name, so we didn't want to be strict in saying you ‘must’ have this policy, this policy; the intention behind the policy is what's important, not what it's called.  

Simon Luckhurst

All right, thanks. So all these documents Lisa, how can organisations, if they're just starting off on their child safe journey, how can they create these documents or even improve the ones that they already have?  

Lisa Purves

Yeah, look, I think taking on Sean's point, I think that the focus for everybody here is to help you be capable in delivering these documents and applying these documents and more importantly, child safe practices. Nobody wants to see anybody be hit with penalties. The ultimate aim is for everybody to be child safe and to achieve that cultural shift that we're trying to achieve here.

So we've created a number of resources to support people, but we don't just want to hand people a resource and let them get on with doing that themselves, we're here to help. We've got a number of training sessions. We've got a number of skill builder sessions which we aim to sort of support people in their journey, and again, we've got that one-on-one contact where they can contact the Child Safe Officer and speak to them about the actual problem. The officer might not have the answer, but they'll be able to put them in touch with others in the sector. And really, for them to be able to gain the experiences and hear from people within their sector about the things that they're doing. Some of these things can be small things. They don't have to be expensive, they can just be about being a part of the community and share their ideas, sharing resources, and that's ultimately what we're aiming to do is for people to think differently about how they keep kids safe when working with them.  

Simon Luckhurst

Thanks. So Sean, again when it comes to compliance what would that actually look like when your team starts to work with organisations to assess their compliance. What's that going to look like? 

Sean Brohier

So it will involve us meeting up with organisations face to face and we'll have a discussion about what things they're doing well in order to implement those Child Safe Standards. And then we'll work together with them to identify any areas where they can improve any areas where they can further implement the Standards. To better protect kids.  

Simon Luckhurst

And I think you said mentioned before, but maybe it would be good to go into it a bit more so some of that monitoring is going to be on that strengths base. It's not going to be what's missing, it's going to be how they can improve what's already there?  

Sean Brohier

Yeah, look, I think it's really important to understand that we're not working against organisations. What we want to work, what we want to do is work with organisations to keep kids safe. So it's a partnership between our office and those organisations and we want to help identify areas that they're doing really well so that they can do more of and then we also want to look for areas where they just need to tighten up so that they don't put themselves and their children at risk.  

Simon Luckhurst

And when is enforcement most likely to occur then?  

Sean Brohier

Enforcement will probably occur when they refuse to engage in the process, or that after us giving advice to these organisations about how to keep kids safe, they just ignore it.  

Simon Luckhurst

So it really sounds like organisations are going to have to be quite resistant to improving or being or creating a child safe environment. That's when things are going to get serious.  

Sean Brohier

That's right.  

Simon Luckhurst

That's great. Lisa, I think one thing that organisations can do working with our Child Safe Officers is have them come in and actually help them capability build. Can you describe that process a little bit?  

Lisa Purves

Yeah, sure, look they they'll come in and do an assessment with the organisation. But again, the focus of that assessment is to look at where they're doing well. And to sort of then also share with them some ideas that other people have done in their sector that will help them improve. Again, what we're looking for is that sort of complete cultural shift, as in child safety is embedded into everything that you do, and it's making sure that children right across the board - no matter their background or their ability - are given every opportunity to participate in the organisation and participate to their best ability as a child. You know, so what we really want them to do is to know that children are valued and, you know, we also need some parents as close as well to sort of start asking the right questions of organisations as a prompt for them to start looking at how they do actually approach child safe.

So we've got a plethora of resources on our website of a really high standard, stuff that I'm really, really proud of that we've achieved and also I think more importantly, we've had up to, I think, close to 50,000 access of those resources. So whether that be our training and accessing the podcasts that we do, or the videos that we've developed recently. You know the fact that we've had 50,000 people in the last, since January of this year shows that the resources are really useful and they're really there to help people. None of us want the compliance action to be enforced, what we really want people to do is come to us, let us help them, let us support them and really, what we're aiming for is a safe place for children across the board.  

Simon Luckhurst

That's great and you mentioned before as well, sort of, without the OCG being involved, there's something called communities, communities of practice. Do you want to just talk a little bit about what that is?  

Lisa Purves

Yeah, sure. So what we also try to facilitate and through the Child Safe Officers is that we meet regularly with the sector and include people in the in the sector who were basically child safe champions in their area, and what we want them to do is to promote the best practice and to give us feedback on the resources that we're developing, so that we know that they're going to be practical and used by the sector. Because what we don't want to do is go away in isolation and develop resources and training that you know doesn't connect with the sector doesn't address their concerns or their needs. We really want the sector to be able to come to the OCG and recognise that we're here to help them, recognise that we're all after the same goal we all want children to be safe and, you know, by learning from each other and understanding what everybody does on a day-to-day basis to make sure that children are safe is the best way that we'll all then, and we'll be able to get those small things that we do every day changed into the big things that keep kids safe.  

Simon Luckhurst

That's great, and if you're a parent out in the community and you wanted to know that the organisation the child was involved in was child safe, how would you go about that?  

Lisa Purves

So we do have some resources for parents that one of our focuses this year is to create more resources for families and communities, but there are a number of animations that they can go to watch on our website and they tell them the things to look out for in organisations. But it ultimately comes down to the parent asking questions of the organisation, perhaps taking a look at their website. Speaking to people when they're there and asking them things like you know, what does this organisation do to keep my children safe?  

Simon Luckhurst

So Lisa, I believe you've got a grandson now. So just out of interest, what were some of the considerations that you and your family took into account when you were choosing a safe day-care centre for him?  

Lisa Purves

Yeah, look, I mean given my background, my daughter wanted me to come with her to go look at childcare centres when we were picking one for my grandson and you know some of them looked beautiful from outside, they really did. They had wonderful facilities. But when I went in, there was small things that didn't sit well with me. And you know, sometimes it was the amount of children in. The room or sometimes where the nappy changing areas were, I didn't like how visible they were. And some you know, had fantastic outdoor layouts but the classrooms where the children were in quite small and in my opinion, overcrowded.

I also, I would also feel better about an organisation if they were upfront and approached me and said, ‘Here are our child safe policies, here are our practices. This is the booklet that we follow. Here's how you can go and speak to anybody. Here's how you raise the concern. These are the things that we do with our children.’ You know the one we eventually ended up selecting was like, ‘On this day the children attend yoga and this day the children do this activity,’ and for me it just seemed much more welcoming and genuine when they came and approached me rather than waiting for me to ask, ‘Can I see your child safe policies? Can I see your National Quality Framework achievements and your results?’ So for me that those centres that were more upfront about that, I felt gave me more confidence in their ability and understanding what it was to be a child safe organisation.  

Simon Luckhurst

And I guess you'll be applying those same kinds of principles when he gets a bit older and he starts playing sport, or, you know, does any other activities that involve organisations?  

Lisa Purves

Yeah look, I've had 2 children myself who've gone through sport. I recognise it can be difficult for some parents to approach and say, you know, ‘Can I ask what you do to keep kids safe in this organisation?’ so that's why I would say the at start of the organisation to be on the front foot and to provide the parents with that information up front. The club that my son attended, they would have a parent’s evening and in that parent’s evening, they would say, ‘This is the behaviours you can expect from our coaches. If you've got a concern, this is how you raise the concern, this is the behaviour we expect of our athletes too,’ so it wasn't all just about the coaches and child protection. It was also there was an expected standard of behaviour for the kids. And so that to me, put me more at rest, and I felt like the organisation did actually care about the outcomes for children because they were on the front foot again and came to me and told me what I should expect from the organisation. I know I've been at other clubs where they didn't do that and I didn't feel like I had a voice or I didn't feel like I could talk to people, so if I didn't feel that way, I'm sure my son didn't feel that way either.  

Louise Coe

I think it's really important that parents and you know communities start asking those questions because that's how you drive compliance. Like there's only so many people in Sean's team that can go out and visit organisations, we need families and communities to get out there and ask those questions because then organisations, if they don't already know about the Standards. They'll go, ‘Oh OK, we're getting asked about this, we better find out, we better start applying,’ so that's driving compliance and that helps us all to keep children safe.  

Simon Luckhurst

So that's how parents and what parents should be doing, and both in terms of for their own children but for an overall, you know, more organisations in general, realising their child health obligations, but how can organisations, what's the OCG doing to assist organisations to establish how child safe they feel they are?  

Louise Coe

Oh, what a great question Simon! Look what we've been working on for a number of months is our Child Safe Self-Assessment which is an online tool. It's a series of questions, it would take someone in an organisation probably about 20 minutes to complete, and it's a series of questions about each of the Standards and it's asking, ‘Do you have this policy? Do you implement this practice?’ and organisations are asked to actually complete it in a really honest way. Because this is part of our capability building and also awareness raising about the Standards. So once they've answered all those questions they will then have an option to receive an action report and depending on the type of organisation or the type of report they want, they can actually choose how complex or basic the report they receive back. So the report is really an action plan and it shows their areas of strength, the areas where they need to sort of maybe concentrate on and their areas where they really need to concentrate on their, their design and their resources and how they are meeting that particular standard.

So, it really provides that starting point for organisations to then reflect about, ‘Well what do we need to change?’ It also has links to our resources, so if they need assistance with a particular Standard, there'll be links in the action plan that they can click on they can find out more about that Standard and they can find out what resources we have available, so I'd strongly encourage organisations to give the tool a go, get onto our website, do the online assessment. They can actually send it to other people in their organisations. So if it's a big organisation and you might have different branches, or you might have, you might want the perspective of people at different levels, then you can all do the tour, the questionnaire, and then when you get the results you can compare and just see where you all sit in the organisation.

So again, it's about capability building and awareness raising about the Standards, and it's really for their benefit to give them that sort of starting point to say, ‘Where do we go from here?’ and hopefully they start implementing the Standards, and they've got the guidance they need to do that.  

Simon Luckhurst

I guess the big question all the OCG's resources: the eLearning, the videos, the animations, the handbooks and the Child Safe Self-Assessment. How much?  

Louise Coe

Everything's free.  

Simon Luckhurst

Everything's free?  

Louise Coe

Everything's free, it's available to everybody, I know people in other states use our resources as well, and that's perfectly fine because we all want to keep children safe and we don't want there to be any barriers to that.  

Simon Luckhurst

Well, that brings us to the end of this podcast. What we've heard today is make sure you're doing all you can to keep the children in your organisation safe. You can do this by applying the Child Safe Standards. Thanks to my guests Louise Coe, Lisa Purves and Sean Brohier from the Office of the Children's Guardian. If you want to know more, head to our website, ocg.nsw.gov.au. While you're there, click on Resources tab to find and download a range of free handbooks, templates, videos, animations, posters and flyers, and don't forget the Child Safe Self-Assessment.

We also have a team of dedicated Child Safe Officers who are responsible for supporting organisations in the sport and recreation, faith-based, early childhood, health, education, and local government sectors. They'd love to hear from you if you have any questions or if you want to know where to find support for your organisation. To get in contact with the Child Safe Officers or to talk to us about anything else, email childsafe@ocg.nsw.gov.au.

Please follow our podcast and let us know what you like and keep checking our website for more episodes. Remember, child safety is everyone's responsibility. I'm Simon Luckhurst, thanks for listening.  

This episode discusses why and how the Royal Commission was set up, the implications of the Commission’s findings across child safe organisations, the challenges that some organisations faced in updating their policy and practice, and where organisations can now find support and other helpful resources to become more child safe.

Justice Peter McClelland was a Judge of Appeal in New South Wales. Prior to this, he was the Chief Judge at Common Law of Supreme Court of New South Wales, a Judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, Chief Judge of the Land and Environment Court of New South Wales, Chairman of the Sydney Water Inquiry and Assistant Commissioner at the Independent Commission Against Corruption. He was also the head of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses into Child Sexual Abuse.

Richard Weston is the first Deputy Children’s Guardian for Aboriginal Children and Young People in New South Wales, bringing more than 25 years of experience in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs to the role. The 20 years prior to this role he has held a number of CEO positions in First Nations peak bodies focused on health, healing and children. He is an experienced leader who has worked in very challenging social and political environments and delivered measurable social, health and economic outcomes. He has also been part of a number of advisory groups and committees working on national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander policy matters. Most recently has been appointed to the Federal Governments Referendum Engagement Group to support Constitutional Recognition of a First Nations Voice to Parliament.

Karen Jones is the Chief Executive of the NSW Office of Sport, leading 400 employees across 18 locations, to set the state sport policy agenda and provide direct service delivery to communities throughout NSW. Karen’s role is to work with government, the sport sector and key partners to create healthier people, connect communities and make a stronger NSW through the power of sport and recreation. Despite significant challenges in recent years, Karen is proud to have continued serving communities and supporting the sport sector. Throughout various adverse weather events, including bushfire, flood and drought, the Office of Sport has operated its sport and recreation centres as evacuation centres to provide displaced community members with accommodation and assist emergency services workers. In addition, the Office of Sport has offered relief programs for youth who were directly impacted during these difficult times and administered grant programs to support the repair and restoration of vital sport infrastructure.

Find out more about the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses into Sexual Abuse - https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/

Office of the Children’s Guardian resources - https://ocg.nsw.gov.au/our-resources

Office of Sport - https://www.sport.nsw.gov.au/

Play by the Rules resources - https://www.playbytherules.net.au/

Looking for support from an OCG Child Safe Officer specific to your sector, or book a training webinar for your staff - childsafe@ocg.nsw.gov.au

Simon Luckhurst

Hello, my name is Simon Luckhurst. Welcome to this podcast from the NSW Office of the Children Guardian. This episode is called Beyond the Royal Commission. I'd like to acknowledge that we're recording today on Gadigal land on Eora country and pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging and any Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander listeners. We're hoping this podcast series will give you a background of the objectives of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, as well as giving you some practical ideas of what you can do to implement the Child Safe Scheme in New South Wales. This series sometimes talks about things which may trigger an emotional response in some listeners. We ask you to always be mindful of your own mental health and to seek support if you need to. I'm very excited to introduce today's panel who bring with them a wealth of experience from a range of areas, all of which have culminated in some serious expertise in how to keep children safe from harm and abuse. Justice Peter McClellan was head of the Royal Commission, Richard Weston is the first Deputy Children’s Guardian for Aboriginal children and young people in NSW and Karen Jones is the Chief Executive of the NSW Office of Sport. Thanks to you all for being here today. Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced her intention to hold a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in November 2012. Peter, you were the head of that Commission, so I'll ask you the first question, what were the key challenges for you in ensuring that the Royal Commission was able to do the job you were asked to do?

Peter McClellan

Well, the terms of reference were very broad. And when I sat down to look at them, I did wonder to myself how I was going to carry out the task. It was plain that there were many people who had been sexually abused who were likely to come forward to the Commission, so we needed to put in place processes to receive their stories and take care of them during the course of engaging with the Commission. So we had one component which required us to collect what became in the legislation, private sessions together with a large counselling group who helped to keep those people safe on their way through their journey with the Commission. But we also had to conduct research in order to identify what was going wrong, why things were going wrong in the community in relation to the sexual abuse of children in institutions and try and find a package of recommendations that would hopefully minimise if not totally eliminate those problems going forward and that required us to draw upon the expertise available in the community to help us to make recommendations. And we did that through engaging with universities and others who had research capacity. We employed directly as consultants, people who were known experts in the field. So we put our research into a wide frame in order to ultimately come forward with the recommendations which everyone knows we made. We're also given remit to look at the criminal justice system as it applies to those who may have been sexually assaulted and in order to ensure that their perpetrators were dealt with appropriately, and we made ultimately a number of reforms for the criminal justice system, which I'm grateful have been taken up around the country. But we also had to look at the response of the community for those, or to those who've been abused and that lead us to recommend a redress scheme which you probably all know about, but they also had made significant recommendations in relation to the response of the ordinary civil law today and to claims for damages which those who have been abused might wish to make. We made recommendations that allowed the removal of the statute of limitations allowed those claims to go back in time. And otherwise made recommendations, particularly in relation to institutions, so that, for example, the Catholic Church, which had previously been able to avoid liability by saying that it wasn't a legal entity, we've made recommendations that state governments legislate to ensure that that couldn't happen again, and they have. So what did I do to deal with that challenge as well? The task was enormous and we had to progressively make our way through the various issues, gather the expertise and information to enable us to make recommendations.

Simon Luckhurst

Peter, it sounds to me from what you said then that one of your primary concerns was the needs of the survivors.

Peter McClellan

Absolutely yeah. As you would appreciate in asking for people to come forward and tell their story, there was a considerable risk of re traumatising those have been traumatised in their childhood. And as a consequence, if we're going to embark on that task, we have to make sure that we had people in place who were able to manage the health of those people through our processes. So, starting with the person who answered the telephone and then working right the way through our processes, we had people who were trained in order to ensure that, so far as we could, we kept survivors safe. And thankfully, I think we managed to achieve our task.

Simon Luckhurst

Richard, at the time of this recording, you're actually Acting Childrens Guardian in NSW. But can you give us some insight into why it's important to have a Deputy Guardian for Aboriginal children and young people?

Richard Weston

I think it's important to have a focus on Aboriginal children and young people in systems, and our main focus has been the child protection system and Aboriginal children are significantly over represented in that that system, across all jurisdictions across the country. NSW has around 40 plus percent of Aboriginal children in care are Aboriginal, with a population representation of around 5%, so I think it's really important that the the Office of the Children Guardian has a focus on what's going on for Aboriginal children and young people in that system and ensuring that we're meeting our primary purpose in relation to Aboriginal children, but for all children is to keep them safe in that system.

Simon Luckhurst

You obviously have a strong interest in child safety.

Richard Weston

Well, look, I think my interest it, I guess it was an evolutionary thing, I didn't have any training or particular focus on children, but I did 9 years at the Healing Foundation. We explored a lot of the traumas and experiences of the Stolen Generations, which happened through the first 70 or 80 years of the 20th century and really got exposed to those stories in debt up and up close the lived experiences of people and in relation to the Royal Commission around 13 to 14% of the people that came forward to the Commission were Aboriginal people. So that's really where my interest has come from, and I think as a First Nations person thinking about the future, you know we're a living breathing culture that's been around for 60,000 years and it's our children that take our culture forward and really important to have our children and all children just brought up happy, safe,  being educated, recognising that they all have a particular bundle of rights that we should honour and you know, just ensuring that they have they are there for that future, to carry out our culture forward. Into the future.

Simon Luckhurst

Peter, we've been hearing a little bit about why the work of the Royal Commission it was so important, but can you give us a bit more of an overview of how the Royal Commission went about its work? You mentioned you started with a staff of 2 and grew into over 600 people, so how did you manage that? How did you oversee that?

Peter McClellan

Well, you need to think of the Royal Commission as having multiple, and, in some ways, different tasks. It was plain that we had to sit down and talk with survivors who wanted to come forward and tell their stories in private sessions. And I'm interested to hear what Karen has to say about talking to survivors. It is a difficult but for us was a fundamental task. So, we had to put together a process to ensure that we received the story of everyone who wanted to come and talk to us. Secondly, and this probably was the most important thing initially to come to terms with, we had to identify ways of telling the stories in public of institutions that had failed. Now we could have told the story of a great many more institutions than we did. And in some cases we couldn't tell the story of particular institutions because they were ongoing police investigations or prosecutions taking place. So we couldn't trespass upon that ground. But we had to find case studies that took us across different types of activities. Sport being one of the activities we looked at carefully, but the church obviously was in other schools with another, Kindergartens, Youth groups. The YMCA was another. You could look at almost every institution in Australia that was engaging with children and find that there had been some problems. So we then had to say to ourselves, well, what do we do? We can't possibly look at all of them. How do we go about our task? And what we tried to do was to find institutions which had failed across each of the categories of institution and try and have public hearings which were in proportion to the number of complaints we had about particular types of institutions. And if you look at the final report, you'll see how carefully we actually managed to meet that objective. In bringing forward public hearings, though, our purpose was of course to explain where failure had occurred, but also explain it in a way that the people of Australia would ultimately come to understand this was a really serious problem. It was not a question of a few bad apples that was not a question of some insignificant events but it occurred, we had to make sure that everyone understood just how fundamental this was as a failure of the whole Australian community. You've probably heard me talk about that from time to time. And so what we did was we carefully identified the institution we would go to and we told their stories in public and that had a sort of gathering momentum. Because the more stories we told more people would come to us with stories submitted, gathered pace and we were originally supposed to take only 3 years. We ended up taking 5. It could have taken longer. But we had to bring it to an end at some appropriate time. But alongside that work, which in itself was very taxing, we had a whole research capacity fulfilled by internal people, but also consultants who were looking at the rules that had applied in the past where they had failed and what the rules should be. What the policy should be going forward. And relation to different types of organisations. And we worked with different types of organisations, so I remember clearly John Coates rang me up. John I'd known when he was a solicitor. Yeah, he rang me up one day and said ‘Peter, I've just realised I'm about to take a youth team overseas to a youth games. We don't have any policies in relation to caring for the children. We are about to take overseas. Can you help?’ And we had those sorts of calls not necessary to me, but to the organisation from different organisations across the country saying ‘whoops, we don't have anything in place to keep our children safe, can you help us?’ So we were able to engage with many. Then through that process and the research process developed, the recommendations which institutions around the country as I understand it, have taken up and are working with to make things safer going forward. Alongside that, as I mentioned earlier, we had a whole research program in relation to criminal law. We conducted 1000 mock trials with transcript that was recorded. Actors playing the part of judges and accused and so on. And recorded the deliberations of 1000 juries to see just how the ordinary public reasoned in relation to sexual assault cases. It's one of the most comprehen- well, the most comprehensive study ever done about the way juries operate. All of the materials are available, it's all recorded both visually and audio. Albeit some of it through one way glass. But it was fascinating to watch, but it enabled us to bring forward multiple recommendations in relation to the criminal justice space and talk about how juries function and reason in that space and hopefully we managed to explode some myths through the work that we did, and then we've made recommendations about changes in the criminal law which have been taken up by different states, and legislative changes occur.

Simon Luckhurst

Now firstly, I leave for the day when I have an issue with my son’s soccer team and I can ring up a Royal Commissioner to ask for advice on it!

Peter McClellan

You might have trouble finding me.

Simon Luckhurst

But secondly, you mentioned you listened to over 8000 survivors. You had multiple reports commissioned, and then you've just talked about these 1000 trials. How on earth did you distil that into the recommendations you had? How did you decide which ones to keep and which ones to leave out? I imagine there was a few robust conversations about that.

Peter McClellan

There were of course 5 Commissioners apart from myself, and we met generally every month. Otherwise, commissioners were spread around the country doing private sessions and other things. And in the course of our meetings, with the help of the staff, we would bring forward reports designed to help us, ultimately to distil recommendations so it was an ongoing process throughout the work of the Commission. And we engaged I think something like 100 experts outside of the Commission, and you can find all their reports - they're all public, which were made available to us and from their work, and together with their help we were able to distil recommendations overtime, which ultimately led to the final report to our early deliberations, was the Redress report, which we released before the Commission came to an end - that was deliberate. I wanted to have that report out in the public domain why we were still operating. So that it wouldn't just die on the shelf. We were still around to talk about it and I was able to meet with the Prime Minister about it during the course of the Commission's work and ultimately, as you know, our recommendations were taken up by the government. But it was important to have that report in the public domain before we got to the end of our work.

Simon Luckhurst

Karen, we know sport’s an important part of childhood for many children, how do you support child safety in your role?

Karen Jones

Yeah, so look at the Office of Sport, of which I'm the chief executive. Our mission is to build active communities and we really provide some things like leadership, policies, programs, funding all with the aim of maximising the benefits for participation in sport, through sporting endeavours and also through general recreation as well. My role as the chief is really quite diverse. And we have an oversight, or I have an oversight, over a variety of programs, initiatives and campaigns which all lead to our mission, which also means that we have a really good focus and real good touchpoint for children. Both as the chief executive and also as a parent myself, child safety means that children, whether they are my own or whether they ask somebody else’s, are in an environment where they're safe, where they can learn, where they can grow. Where they can really develop to their full potential. And for me it is really about preventing any sort of harm to children creating an environment where they can actually participate free of any harm or of any danger, and for us the creation of the redress scheme following the Royal Commission was a real game changer for us as part of child safety and we really put a focus on it for the Office of Sport. So soon after becoming the chief executive, a real touchpoint for myself around the emphasis of child safety was I was actually charged with giving some direct personal apologies to people who had experienced abuse in our sport and recreation centres in the early 19- in the 1970s through to the 1980s. And I personally saw the hurt from their experiences and how they continued to be affected through to this time around what they experienced, even though it was many decades ago, and I want to acknowledge that it does take real courage to come forward in that type of way, and to actually say what had happened and these people were incredibly brave to do so, and so the least I could do was acknowledge and obviously pay their due respect back around that, their experiences and what it is that they went through. For us, that whole experience, for me anyway, it really highlighted the need for us to do absolutely everything that we could do around child safety for our organisation, not just for the Office of Sport proper but also for us actually showing leadership across the sport sector and really showing that way that things need to change, and really to set the tone of the conversation and also really to set the standard around expectations for child safety across sport. It's really important for us that you know people do feel safe in the sport environment that children feel safe in the sport environment that parents feel safe sending their children to participate in sport and for us at the Office of Sport for the NSW government, the best thing that we can do is to really show leadership in that space.

Simon Luckhurst

Thanks Karen. Richard as part of its response to the Royal Commission's recommendations the NSW government has developed the Child Safe Scheme, which incorporates the Child Safe Standards. Can you give us a bit of an overview into what role the Office of the Children’s Guardian has in rolling out the Scheme?

Richard Weston

Well, we've been at this for a number of years now, so we have developed the legislation and the legislation came into effect on the 1st of February 2022, but that's really just the start of the journey, I think. So we have a, uh, compliance and enforcement role, which will come into effect on the 1st of February in 2023, so there's been this, I guess, a year of enabling organisations that are affected by this legislation to, you know, become aware of what the requirements are and what the requirements will be. So we've taken, you know, so we do have to do the enforcement and compliance. But we've also produced a lot of resources to support organisations to implement Child Safe Standards, and when those Standards are implemented, they build a culture where the abuse of children is prevented. That's our primary focus, we want to prevent abuse from occurring and that was certainly a strong message that came out of survivor testimony out of the Royal Commission. They did not want to see it happen again to other children. But when it does occur we wanted to see it responded to and reported on. So, the the Child Safe Standards provide a very dynamic, flexible framework to help organisations build that culture of child safety. It provides the resources that were developed at providing guidance for organisations about how they can implement the Child Safe Standards in a very practical way. And to ensure that children are kept safe from harm. I guess the other approach that we're taking is not just about you know that big stick enforcement and compliance approach, it's really about building a continuous improvement approach so that organisations take time out to reflect on practice, how they’re going, and a lot of our resources talk about that. They show great examples of organisations that are all already doing great things with children, and there are quite a few organisations that are doing really good work with children, and I think this child safe framework has helped. I like that. And bring those bring those practices to the floor.

Simon Luckhurst

And can you describe some of the challenges the OCG is facing in assisting organisations to be child safe?

Richard Weston

Well, I think being able to, you know, have a flexible approach, I think, is really important because, you know, different organisations have different capabilities and different resourcing to be able to implement the Standards. Certainly communicating the importance of child safety and the Child Safe Standards too, you know, that it is encased in legislation, so there's an obligation for organisations and agencies that are working with children to implement that legislation and implement the Standards. And I think the just the diversity of the types of organisations that are out there, there's as we've just heard, there's, you know, there's multitudes of organisations, and we're having to deal with, you know, faith-based organisations, education, schools, sporting agencies and groups. So it's not just about organisations and agencies, it's about what goes on at the community level, so really important that communities have access to, you know, what's going on in their community. So what policies, organisations, different agencies, their children are interacting with? What sort of policies and procedures and strategies that they have in place and that's all part of the Standards. And I think really supporting organisations to be able to listen to the voices of children and involve children in in the development of those policies and hearing from children, what keeps them safe? What's the environment that, when do they feel safe? Then being able to act on that.

Simon Luckhurst

Thanks, Richard. Karen, what are some of the challenges sports organisations are facing to keep children safe?

Karen Jones

The actual issues that are faced at that organisational level is the majority of these organisations are not-for-profit and so therefore their capacity to be able to look at implementing new child safe practices or whatever is often quite limited, also because a lot of the people that run these organisations are volunteers. They’re mums and dads and parents and carers who are sitting around their kitchen tables, sometimes wearing the hat of secretary and treasurer of their local club. So for them to actually then be able to not just worry about the day-to-day operations of their club, but then also have this overlay of child safe requirements or child safe practices, it can be really challenging for them to actually implement it. And so, our role at the Office of Sport is to try and make that process a lot easier for them, to actually provide them with instructions, with tools, with tips and tricks around how they might be able to implement these child safe requirements or practices for their clubs and for the beneficiaries of the children and youth who participate in their sport.

Simon Luckhurst

There's obviously a vast disparity between some really well-funded large sporting organisations and then much smaller volunteer-run clubs. How do you, how can you support all clubs to be child safe?

Karen Jones

So where we actually started was, we have developed our own child safe action plan and that child safe action plan not only embeds every Standard in every aspect of our own organisation, and it was really important for myself that we get our own house in order, as well, before we actually show leadership across the sports sector. But we also that child safe action plan also aims to increase awareness around child safety across the sports sector and also importantly builds child safeguarding capacity in those organisations to be able to deliver services to children. So for the short term, what we would really like to see is I would personally like to know that the Office of Sport demonstrates best practice in keeping children safe and that our culture of child safety is really well understood across our staff cohort and is demonstrated every single touch point for us with children and youth. I also want to ensure it's truly embedded to every program and every activity that we offer as an organisation. However, in the longer term, I would like to have confidence that right across the NSW sports sector that all organisations are actively preventing harm to children and protecting children from harm through their own policies and practices that they've hopefully learned from not just us at the Office of Sport, but more broadly through organisations like the Office of the Children’s Guardian.

Simon Luckhurst

Thanks, Karen. Can I ask how policies and practices are changing in the sporting sector to reflect the requirements of the Child Safe Scheme?

Karen Jones

Yeah, I'll start by talking about the Office of Sport and how our policies and procedures have really started to change. And then how that then influences the sports sector. With regards to our policies, these were all updated after the Royal Commission and the legislative changes that then followed.  So this was, and continues to be, a real ongoing effort to ensure that all staff understands the policies and what is actually required of them across the whole Office of Sport. The introduction of the Child Safe Standards provided us with the opportunity to have a broader and really more holistic view and discussion about how we continue to keep child safe and the best ways and the means for us to do so. And I believe that the Standards have made us more proactive in actually preventing harm. I’ll give you an example; we increased our focus on risk management, for instance, and we trained staff from every Office of Sport centre and venue. This really provided every member of staff the opportunity to understand what it meant to be child safe as an organisation and this actually meant that it was all of our staff; so, it was our catering staff. It was our maintenance officers. It was our administration staff. And the purpose of doing that was really to understand and to get them to contribute to a child safe culture across the organisation. So it wasn't just those staff members who  dealt with children directly, it was the whole organisation because we wanted to really instil that cultural approach to say we are a child safe organisation, and we have a child safe culture. Child safety also became an identifier priority amongst our leadership team. We established a Child Safe Steering Committee of which again to elevate the importance of child safety across the organisation. I nominated myself as the chair of that steering committee so it came from the top down. We have introduced a new child customer survey. The children who attend our camps and this really supplements the range of ways that we informally already hear from children about their experience while they're at any of our facilities or any of our venues, a really important component is the survey that they complete is anonymous, so that they do feel safe in actually providing us with any information they want to. We've also been talking to the Advocate for Children and Young People and sporting organisations about the best ways to include children voices and to ensure that they’re  heard, I mean in fact earlier on today, we did have one of our steering committee meetings and we did start talking about youth advisory councils, and how we can actually start to establish one for ourselves so that we can actually interact with a representative group to actually start talking about not just child safe measures, but also how can we best reflect the needs and the voices of children and youth across everything that we do in our organisation.

Simon Luckhurst

And how have you supported your organisations to include the voices of children and their families when they're involved in sport?

Karen Jones

Yeah, absolutely so, child safeguarding considerations are really inherent in all of our programs, campaigns and training that is provided by the Office of Sport. I'll give you some examples. So one example is our daughters and dads Active and Empowered program. This is a great program, it's a program designed for dads who actually want to spend really good quality time with their daughter while learning and encouraging her sporting skills, helping her become more confident, building up her self esteem and also her resilience. It's also a really good exercise for the dads to actually learn about the girls’ experience in this day and age and the pressures that they might be facing and it really educates the fathers around what their daughters might be going through and being a bit more empathetic to that. But the whole program is really about empowering, yeah, young girls and really helping to build our positive parent-child top relationship under the guise of sport. And actually making them more physically active. Another example I've got is our Shoosh for Kids campaign, and this is a collaborative effort between the Office of Sport and sporting organisations. And the purpose of our Shoosh for Kids campaign is to encourage positive spectator behaviour at junior sport. So the Office of Sport provides free digital resources to raise awareness and to promote the very simple message; that is, ‘if you don't have anything nice to say at local, junior sporting competition or sporting event, then you just shoosh for kids’, right? And this program is aimed at really reducing the harm to children from negative sideline behaviour, and so all of that yelling and commentary that might be provided by over-enthusiastic parents on the sideline. The last example I can give you is around their Talent Pathways and that is where we know that there have been some specific risks to children recently identified through the media about upcoming athletes as they're excelling in their sport and that's that sort of athlete and coaching type relationship. And for us it's really about helping parents and carers understand how they can best support their children as they go down that pathway of their athletic pursuits and at the same time really encourage them encouraging them to go down that pathway but making sure that they're doing it in a really safe environment. So at the Office of Sport we've created a series of resources and websites to actually guide and assist parents supporting their children’s engagement in sport and particularly as they're pursuing their athlete their athletic career.

Simon Luckhurst

Thanks Karen. Peter, it must be satisfying to hear about some of the practical things now being done to keep children safe as a result of the Royal Commission you lead. Why do you think your work has been so effective?

Peter McClellan

Well, can I go back to a step I mentioned earlier, the task that confronted us. We set out to shock the Australian people and to shock organisations that had responsibility for children. Because we believed that unless we did shock them, and shock people into realising things must change, then there probably wouldn't be change and we would disappear from the landscape and things would go on as normal. I think we succeeded in shocking the general population, and I think we also sent a shockwave through all of the organisations which have responsibility for children. And I'm immensely pleased that those organisations responded to that gentle, perhaps sometimes more than gentle, shock and have responded by developing policies now going forward that will provide, I am sure, are much safer environment for children going forward. My hope is that the organisations with responsibility for children continue to work in that space. Richard mentioned before the the idea that organisations should continually learn and develop, improve policies in these areas and I'm sure that, well, I hope that that's what will happen not only in 5 years' time, 10 years' time, but for all time. That we may have actually been able to so shock the community into realising the failure that we as a whole community suffered in earlier generations that that should never be repeated. I confess to being confident, but with some reservations that that actually will happen.

Simon Luckhurst

Richard, where do organisations start on their child safe journey?

Richard Weston

I think the first starting point is to recognise that there are now laws in place that require organisations to implement the Child Safe Standards, so there's a legal requirement to focus on these Standards. That's, I think, the first thing, but in terms of getting resources, the OCG website has a plethora of resources which are in different forms, written forms. There's video clips, there's all sorts of ways to access that information, and there's great examples and the clips about organisations that already doing work in this space, how they're working with children and giving them voice and what they're doing in their organisation. To implement, you know, develop policies and continuous improvement. We've heard some of that from Karen. So you know, I think that's where it starts, but I think, you know, we are responding to this Royal Commission which showed really deeply the hurts and harms that have occurred to people who experienced child sexual abuse. And you know, if you line up against the Standards and think about, well, the voices of children are important, one of the things survivors said were that they were never listened to. And in many instances they talked about that not being believed, and you know not being supported as being more harmful than the actual abuse they experienced. So I think that we are, the Child Safe Scheme is responding to the Royal Commission in that way and that these Standards that have come out of that Royal Commission. Again, it's based on research, so really quality research and consultation and the voices of survivors. The standards are not a, not just about dealing with, you know, the event after you know after the event, abuse after it happens, it's really about aimed at prevention. About and supporting organisations, supporting communities, supporting children, to be safe and have child safety top of mind.

Simon Luckhurst

Karen, we've heard about some of the things available to support organisations, but when do they need to start on their child safe journey?

Karen Jones

If they haven't done it now, then as soon as they identify a child safe risk or any concern, whether it be small or big. And this might be something like a behaviour that they think might breach a Code of Conduct, or something along those lines, or when a child might disclose information. It might be when they identify a new risk at any of their sporting venues, for instance, or even if they see a risk online, they should really start acting on those things straight away. However, if organisations have a child safe culture, then everyone in their whole organisation is looking at children all the time and is looking at improving their experience all the time. So I would say that if you have not started then now is the right time to do so, but not only looking at the immediate risks, but also looking at how you can actually instil a child safe culture across your whole organisation.

Simon Luckhurst

And what are some of the specific resources from the OCG, and other places, that you'd recormmend?

Karen Jones

For those that might be listening that are involved in sport or recreation across the state, I do encourage them to go to our website which is sport.nsw.gov.au of course, very simple, and if you actually click through to the ‘run your club’ section of our website, you'll actually be pointed to all of those resources that will help people start on their child safe journey.

Simon Luckhurst

Thank you. So last question for you Peter. We've spoken a bit about how you must feel on that journey from when you started the Royal Commission. What do you think is the the the overall legacy of the of the Royal Commission now?

Peter McClellan

I think there's multiple legacies I don't think you can say there's just one. But listening to Richard and Karen, and a little bit of that I've read in these spaces, it’s plain that what we set out to do and to drive change through organisations is happening. It started to happen in the time of the Commission. Many organisations were required - they came voluntarily - but to come and talk to us in roundtables about what they had been doing, what they should be doing, and we were able to set a conversation going which obviously is starting now to take real momentum through the community. I'm very pleased about that, but also, beyond that, I don't think it's too bold of me to say, but the work of the Commission and the exposure of the stories in relation to children and the failures of organisation has assisted the whole community to talk not only about sexual assault in the space relating to children, but more generally. We've provided, we’ve made it legitimate to actually complain and actually brought people up with the start when they previously had not listened. Richard mentioned the fact that many survivors weren't believed, it's true. We've got hundreds and hundreds of stories. The mothers who didn't believe, fathers who didn't believe. The child complaining, maybe a teenager complaining about sexual assault was just pushed to one side. We actually opened up the door and it made it legitimate for people to talk about what's happened to them and made it more likely that the community and individuals in the community will listen to them and that I consider that to be, as much as anything else we did, one of the most significant legacies of the Royal Commission.

Simon Luckhurst

Karen, Peter, Richard, I think this been a fascinating conversation and I'm sure it's one that people will get a lot out of and thank you very much for being part of it. All Thank you, thank you, thanks. Simon Luckhurst That brings us to the end of today's session. I'd like to thank my 3 guests, Justice Peter McClellan, Acting NSW Children’s Guardian, Richard Weston and the Chief Executive of the NSW Office of Sport, Karen Jones.

I hope you enjoyed this podcast brought to you by the NSW Office of the Children Guardian. If you have an idea for something you'd like to know more about in future podcasts, why not get in contact with us? Drop us an e-mail to childsafe@ocg.nsw.gov.au. You can also head to our website. While you're there, click our resources tab to find and download a range of free resources. Including comprehensive handbooks, videos and animations, posters and flyers. Check out our E-learning as well.

We also have a team of dedicated child safe officers who are responsible for supporting organisations in sport and recreation, faith-based, early childhood education and local government sectors. They'd love to hear from you if you have any questions or want to know where to find support for your organisation. Remember, child safety is everyone's responsibility. I'm Simon Luckhurst. Thanks for listening.