To create and maintain safe environments for children and young people, organisations must embed a continuous improvement approach in safeguarding children.
How learning from a reportable conduct investigation relates to the Child and Youth Safe Organisations Framework as a whole:
- Continuous improvement is an essential practice for organisations under the Child and Youth Safe Organisations Framework.
- Specifically, it relates to Tasmania’s Child and Youth Safe Standard 9: Implementation of the Child and Youth Safe Standards is regularly reviewed and improved.
- This means that to comply with Standard 9, an organisation needs to continually review and improve its child safety and wellbeing practices.
How organisations can learn from reportable conduct investigations:
- Concerns about reportable conduct can reveal how effectively an organisation’s policies, practices and people are preventing and responding to child abuse.
- Continuous improvement in the delivery of services to children and young people requires regular reviews of the changing environment, and using complaints or allegations as a basis can contribute to achieving this improvement.
- To integrate a system of continuous improvement, organisations can:
- review complaints and their outcomes to identify where things went wrong and highlight any remaining risks
- create a system for collecting and reviewing complaint information to identify overall patterns for improving services
- communicate with people who made complaints and those involved about any changes or improvements that happened because of their concerns.
- Taking these steps also helps to create an environment in which raising and investigating concerns is normal practice.
The creation of a child safe environment requires vigilance and necessitates paying attention to systemic issues.
- Final Report of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse
How organisations can strengthen their implementation of the Child and Youth Safe Standards by learning from reportable conduct investigations:
- The Child and Youth Safe Standards and the Reportable Conduct Scheme relate to and reinforce each other.
- They’re separate but connected. If an organisation is putting the Child and Youth Safe Standards into action, they are creating an environment in which any concerns about possible harm done to a child are taken seriously and thoroughly investigated.
- Similarly, an investigation through the Reportable Conduct Scheme may reveal issues with the effectiveness of the organisation’s policies and procedures under the Child and Youth Safe Standards, and lead to improvements being made.
Useful resources
Link | Description |
|---|---|
This resource is a video created by the NSW Office of the Children’s Guardian. It focuses on Standard 9 and the importance of continuously reviewing and improving implementation of the Standards. Because the Tasmanian Child and Youth Safe Standards are similar to the NSW Child Safe Standards, this may be a useful tool to give organisations general ideas about how to comply with Standard 9. | |
Information Sheet: Child Safe Standards and Reportable Conduct Scheme | This is a short factsheet developed by the Victorian Commission for Children and Young People which describes the relationship between the Child Safe Standards and the Reportable Conduct Scheme in Victoria. |
Complaint Handling Guide: Upholding the rights of children and young people | This resource was developed by the National Office for Child Safety to help organisations build their capacity in handling complaints involving children and young people. The guide is accompanied by a short reference guide and a fact sheet. |
Child Safe eLearning – Keeping Children Safe in Organisations | The Office of the Children’s Guardian (NSW) provide free eLearning courses to guide organisations on keeping children safe. |