How Australia's childcare sector became a hunting ground for predators
Jul 24, 2026
For years, every time a childcare worker has been charged with offending against children in their care, the public conversation has followed the same script: shock, outrage, calls for "better vetting," and then silence - until it happens again.
It’s a reasonable response but I don't think that script is useful anymore. Not because the shock isn't warranted, but because it treats each case as an isolated failure of judgement, rather than what it actually is: the predictable outcome of a system that made it easier for offenders to gain access to children - and harder for anyone around them to notice.
This isn't a story about a few bad apples slipping through the cracks. It's a story about how the cracks got there in the first place and just my opinion on how Australia’s child care sector became a hunting ground for child sex offenders.
The vacuum opens
Go back far enough and most families could live on one income. That's no longer the reality for most Australians. As the cost of living rose, two incomes became a necessity rather than a choice and demand for early childhood education and care surged to match.
At almost exactly the same time, the sector was privatised. Centres that once operated as small, community, or not-for-profit services increasingly became part of larger commercial operations, where growth and cost management sit alongside - and sometimes ahead of care. Growth at pace creates hiring urgency. And hiring urgency is exactly the condition in which scrutiny of who's coming through the door quietly loosens.
The barriers drop
To meet that surging demand, the qualification pathway into the sector was shortened. Diplomas that once took longer to complete were compressed. Early childhood education was added to the skilled migration occupation list, opening another route into direct, trusted, largely unsupervised access to young children.
None of these decisions were made with bad intent. They were made to solve a genuine workforce shortage. But every one of them also lowered the threshold between "wanting to work with children" and "being trusted alone with them."
A culture shift without a matching shift in scrutiny
Early childhood education was, for a long time, considered women's work. That's changed, and on its own, that's a good thing - children benefit from a range of trusted adults in their lives, and the vast majority of men who choose this field do so for exactly the reasons they say they do.
But normalisation wasn't matched by proportionate curiosity. A role that was historically low-status and low-paid suddenly held appeal for a wider pool of applicants, and the sector didn't correspondingly ask more questions about why. That gap - normalisation without scrutiny - is where the opportunity for predators to infiltrate childcare has occurred.
The pattern isn't new
None of this is unique to childcare. Offenders have always been drawn to roles of trust, authority, and unsupervised access to children - clergy, scouting, coaching, teaching. When we know better, we can do better, and what we know from every institutional abuse scandal this country has reckoned with is this: predators don't force their way in. They apply for the job. Early childhood education simply became the newest version of a very old opportunity to harm children.
Grooming doesn't stop at the child
This is the part of the conversation I think we get most wrong. Grooming isn't only aimed at a child - it's aimed at the entire system around that child. Offenders work just as deliberately to build trust and credibility with employers, colleagues, and management as they do with the families they target. It's not incidental to the offending. It's a significant part of it.
Nobody was trained to see it
Educators are trained in mandatory reporting - what to do if a child discloses abuse, or if there are signs of harm at home. What they are not trained in is recognising grooming behaviour in a colleague. Neither are their managers. Neither are the policymakers who write the standards, or the regulators who are meant to enforce them.
Mandatory reporting has a clear, defined pathway. Suspected red-flag behaviour in a peer does not. So even the adults who sense something is wrong or witness grooming, are often left without a structured way to report or act on it - and without the training to know if what they're seeing is even significant.
When it is reported, it's too often mismanaged
And when someone does raise a concern, it frequently doesn't go anywhere. There are two different reasons for that, and we need to disguise the differences, because they need different fixes.
Sometimes it's a capability failure - a manager genuinely doesn't have the training to know what they're being told, or holds an unconscious bias about what "a child offender or predator looks like."
But sometimes it's something more deliberate. The offender has already done the groundwork and built enough credibility, likeability, and social capital that when someone raises a concern, it's the person reporting who is disbelieved - labelled a troublemaker, seen as overreacting.
That outcome isn't the system failing by accident. Often, it's the system responding exactly the way the offender planned for it to respond.
A regulatory system that was never built to keep up
Underneath all of this sits a regulatory framework that is fragmented, inconsistent, and largely reactive.
Oversight varies by state and territory, so a child's level of protection can depend on geography rather than need. Investigations are frequently slow, and timeliness matters - every day a risk goes unchecked is a day it can continue. There is no consistent way to track staff conduct across centres or borders, which means someone can be dismissed from one centre for high-risk behaviour and be working in another within days. A national misconduct register is only now being discussed and implemented - which tells you how reactive, rather than anticipated, this response has been. The requirement for ongoing education has been minimal. Until now, Staff and management have not had a requirement to understand how grooming evolves. And when a centre fails to safeguard the children in its care, there is often no meaningful accountability for the organisation itself.
Even the Working With Children Check - the safeguard most parents assume means someone has been thoroughly vetted - isn't a truly national system. The same jurisdictional gap that lets an offender move between centres unnoticed exists inside the very tool meant to catch them.
Almost every safeguard in this system - hiring, training, reporting, tracking, vetting - was built at the state or centre level, in isolation. Offenders don't respect those boundaries. They just move.
When we know better, we can do better
I want to be really clear about what this piece is, and isn't. This isn't an argument against men in early childhood education, against migration pathways into the sector, or against getting more educators into a workforce that desperately needs them. Every one of those changes solved a real problem.
What this piece is about is naming, honestly, that safety was never built into the design. It was added - if at all - after the fact, in response to harm that had already happened.
We can't keep responding to each case as a shocking exception. The system doesn't need to catch a handful of bad apples more effectively. It needs training at every level - frontline, management, regulatory - on what grooming actually looks like, in children and in adults. It needs reporting pathways for red-flag behaviour with the same seriousness as mandatory reporting. It needs a genuinely national approach to vetting and misconduct tracking. And it needs organisations and authorities to be held accountable when they fail to safeguard the children entrusted to them.
We know better now. It's time we did better.
This blog is purely my opinion and experience and something I am very passionate about helping change. Our kids need real changes to the industry, not just band aid fixes.
Kristi
If you are an educator or child base organisation looking for more information on grooming and predatory behaviours, please check out my 'Keeping Little Ones Safe' educators course or reach out to discuss professional development and training.
