YACVic welcomed the opportunity to submit to the review of Victoria’s ground-breaking Child Safe Standards. Youth support professionals have told us that they are, for the most part, strongly supportive of the Child Safe Standards, which have helped to make organisations safer for children and young people.

However, the implementation of the standards has been very uneven, and youth support professionals want a lot more opportunities to work through the practicalities of running a Child Safe organisation, backed up by expert support.

Our key recommendations include:

  1. Strengthen resourcing to the Commission for Children and Young People to keep pace with demand.
  2. Invest in further training, professional support, and communities of practice for youth support professionals and other workers, to meet the level of need.
  3. Work with organisations and training providers to ensure greater quality control, monitoring and evaluation of different child safety training models.
  4. Support bodies like the Commission for Children and Young People and the Municipal Association of Victoria to ensure all local governments can access high-quality advice and training about child safety by experts with strong legal knowledge. Targeted work is needed to engage council CEOs, and to engage council staff who do not typically work with children.
  5. Support new, targeted initiatives to engage private businesses which have significant contact with children to understand and meet their Child Safe obligations.

Have a read of our submission here.