Improving outcomes for children since 2003
Headquartered in Brisbane city, Poynting Consulting & Advisory is available to clients anywhere in Australia and New Zealand. Our firm specialises in coaching child-serving and child-contact organisations in best practice in protecting children. Whether you’re a sporting club, an ECEC provider, a music teacher or tutor, GP or specialised medical practice, or small business owner that requires your staff to work in child-serving environments, we will not only help to protect the children you have contact with, but we’ll also help to protect you and your business reputation. We bring extensive experience and professionalism to every client and customise our support to your individual needs and concerns.
Our Consultants and Advisers have been working with children and in the child protection field for over two decades. We’re on the pulse of contemporary practice in preventing child abuse and maltreatment, creating Child-Safe Organisations and mitigating risk. We actively monitor emerging research and best practice to inform our practice —all to give you exceptional advice that will last for years to come.
Get in touch with us to set up a consultation, or use the contact form at the bottom of this page to enquire whether our services are right for you.
Services and Resources
Face-to-face / Virtual Classroom Training
PCA provides a number of ‘off-the-shelf and ready to deliver training sessions for child-serving and child-focused organisations. Most sessions offered by PCA have the ability to be tailored prior to delivery to include specific information about your organisation (for example, to include details of your organisation’s policy regarding reporting child protection concerns). Training packages include:
Full day child protection & introduction to child safe organisations training
2.5 hour child protection training (refresher, mandatory reporting, preventing and recognising abuse and neglect)
2.5 hour introduction to child safe organisations training
2 hour making recruitment child safe training
2 hour child safeguarding through situational crime prevention training
One-on-One video coaching call
Video coaching calls take place over Zoom and entitles you to ask PCA’s Principal Consultant anything about whatever child safeguarding or child protection challenges you’re facing. He’ll give you realistic, practical support and advice that you can put in to action immediately. This is not generic or ‘stock’ advice. This is Brad Poynting’s unique insight gained from over 10,000 hours coaching organisations in becoming Child Safe and Child-Friendly environments.
Short Pre-recorded webinars
PCA recognise that professional development is a necessary part of any position but that PD is not always offered in a way which is accessible, affordable or relevant. To Combat this, PCA has developed a series of Recorded Webcasts which can be found on our Online Training page. These session are short - 45 minutes or less, they’re cheap, they have a single educational focus, they’re available on-demand, and once purchased, they’re yours to keep forever. Our online training range will continue to expand over time. Current sessions include:
Child Safe Practice in Recruitment, and
Child Safeguarding: Situational Crime Prevention
Child Safe Strategic Planning for Boards & Executives
PCA has developed two interactive Strategic Sessions to be delivered for Boards and Executives depending on where you are in your child safe journey. Both of these sessions can be delivered as standalone 3hour seminars, or either session can be paired with an interactive workshop for a full day bootcamp. these session provide your Board and Executives with the foundation knowledge on creating child-safe environments or for more advanced organisations, provide practical guidance to successfully embed child-safe practice for the long term. The sessions are:
Introduction to Child Safe Organisations for Boards and Executives
Embedding into Practice the National Principles for Child Safe Organisations
The optional add-on workshop component is an interactive, engaging strategy development session which is tailored to meet your organisation where it currently is on your child-safe journey. Your Board and Executives will determine your child-safe goals and values and begin to design your implementation plan and road map to becoming a CSO.
Resources
PCA has developed a number of resources to help organisations improve their capacity to keep children safe and protected from abuse and neglect, and create child-safe and child friendly environments. These can be purchased online and downloaded instantly after purchase via a link which is emailed to you. Current resources include:
Quick Reference Guide Pack (3 guides to better recognise signs of abuse and neglect, indicators of grooming behaviour, and situational prevention)
Child Protection Procedure for small organisations (compliant with mandatory reporting obligations for familial child abuse and neglect in all states and territories)
Commitment to Child Safety Template (developed after a scoping meeting)
Code of Conduct for Safe Interaction with Children (developed after a scoping meeting).
Areas of Practice - Consulting Services
child safe organisations
Child-Safe Organisations don't just happen. They're created through intention and action. Our Advisers go beyond policies and procedures and help organisations shift their culture to be child-focused, child-friendly and child-safe. You could have the best written policy in the world, but if your team don't value it, it might as well not exist.
Creating Child-Safe Organisations is our passion project and it might give you the edge over your competitors to encourage your potential clients to pick you. We can work with your organisation to set up ways of working that contribute to creating a child safe environment and help you identify and develop Champions to lead the change to ensure children are your first priority.
ECEC & OSHC Sectors
We work with child-serving and child-contact organisations in all sectors, but our specialities are in the ECEC & OSHC sectors - and that starts with acknowledging that they’re different.
Our Principal Consultant has worked for some of the biggest names in both sectors, has an understanding of the NQF, NQS, My Time, Our Place, the National Law and the National Regulations.
PCA can provide all of the stated areas of practice, tailored to fit with the compliance, oversight and highly regulated environment that is the ECEC & OSHC sectors.
Child Protection Capability Frameworks
Clients consistently tell us they want their staff to be competent and capable of preventing, recognising and responding to child abuse and neglect and creating child-safe environments. They also tell us the organisation needs to have the internal capacity to be self sufficient in equipping their staff with child protection and child safeguarding skills and knowledge.
PCA can work with you, your child protection specialist and your learning and development team to design a child protection and child safeguarding capability framework tailored to your organisation’s specific needs. Don’t have internal L&D? No problem, PCA can arrange a third party review of our work for your piece of mind.
BUSINESS STRATEGY
PCA can work with you to ensure your business strategy is working for you to protect children. We can help with:
Enterprise risk mitigation
Vision and mission
child-safe recruitment practices
optimising for situational crime prevention and child-safe practice
involving children in decision making
strengthening communities and extending guardianship, and
developing and implementing commitment to protecting children.
policy Development & review
The legislation and regulation around child protection is constantly in flux and your policies must adapt quickly. PCA strives to anticipate these changes so you can focus more on your core business and know that you policies are protecting your children and yourselves as well. We can develop your protecting children policies and procedures from scratch and we're also able to actively monitor them to ensure they're updated in line with any legislative changes.
Already have policies in place? That's a great start, PCA can review and update your existing documents to ensure they're meeting your needs. Our Consultants and Advisers can work with you to make sure you policies are keeping children safe and mitigating risk.
Training
The world of child protection and safeguarding is ever growing and evolving, and we’re not just talking about making a child protection report. With the consistent evolution of expectations, duty of care, and liability, the level of accountability grows, and so does the complexity. It can be hard to ensure your team know how to protect children from harm. That’s where we come in.
That’s where we come in. PCA provide face-to-face and virtual classroom child safeguarding training and child protection / mandatory reporting training to child-serving organisations. If we don’t have a package suitable for your organisation, we can develop bespoke training that does.
incident review
We do everything we can to ensure that your business is working to prevent incidents from happening in the first place, but if there is a child harm incident in your centre, we're here to work with you to analyse the situation to make sure an incident like that can never happen again in your organisation. Our consultants can conduct an external review of your incident and how it was handled, and provide advice to prevent it from re-occurring.
Speaking Engagements
Our Principal Consultant, Brad Poynting, is available for a limited number of speaking engagements each year.
Brad is passionate about spreading the CSO message. Our focus at PCA is to take Speaking Engagements based on need and audience rather than on revenue. If there is a persuasive case for how Brad and knowledge about CSO will help your organisation or community - PCA encourages you to reach out to us.
Let's Chat.
Use the form below to contact us regarding your enquiry. Please be as detailed as possible. Include details about your organisations core business and how your organisation engages with children. To help us best service your enquiry, we recommend that you first describe the issue you’re having before telling us what you want to achieve. You may also email us to make an appointment.
For job opportunities, please email us your resume. We’re always looking for new and exceptional talent to lead our practice into uncharted fields of practice.