New Resources for Child Safe Organisations!
It’s been a busy few weeks for the National Office for Child Safety and the Australian Children’s Commissioner. We’ve seen the release of two big pieces of work to support organisations to protect the wellbeing, welfare and rights of children and young people. At PCA, we’re glad to be sharing these amazing resources in the lead up to 2019 National Child Protection Week which begins September 1st.
Child Focused Complaint Handling
The first resource to share with you comes from the National Office for Child Safety. It’s the ‘Complaint Handling Guide: Upholding the rights of children and young people.’ This Guide, which was developed by the NSW Ombudsman provides comprehensive information to support organisations to implement Principle 6 of the National Principles for Child Safe Organisations. Principle 6 holds that, “Processes for complaints and concerns are child focused.”
From the Abstract of the Guide: “The Guide provides practical advice to organisations about how to develop, implement and maintain a complaint-handling system that prioritises child safety and promotes the rights of children and young people to have a voice in decisions that affect them.”
The Guide is a great resource for child-serving and child-contact organisations of all shapes and sizes. Whether your organisation is yet to develop a formal complaints process, or you have a highly sophisticated process, the National Office for Child Safety’s new Guide will help your organisation ensure that the rights of children are a core tenant of your complaint resolution process.
Make sure you book this page or save a copy for your electronic resource library. This new Guide should be a touchstone every time your organisation’s Complaint Resolution Policy is reviewed and updated.
E-Learning Modules
The Australian Children’s Commissioner developed the National Principles for Child Safe Organisations. The National Principles are informed by the Child Safe Standards which were developed by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. In February 2019, the National Principles were endorsed at COAG by the federal government and every state and territory government of Australia. To support organisations to learn how to implement and work toward the National Principles, the Australian Children’s Commissioner has been quietly developing a series of online learning modules for individuals. The obvious news being shared here is that these e-learning modules are now available for use!
To support the National Principles, 11 e-learning modules have been released on the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Child Safe website. There is an introductory module which gives an overview of the development and content of the National Principles. If nothing else, all staff of child-serving and child-contact organisations should complete this module! The remaining 10 modules each cover one of the National Principles. Each module takes around 20 minutes to complete and best of all – the entire suite of e-learning modules is provided on the Child Safe website for free.
We spoke to Brad Poynting, PCA’s Principal Consultant about the release of the free e-learning modules and he had this to say:
“It’s great to have these CSO modules available for free. The biggest concern I here from child-serving organisations is that they’re not able to get all their staff together to justify the budget spend for a face-to-face CSO session. These modules are short, cover every Principle and are available when people have time and they’re free. It’s great to see the Children’s Commissioner delivering on the Royal Commission’s recommendations around training and awareness of ways to prevent institutional child abuse from occurring.”
The release of these modules is only one of many resources available on the Child Safe website. There is a wealth of resources and tools to help organisations create child safe environments. Bookmark this page, sign up to their mailing list and start ticking off those e-learning modules.