Child safety is at the centre of everything we do, every day at Goodstart.

As a not for profit, we exist solely to help children thrive and we invest tens of millions of dollars every year in our people’s training; the design and resourcing of our centres and learning environments; and in continuous improvement to help keep children safe. 

We know how vigilant we must be because, despite our best efforts, things can go wrong though our child safety performance continues to be among the best in the sector – in fact our child safety rates are some of the lowest in the sector with 0.68 per 10,000 attendances. 

Any injury is one too many and our dedicated safety team and our centre leaders continue to work to ensure our child (and adult) safety rates are as low as possible.   

The ACCC recently found the not-for-profit providers like Goodstart offer higher quality, more experienced and better paid staff, lower overheads, and lower fees for families.  High quality is not a happy accident, it takes serious effort and an ongoing commitment to the National Quality Standards and to continuous improvement. 

Here’s a quick snapshot of some of the things we do to help keep children safe at our centres:

1. High quality centres help keep children safe and 99% of our centres are exceeding or meeting the National Quality Standards 
2. We have Safety Champions in each of our centres who help us spot and fix potential safety issues before any harm is done 
3. Our Outdoor Safety Inspections Checklist must be completed by an educator every time they take children into an outdoor learning area for the first time each day to help identify hazards and rectify them 
4. Our Goodcall safety hotline helps teams to follow ‘Look Do Tell’, so if our people witness an unsafe situation or practice in relation to safety or child protection, they can report directly to our Safety Health and Wellbeing team   
5. Report and learn from our mistakes – Goodstart has a no blame culture, which ensures incidents are reported, investigated and addressed quickly. This helps to prevent future incidents, monitor trends and identify areas where improvement is needed 
6. All our centres complete a monthly Centre Safety Inspection, ensuring any hazards can be identified and mitigated – and this is reviewed by Centre Leadership and National Safety Health and Wellbeing team 

 Safety starts with each of us – but at Goodstart it is more than that. Empowering all children and Goodstarters to feel safe and be safety is who we are and what we do. Safety, health and wellbeing is at the centre of every decision we make and every action we take.