CEO Michele Carnegie recently briefed the NSW Legislative Council ECEC sector inquiry on what’s needed to drive an urgent and effective uplift in quality and safety.
The context
After the shocking child safety revelations from ABC's Four Corners in March 2025, the NSW Legislative Council’s Education Committee launched a wide ranging inquiry into the NSW’s ECEC sector, examining the effectiveness of its regulatory framework, the quality of services and the pay and conditions of its workforce.
Key takeaways
In her testimony to this Committee, Michele highlighted two reforms that the NSW Government should prioritise to put children’s safety first:
1. Effective prevention means investing in a stable skilled and valued workforce that understands how to protect children's safety as the foundation for their work, in both frontline and leadership roles.
This means:
- attracting, growing and retaining qualified staff by providing professional pay and ongoing access to paid professional development
- staff ratios that ensure quality supervision and care, tailored to the needs of children at each service
- building leadership capacity to ensure a child safe culture is embedded in every part of how a service operates
2. Service by service change management support and leadership capacity building to ensure leaders and their staff can understand, implement and comply with major quality and safety reforms.
What this means for our members
On any measure, the greatest investment we can make in our citizens is by providing high quality early education and care in the first five years. We can never lose sight of the critical value of high quality early education and care to children and families, delivered by capable leaders and qualified, experienced educators and teachers across Australia.
For all of the services who are devoted to delivering quality early education and care every day, we value what you do and how you make every dollar count as you deliver programs that shape Australia’s children.
Our mission is to elevate your voices and stories to government to drive the reforms that put children’s safety first.
What’s next?
The cost of incremental reform is too high for children and families. That’s why CELA’s number one priority is to ensure the NSW Government deliver the most effective reforms that will protect children’s safety, on behalf of community managed and small providers. We are working every day, through inquiries like this as well as directly to ministers, to make this happen.
About CELA
Community Early Learning Australia is a not for profit organisation with a focus on amplifying the value of early learning for every child across Australia - representing our members and uniting our sector as a force for quality education and care.