00:00Parents have never been more reliant on childcare centres, they're using them in greater numbers
00:06than ever, but that unfortunately their children have never been less safe inside those centres.
00:11The latest figures released by the Productivity Commission are for the 2024 financial year
00:15and they show there were more than 26,000 serious incidents, so I'll break down what
00:19a serious incident is, about 20,000 of those involved a trauma, injury or illness to a
00:25child and the rest involved things like emergency services being called or a child being left
00:30unattended or unaccounted for, so pretty serious things given the age of the children.
00:36The data also showed, gave us a breakdown of staff and there were some concerns there too,
00:40it showed that the number of staff with qualifications continues to fall, so one
00:45quarter of staff now don't have any kind of qualification, not even the sort of minimum
00:50TAFE level qualification that centres would like their staff to have. The one potential bright
00:55spot for parents in these figures is that they're a little old now, they're 18 months old, so we have
01:01seen a lot of change in the last six months following the ABC's reports into the sector, so that could be
01:06following through, but really again it kind of goes to the transparency issues in the sector that parents
01:11are only just now getting 18 month old information rather than being able to put their finger on exactly
01:16what's happening.
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