72% of children in Australia have encountered an adverse experience.
As of the Q2 2022 NQF snapshot, Element 2.2 (Safety) ranks as the fourth lowest-rated component of the 2018 childcare NQF.
Children with lower risk factors may go unnoticed.
Mandatory reports are currently required for children who exceed the risk threshold. But what happens to the other vulnerable children who fall just below that line?
Struggling to navigate the system to access the right assistance.
For services and educators who identify a child potentially at risk of harm or neglect, accessing the appropriate professional support and guidance can often be challenging.
Varying reporting requirements across state and federal levels.
Meeting mandatory reporting obligations can become an administrative burden without accessible tools to assist services and educators.
Here are a few of our clients favorite things.
Safe was developed in response to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, which found that all organizations in contact with children should have the systems in place to identify those at risk and respond appropriately.
When completing a Safe assessment users must respond to 41 simple questions designed to identify the level of risk and the type of abuse or neglect (including emotional, physical and sexual).
These questions were developed in consultation with industry leaders on child protection, trauma and case management.
Safe uses machine learning and language processing technology to analyze each Safe assessment and provide a risk prediction rating for each child.
As part of the machine learning prediction, each Safe assessment is analyzed against health and welfare data sets, which have been provided by childcare organizations through the Australian Government’s prescribed Child Care Management System.
This data set of over 230,000 children nationwide is unique to Safe and is based on the mandatory reporting guidelines in each Australian state and territory.
The Safe assessment and prediction is then reviewed by CAPS experienced Case Review Specialists (CRS) that review each prediction and utilize professional judgement to identify the possibility that a child is at risk.
If the CRS considers the likelihood of risk to be high they will contact the service that completed the Safe assessment and support them to contact the appropriate child protection service for their State or Territory. If need be, the CRS will also contact child protection authorities.
By default, cases are prioritized in order of risk to ensure the most vulnerable children receive the most urgent attention. This ensures better outcomes for the child and prevents anyone from slipping through the safety net.
The program AI becomes smarter with every case assessed. The more organisations that utilise Safe the better our society becomes at recognising vulnerable children well before any harm can occur.
Safe’s dashboard can be presented as a heat map. Each child is represented as a red circle. The larger the circle the more at risk that child is.
The heatmap can be used to identify specific areas where family support services could be deployed, and you can track the impact that these services have made over a period of time.
The dashboard also provides a visual triage diagram so that the most at risk children can be readily identified and focused on first.
As the first ECEC software provider to offer child protection solutions, we remain committed to advocating for their integration into the sector.
Created in collaboration with our advocacy partners.
Safe was created by Healthy Australia, our not-for-profit arm, in collaboration with Welfare Australia, CSIRO, and NICTA. We are now working alongside the Child Abuse Prevention Service (CAPS) to enhance our efforts in identifying at-risk children. Established in 1973, CAPS is Australia’s longest-standing organization focused on preventing all forms of child maltreatment. As a non-government, non-religious charity, CAPS holds a straightforward yet powerful vision dedicated to protecting children.
Assessments evaluated by CAPS professionals.
With nearly 50 years of experience, CAPS employs a dedicated Case Review Specialist (CRS) to personally evaluate each Safe assessment. The CAPS team also includes seasoned psychologists, educators, and policy experts, all committed to fostering positive childhood experiences through their award-winning community education initiatives, a national case review platform, training workshops, and child-safe organizational solutions.
Ensuring the protection and security of sensitive data.
All data used by Safe is encrypted and secured with password protection, ensuring that case details are only accessible to authorized child protection professionals who have up-to-date working with children and police clearances. Access to case information in Safe is regularly audited to maintain security and compliance.
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