There is a growing number of “serious incidents” in Australian early childhood services, including day cares.

A serious incident is one that seriously compromises the health, safety or wellbeing of a child. There were 160 such incidents per 100 services in 2024–25. This is up from 148 and 139 in the previous two years.

These figures follow explosive revelations of safety issues and abuse in the sector.

In response, there are several new national child safety measures. These include banning personal phones in early childhood services, improving recruitment, and making sure parents can see a service’s compliance history.

But one key area has not received the attention it needs. This is educator-to-child ratios.

How are ratios supposed to work?

Ratios are presented as a simple numerical safeguard to ensure enough qualified educators are present and working directly with children.

These can differ between states and territories, the type of service and the age of the children. However, for children aged under 24 months at daycare, there needs to be one educator for every four children. As children get older, the ratios change. For example, in New South Wales for children over 36 months, it is 1:10.

Tammy Williams’ recent PhD research interviewed 16 early childhood educators about their workplaces, which were a mix of for-profit services. Some were small, standalone services; others were part of large corporate chains.

They reported how ratios operate in practice can be very different from how they look on paper. This raises serious questions about how safe the system really is.

‘Under-the-roof’ ratios

The “under-the-roof” ratio is a common term in early learning services. Some services use this to calculate ratios based on the total number of........

© The Conversation