CCTV is touted as a safety measure for daycare centres. But does it work?

CCTV has been promoted as one way to make early learning safer in the wake of ongoing reports of child abuse and neglect.

It’s certainly something families see as enhancing safety in services.

But does it help in practice?

The federal government has been running an evaluation of how CCTV is used in early learning services around Australia to understand whether it was appropriate and effective. And whether it should be used more widely.

We now have the final report, alongside two new international studies about CCTV in early learning and care.

The evidence suggests we should not be relying on CCTV to protect kids. Here’s why.

Australia’s CCTV trial

The CCTV trial began late last year and was based on 309 services who were already using CCTVs. It was conducted by Nous Group and then independently evaluated by KPMG.

It found CCTV is useful for investigations (once abuse occured). But it cautioned

there is no strong basis for a mandatory requirement to have it installed in all [early learning and care] settings.

Across 3,386 incidents recorded during the three-month assessment, 80% were picked up through active human supervision and 16% through children speaking up. Just 3% were detected via CCTV, and those were overwhelmingly low-level hazards like wet floors or minor playground tumbles.

The report explicitly warns CCTV is “unlikely” to deter perpetrators of child sexual abuse, nor capture such crimes, because abuse occurs in private spaces like bathrooms and nappy-change areas where cameras are prohibited.

Cameras are far from foolproof

Last month, the ABC’s Four Corners aired harrowing footage of a trainee educator assaulting a young boy at a centre in Far North Queensland.

That centre already had CCTV installed. So the cameras did not deter the violence, nor did they catch it in real time. The abuse was uncovered after an acting director had concerns about marks on a child and left a note asking the director to check the recordings.

CCTV helped secure a criminal conviction after the damage was done. What failed those children was not a lack of cameras, but systemic regulatory gaps – a centre operating outside the national quality framework – that allowed an unqualified trainee to be left alone with babies.

Other technical issues

The Australian trial also exposed technical and governance issues around CCTV. These include:

• Data security blind spots: nearly one in three services using cloud or hybrid storage did not know whether footage of young children was being stored inside or outside Australia.

• Unlawful audio recording: several centres were recording audio alongside video without realising they were potentially breaching state and territory listening devices laws.

Rather than urging centres to rush out and buy cameras, the report’s “future considerations” for officials focus on harmonising conflicting state surveillance laws, setting clear footage retention rules, and building national best-practice guidelines.

Read more: A UK hack shows Australia needs to be very careful about its CCTV trial for daycare centres

Data and privacy risks

New overseas research is also raising concerns about CCTV use in early learning services.

A UK study examined how CCTV can create a false sense of safety in centres.

It argued CCTV narrows the focus onto catching individual deviance. This takes attention away from the broader organisational, cultural, and workforce conditions which can prevent abuse in the first place. For example, adequate staff levels, proper training around child safety and support from management to speak up if there is an issue.

Constant monitoring also changes how educators work. In the Australian trial, almost one in five managers (18%) agreed cameras can make educators hesitant to engage in messy play or offer close physical comfort to distressed children out of fear their actions might be misinterpreted out of context.

This echoes a new Canadian study where researchers examined video surveillance across early childhood programs in Nova Scotia and Ontario. They found cameras pressure educators to perform the role of a “good” caregiver for an unseen audience rather than responding spontaneously to children.

What should be happening instead?

While noting CCTV “cannot and should not replace active supervision by trained educators”, the federal government has announced a A$11.5 million grants program for not-for-profit services to install or upgrade CCTV.

To boost childcare safety, it continues to emphasise mandatory safety training for educators, a national worker register, banning personal devices in centres and shutting down non-compliant services.

But other reforms to prevent harm have remained largely unaddressed.

In March, a Senate inquiry made 23 recommendations to prevent abuse in early learning.

Responding to the report last week, the federal government “noted” 14 of them, partially supported three, and offered qualified “in-principle” support to five. Among the measures left without full backing are:

• tightening active supervision rules and ratios during high-risk sleep and rest periods

• setting minimum benchmarks for unannounced regulatory spot checks by trained inspectors

• establishing real-time national information sharing between Working with Children Checks, police and regulators.

There is a risk that spending $11.5 million on CCTV grants offers the community an illusion of security. As the Four Corners’ investigation, international research, and now the government’s own trial all show, cameras only record what happens when safeguarding has already failed.