Your responsibilities: for sole traders, small businesses and volunteer community groups
Staff and volunteers have a shared responsibility for the safety and wellbeing of children, no matter the size of your business or organisation.
The Child Safe Standards aim to create environments that prioritise the safety and wellbeing of children. Business and organisations that work with children should already have a strong focus on children’s safety and processes in place to prevent harm—build on these as you implement the Standards. Every business and organisation will be at a different stage of its journey to becoming child safe, and that’s OK. Implementing the new law isn’t intended to be onerous, especially for smaller businesses or volunteer groups like yours. How you implement the Child Safe Standards is intended to be flexible and tailored to how you interact with children.
It's all about putting children’s safety at the forefront of your operations, making sure you and your workers have all the skills needed to identify risks of harm and take action, having a pro-reporting culture, and communicating with children and families about how you are prioritising children’s safety.
Our Getting started webpage gives you some helpful pointers if you’re learning what’s required. This includes basic starting points, like familiarising yourself with the standards and the key documents your business or organisation might need to help you meet them.
Our Quick Reference Guide and our Child Safe Standards webpages also include tips especially for small businesses, sole traders and volunteer community groups.
Small businesses and volunteer community groups might find our scenario discussion guide useful. It is designed to walk you through implementation with the help of scenarios and discussion points for you to work through as a team or staff/volunteer body, so everyone understands their responsibilities and what the standards will mean for you.
Some businesses or organisations will also need to implement a Reportable Conduct Scheme. This is the second part of the new law that enables a business or organisation to properly respond if harm or misconduct happens. You can find out more about the scheme and whether it applies to you on our Reportable Conduct Scheme and Who does the scheme apply to webpages.