Child safety policy

Our commitment to child safety and wellbeing

The City of Sydney is committed to safeguarding all children’s sense of wellbeing and rights to reach their full potential and to keeping children safe from harm and abuse.

We work to empower children to find their own voices and understand that children play an important role in creating vibrant, positive communities, and are our communities of the future.

We recognise that disrespect, harm and abuse can have long-lasting effects on healthy development, and that these can lead to serious lifelong consequences. We know that abuse that occurs within an organisational context is not just a problem of the past, it continues today. The City of Sydney has zero tolerance of child abuse in our organisation.

We are working to embed the NSW Child Safe Standards into our organisational leadership, governance and culture and by adopting strategies and acting to put the interests of children first and keep them safe from harm.

At the City of Sydney:

− We want children to be safe, resilient, happy and empowered.

− We want children to be connected to each other, community and culture.

− We respect and uphold children’s right to privacy.

− We support and respect children of all ages, cultures, religions, education levels, children of diverse sexualities and genders and children with disability.

− We are committed to the cultural safety of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, the cultural safety of children from culturally and/or linguistically diverse backgrounds, and to providing a safe environment for children with disability.

− All allegations and safety concerns are treated very seriously and consistently with our robust policies and procedures.

− We have legal obligations to contact authorities when we are worried about a child’s safety, or where there is an allegation against one of our employees or volunteers, which we follow rigorously.

− We are committed to preventing child abuse by identifying risks early and removing and reducing these risks.

− We have robust human resources and recruitment practices to reduce the risk of child abuse by new and existing employees and volunteers.

− We work closely with our contracted service providers to ensure the services they are delivering on our behalf are child safe.

− We are committed to regularly training and educating our employees, volunteers, senior leaders and councillors on child abuse risks and obligations to prevent abuse and respond appropriately.

− We are committed to continually improving our child safeguarding policies and practices through scheduled policy reviews, audits and by closely examining our policy and practice following any child safety incident or report.

− We have specific operational procedures in place that support everyone working at the City of Sydney to achieve these commitments.