Safeguarding Services is a suite of support services offered to organisations who deliver services to children and young people. Using a set of Child Safe Standards, and drawing upon a number of resources, Safeguarding Services helps organisations to build capacity and a culture of child safeguarding to protect children and young people from abuse and exploitation. The importance of Safeguarding Services to sectors and programs that have a duty of care to children is evident not only in the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) endorsement of the Accreditation Scheme (the sole endorsement of such a scheme in Australia), but also the size and nature of the sectors with services that seek to enhance the wellbeing of children.

A significant amount of government budget is allocated to these services, who in turn often work with the most vulnerable children, sometimes in new and untested ways, employing and engaging an array of different individuals to provide services in jurisdictions with varying regulatory requirements. The sheer complexity and array of different risk vectors of meeting the service needs of children illustrates the value of a program such as Safeguarding Services to navigate this complexity and, ultimately, better serve the children that these organisations work with.

The Centre for Social Impact at the University at the Western Australia was engaged by the Australian Childhood Foundation to examine and document the social impact story of Safeguarding Services. This report outlines the findings.