Executive summary
In late July 2026, the second and larger tranche of Victoria’s Working with Children Check (WWCC) reforms came into effect. Most of the commentary has focused on two things: the Social Services Regulator (SSR) can now consider a much wider pool of information, and external merits review at the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) is gone.
Both are true. Neither is the change that will most affect how organisations actually operate.
The change that will is quieter and sits in the Regulator’s own guidance for organisations. When a worker is issued with an Interim Bar or a Suspension, the SSR will notify the organisation, and will expressly not disclose the information that led to the decision. That instrument can remain in place for up to two years.
Organisations are therefore going to find themselves holding a worker they cannot lawfully deploy in child-related work, for a period that may run into years, on the basis of information they are not permitted to see, arising from a process in which they have no standing.
That is a governance problem, an employment problem, and, most acutely for anyone conducting internal investigations, a documentation problem.
What actually changed
Victoria’s child safety regulatory architecture has been rebuilt in stages following the Rapid Child Safety Review, led by Mr Jay Weatherill AO and Ms Pam White PSM, which reported to Government on 15 August 2025. The Victorian government accepted all 22 recommendations.
Three stages matter for present purposes:
1. Stage one (2025)
The Worker Screening Amendment (Strengthening the Working with Children Check) Act 2025 (Vic):
- delivered mutual recognition of interstate WWCC exclusions (“banned in one, banned in all”);
- expanded suspension powers, a power to cancel clearances obtained on false or misleading information; and
- an extension of the prosecution limitation period for false information from 12 months to five years and six months.
2. Stage two (23 February 2026)
Responsibility for the Reportable Conduct Scheme and the Child Safe Standards transferred from the Commission for Children and Young People (CCYP) to the SSR. For the first time, worker screening, reportable conduct and child safe standards sit inside a single regulator. The Commission retains its oversight and advocacy functions across the broader service system.
3. Stage three (late July 2026)
The Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Act 2025 (Vic) provisions relating to worker screening commenced.
These are the reforms discussed:
a. A new category of information: "child safety risk information"
Victoria’s previous framework was among the most rigid in the country. Action required a formal trigger: a charge, a conviction, a finding of guilt, or a substantiated disciplinary or regulatory finding. The Rapid Child Safety Review described the consequence in a phrase, the “breadcrumbs” of information about a person, individually below threshold but collectively concerning, were rarely visible to anyone and almost never actionable.
That threshold has gone. The SSR may now obtain and consider information relevant to a person’s child safety risk. On the Regulator’s own account, this extends to information from Victoria Police about suspected criminal activity where no charge has been laid, and to information contained in child protection reports. Applicants consent to the collection of this information as part of applying.
b. Two interim instruments, each lasting up to two years
Where the SSR becomes aware of child safety risk information, it may act before completing its assessment:
- A person without a clearance may be issued an Interim Bar.
- A person with a clearance may have that clearance suspended.
Either may remain in place for a maximum of two years while the SSR assesses and decides. During that period the person cannot engage in child-related work, paid or unpaid.
The Regulator will notify the organisation, but only if the worker has told the SSR that they work there. And in both cases the guidance is explicit that the SSR cannot disclose to the organisation the child safety risk information or other details that informed the decision.
c. The review pathway is now internal
A person issued with a WWC Exclusion may apply to the SSR for internal review, conducted by a different officer of the Regulator. Applications must be made within 28 days. There is no fee.
Two qualifications are routinely missed:
- Internal review is not available at all to people in Category A, or is available only on a limited basis to those disputing their Category A assignment. Category A captures the most serious matters, charges or findings of guilt for very serious offences, serious offender orders, registration as a sex offender, and, following mutual recognition, now also captures interstate exclusions.
- It is not that VCAT review has been replaced by internal review for everyone; it is that the merits review pathway has been narrowed to an internal process, from which the most serious cohort is largely excluded altogether.
Judicial review remains theoretically available in the Supreme Court, but that is a review of legality, not of merits, and is not a practical pathway for most people. Organisations should not assume it functions as a substitute.
Note also that this change applies to WWCC decisions. NDIS Worker Screening decisions retain a distinct review pathway, a divergence that matters for any organisation running both screening streams across the same workforce.
The consequence for investigation practice
Put the pieces together and the practical position is this:
Your investigation report is now regulatory input, whether or not you substantiate, and the regulatory consequences that follow may be invisible to you.
For anyone investigating reportable conduct or professional standards issues, six things follow:
1. The finding is no longer the only output that matters
Investigation reports are conventionally built to answer one question: is the allegation substantiated? Everything in the report is arranged to support or not support that conclusion.
That is now insufficient. The regulator will read the material for something else entirely: pattern, risk, and the residual concerns that sit around the finding rather than in it. An investigation that establishes nothing at the substantiation threshold may nonetheless record:
- a persistent pattern of boundary drift;
- three separate low-level complaints from unrelated sources;
- an implausible explanation the investigator could not disprove;
- a witness account that could not be tested because the witness declined to participate.
Under the previous framework, none of that was considered, but it may be now.
Therefore, more than ever, the factual record needs to be complete and neutral enough to ensure it can be used for a purpose it was not intended for.
2. "Not substantiated" must be disaggregated
Most organisational reports use “not substantiated” to do three quite different jobs:
- The allegation was disproved; the conduct did not occur.
- There was insufficient evidence to reach the standard of proof.
- The matter was unable to be determined, for example, a single-witness account with no corroboration either way.
These have always been distinct. They now have materially different downstream consequences, because the second and third leave live risk on the table in a way the first does not.
If investigation reports collapse all three into one phrase, you are producing a document that misrepresents the residual risk picture in both directions, understating it where evidence was merely insufficient, and overstating it where conduct was positively disproved. Neither serves the respondent, the person raising the concern, or the child.
Our recommendation is to adopt explicit categories for findings and define them in the report itself. Where a matter is not substantiated, state which of the three applies and why.
3. Procedural fairness must be delivered by you, because it will not be delivered elsewhere
This is the point that deserves the most attention.
Under the previous framework, an organisation could reason that a respondent aggrieved by the consequences of an investigation had a further, independent forum available. VCAT provided a merits review before an independent tribunal.
That reasoning is no longer available. The respondent’s review rights are now internal to the Regulator, unavailable to the most serious cohort, and exercised on a record to which your investigation may have contributed and which the respondent may never see in full.
Whatever view one takes of that policy choice, its operational consequence for investigators is unambiguous: the investigation process is now, for many respondents, the last point at which a genuinely independent examination of the facts occurs. The fairness you build into your own process is no longer just one of several layers. It may be the only layer.
Concretely, that means:
- Allegations must be sufficiently particularised that a respondent can actually answer them: dates, locations, conduct described specifically, not implied.
- Adverse material must be put to the respondent before findings are made, and the response recorded in full rather than summarised.
- Where a respondent declines to participate, record the invitation, the terms, the notice period and the refusal, not merely that they “did not participate.”
- Where credibility is assessed, record the basis. “The investigator preferred the complainant’s account” is not a reason. It is a conclusion in search of one.
- Where an interpreter, support person, or adjustment was offered or provided, record it.
None of this is new practice. What is new is that the cost of getting it wrong has moved from an internal grievance to a five-year exclusion from an entire field of work, reviewable only internally.
4. Interim risk management now needs its own documented reasoning
If a worker is issued with an Interim Bar or Suspension, your organisation is notified of the fact, but not of the reason. You will be managing an employment relationship, and possibly a parallel internal process, in an information vacuum that may persist for up to two years.
You will need to make and defend decisions, on suspension with or without pay, redeployment to non-child-related duties, communications to colleagues and families, and whether to run or pause your own investigation, without access to the material driving the regulatory action.
That is survivable, but only if the reasoning is documented as your own. Record what you knew, when, from whom, and what you decided on that basis. Do not record inferences about what the SSR must have known: you don’t know, you can’t know, and a file note speculating about it will read badly to anyone who later reviews it.
Note also that the notification pipe depends on the worker having told the SSR where they work. Organisations that assume they will automatically be told are assuming a data flow that rests on someone else’s compliance. Ensure you have processes in place to ensure workers and volunteers update their WWCC accordingly.
5. Your own notification processes
A worker issued with an Exclusion must tell you in writing within seven days. A clearance holder charged with a serious offence must notify both the SSR and their employer within seven days. Reforms also introduce requirements for organisations to notify the Regulator when they engage a WWCC holder and when that person leaves, so that worker movement between organisations is visible in near real time.
For organisations with volunteer cohorts, casual workforces, contractors, or ministry-based rather than employment-based engagements, this is a live systems question rather than a policy question. Who in your organisation actually knows, today, every person engaged in child-related work, when they started, and when they stopped?
If the honest answer is “several people, in several places, inconsistently,” that is now a compliance exposure rather than an administrative untidiness.
6. Records retention needs revisiting
An investigation file that closes as “not substantiated” has historically had a shorter practical life than a substantiated one. That distinction no longer holds. Where residual risk was identified, the file may be relevant to a regulatory assessment years later, including one prompted by an entirely unrelated matter at a different organisation.
Review your retention schedule against that possibility.
The procedural fairness question
It would be incomplete to describe these reforms without acknowledging that they involve a genuine and contested trade-off.
The case for the reforms is that Victoria’s previous framework was demonstrably not fit for purpose. The Rapid Child Safety Review found the triggers for action too rigid, the information too siloed, and the discretion not to refer substantiated matters difficult to justify. The Victorian Ombudsman had made recommendations to similar effect in September 2022, which went unimplemented. Where a regulator holds credible information that a person presents a risk to children, requiring it to wait for a formal charge or a substantiated finding before acting is a policy choice with its own victims. Removing external merits review reflects a judgment, made in NSW as well, that tribunals had, in practice, returned people to child-related work whom the screening authority had assessed as unsafe.
The case against is that expanding the evidentiary base and narrowing the review pathway simultaneously compounds two risks rather than balancing them. Unsubstantiated allegations enter the assessment precisely when independent testing of the resulting decision is removed. Internal review by a different officer of the same agency is not equivalent to merits review by an independent tribunal, and the cohort excluded from internal review altogether has no merits pathway at all.
The Attorney-General’s own statement of compatibility acknowledged that Aboriginal people, as a cohort over-represented in the justice system, are particularly exposed to the expanded suspension powers.
Reasonable people hold both positions. Our purpose here is not to resolve that debate but to note what it means for practitioners: when a system relies more heavily on organisational fact-finding and less on external review, the quality of organisational fact-finding ceases to be a matter of good practice and becomes a matter of systemic integrity.
A practical checklist
Before your next investigation:
- Define and publish your finding categories, including disaggregated categories for "not substantiated"
- Review your notice of allegations template for particularity
- Confirm your process puts all adverse material to the respondent before findings
- Confirm credibility assessments are reasoned, not asserted
- Build a distinct "residual risk observations" section, clearly separated from findings
- Establish a documented decision framework for managing a worker under an Interim Bar or Suspension where no reasons are available
- Audit your register of people engaged in child-related work: completeness, ownership, and start/end dates
- Review records retention for unsubstantiated matters
- Confirm who in your organisation is the recipient of SSR notifications, and that the address is monitored
Important notes
This paper is not legal advice. Safeguarding Services is a specialist safeguarding and professional standards consultancy, not a law firm. Questions about the application of the Worker Screening Act 2020 (Vic) to a particular person or decision, about employment consequences, or about a respondent’s review rights should be referred to your legal advisers.
Sector regulators vary. The SSR regulates organisations without a specific sector regulator. Schools and education providers remain with the Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority; other co-regulators include the Department of Health, the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority and Workforce Inspectorate Victoria. Confirm which regulator applies to your organisation before acting on any of the above.
Safeguarding Services Pty Ltd (ABN 56 617 975 407) conducts independent workplace and reportable conduct investigations, safeguarding reviews, and governance advisory across education, faith-based, disability, aged care, government and community services sectors.
Contact us to learn what Victoria’s Working with Children Check (WWCC) reforms mean for your organisation.
