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• Employer guidelines
  • Introduction
  • 1. Do you provide child-related employment?
  • 2. Your obligations as an employer
  • 3. Step-by-step guide
  • 4. Relevant employment proceedings
  • 5. Background information
  • 6. Forms
  • Glossary
• Prohibited employment
• Background checks
• FAQs
• Employer-related bodies
• Child-safe child-friendly
• Offender Counsellors
• Commitment to service

As an employer, the Working With Children Check requires that you:

• don't employ prohibited persons in child-related employment;
• do Working With Children background checks;
• report relevant employment proceedings; and
• keep records and protect confidentiality.

2.1   Don't employ prohibited persons in child-related employment

It is an offence for prohibited persons to apply for or otherwise attempt to obtain, undertake or remain in child-related employment in any capacity, whether paid, volunteering or self employed.

You must ask all preferred applicants for child-related employment to declare that they are not a prohibited person. To do this use the Prohibited Employment Declaration.

For further information on your obligations go to Prohibited Persons.

2.2  Do Working With Children background checks

You must conduct Working With Children background checks for:

• preferred applicants for paid child-related employment;
• foster carers; and
• ministers, priests, rabbis, muftis or other like religious leaders or spiritual officers of a religion entering into child-related employment.

Working With Children background checks are not available for any other employees or self-employed people.

For further information on how to do Working With Children background checks go to Do you need to do Working With Children background checks?

2.3  Report relevant employment proceedings

All employers must notify the Commission for Children and Young People of the details of any employee against whom relevant employment proceedings have been completed since 3 July 1995.

If you subsequently discover that a relevant employment proceeding was wrongly notified to the Commission for Children and Young People, you must tell the Commission.

Both the Commission for Children and Young People and the NSW Ombudsman have a role in the notification of relevant employment proceedings. However, not all employers are subject to the NSW Ombudsman's scheme. For further information on employers' obligations under the NSW Ombudsman refer to the NSW Ombudsman's Child Protection in the Workplace: Responding to Allegations Against Employees (June 2004, 3^rd edition) at www.ombo.nsw.gov.au.

For further information on relevant employment proceedings and how to notify them to the Commission for Children and Young People go to Relevant Employment Proceedings.

 

2.4  Keep records and protect confidentiality

The Working With Children Check depends on accurate and reliable information. To maintain the integrity of the Check it is important that information collected is used in a fair, responsible and accountable way.

You must keep records of investigations and findings leading to relevant employment proceeding notifications so that it is available for future reference.

You must keep all information regarding the Working With Children Check confidential. It is an offence to disclose information obtained as part of the Working With Children Check, except in specified circumstances.

For further information on your obligations to maintain the confidentiality of the Working With Children Check go to Maintaining confidentiality.

Where a person who has been the subject of a relevant employment proceeding makes an application to access documents from you which contain information about those proceedings under the Freedom of Information Act 1989, you must provide them with access.