As a mother filmed, her son told her a childcare worker ‘pinched my doodle’

The moment Emily picked up her son from child care, she knew something was wrong.

The four-year-old had been sad for months, but his tear-streaked face stopped her cold. Heart pounding, she pulled out her phone and hit record.

Warning: This story contains descriptions of sexual abuse

“His name is Ali,” he murmured, his hands nervously playing with a homemade beaded necklace. “He pinched me on the doodle. That’s what he done … And he was doing that to some of the other boys.”

For four months, Ali worked at the childcare centre her son went to every day.

Fighting to stay composed, Emily gently asked: “How does he make you feel when he does it?”

The raw, harrowing recording from April 2022 captured, in real time, the moment their lives changed forever. It would become crucial evidence in their fight for justice.

Emily says she notified the childcare centre immediately but, after three weeks without any response from the police, she contacted them herself.

It was only then, she says, that she learned crucial CCTV footage had been erased — stored for only a short time before being overwritten. The only remaining evidence was 20 minutes of footage and the recording she had made of her son.

She says the childcare centre never informed other parents about what had happened.

“I get that some parents are like, ‘Well, it would never happen to me’, but how do you know it hasn’t happened already? You wouldn’t know ’cause they don’t tell you. Everything’s a secret and they don’t care about your kids.

“They’re there to make money and that’s the bottom line.”

Emily’s case is not an isolated one, it’s a symptom of a system in crisis.

The rapid privatisation of Australia’s childcare sector has unleashed a wave of neglect and exploitation.

The childcare industry, entrusted with the care of 1.4 million children in Australia, is increasingly prioritising profits over safety.

Parents are paying as much as $220 a day, or more than $1,000 a week, to a $20 billion-a-year sector riddled with systemic failures, a rising number of serious incidents and a troubling culture of secrecy.

Now, in a six-month Four Corners investigation, whistleblowers, workers, parents and experts are revealing the urgent need for reform.

Surge in incidents

To protect her son, we cannot reveal Emily’s real name. She’s speaking out now to expose a broken childcare system that allowed this to happen.

Had she not taught her son about body safety and abuse prevention, Emily says, none of this would have come to light.

“At the end of the day, that’s what saved him,” she says.

She also believes that had she not gone to the police herself, the centre would have quietly dismissed her complaint.

In 2023, Muhammad Ali was convicted of indecently touching Emily’s son and sentenced to 18 months in prison. He will be released in May.

Court documents reveal that prior to joining the centre, he was unemployed twice due to drug use.

His case highlights a growing issue within the sector: where the often urgent need to fill vacancies due to a chronic staff shortage can outweigh proper safety checks and balances.

Two months after Ali was arrested, the centre was quietly sold and rebranded, yet many of the staff remained.

“All I can see is they just put a different T-shirt on and call themselves something else,” Emily says.

Such stories are often dismissed as rare exceptions, but the evidence paints a far more troubling picture.

Four Corners’ analysis of national data reveals a troubling surge in serious incidents — more than 26,000 cases in 2024, a 27 per cent jump in three years.

These incidents can include deaths, serious injuries, trauma or illness, missing children and allegations of sexual, physical or emotional abuse.

Every day, at least seven children go missing, are not accounted for, or are locked out of centres — a 49 per cent increase in three years. Each year, more than 3,000 babies and toddlers are sent to hospital with injuries sustained in child care.

On average, there is one report a day of sexual misconduct or sexual offences in Victorian, West Australian and NSW childcare centres. In Queensland, the Northern Territory and South Australia, there is no reportable conduct scheme.

Little children, big money

Australia’s childcare sector is increasingly dominated by private operators, where profit often outweighs care.

This shift, Professor Gabrielle Meagher warns, comes at the expense of quality. A leading expert on privatised social services, she points to the overwhelming evidence showing that for-profit providers deliver lower-quality services on average compared with their non-profit equivalents.

Of the 300 to 400 new childcare centres opening each year, a staggering 95 per cent are for-profit, with only one of the country’s 10 largest daycare operators being non-profit. The rest are controlled by private equity firms, publicly listed companies and international investment groups, all driven by profit rather than child welfare.

For investors, the childcare sector is an attractive opportunity, thanks to billions of dollars in government subsidies and grants underwriting the business.

“The whole industry is massively underpinned by a secure and growing stream of government income,” Professor Meagher says.

An Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) report from December 2023 found that for-profit providers paid lower wages and hired less-experienced staff than their non-profit equivalents, leading to a decline in the quality of standards.

“The bottom line to that is that quality has to suffer if you don’t invest in your staff,” Professor Meagher says.

For childcare workers in centres around the country, these issues are all too familiar.

Affinity is ‘profit at all times’

Affinity Education, a private equity-backed childcare provider with over 250 centres nationwide, is drawing criticism from some staff and parents, who say they put profit ahead of child welfare.

Some workers and parents Four Corners spoke to said its business model prioritised profit over care, with strict financial targets driving managers to make tough choices.

Former centre manager Letiha Loveday recalls the unbearable pressure to meet financial targets, often driving her to physical distress.

“I would leave my house in the morning with a pit in my stomach. And I’d take an extra change of clothes with me because nine times out of 10 in my hour drive to work, I’d throw up on myself,” she says.

“It was killing me inside.”

Letiha started her career in a not-for-profit, where she says money was invested back into the service and there were incentives and programs for educators to upskill.

At Affinity, Letiha described a constant, high-stakes environment where financial targets governed her decisions.

Occupancy rates, wage costs and revenue goals dictated her daily operations.

Bonuses were tied to hitting targets, but failing to meet them resulted in harsh consequences, including being placed in “intensive groups.”

Letiha remembers juggling multiple roles — teaching, cooking, supervising, and marketing — just to try and meet targets.

“There was a point there where I was having to cook meals in a storeroom so I could still supervise children at the same time, just so they could eat,” she says.

“It was profit at all times.”

Letiha left the childcare industry three years later, frustrated and broken.

Chey Carter, who managed multiple Affinity centres across NSW and Canberra, found the culture so toxic that she stopped working in childcare centres.

“I tried to end my life … [it got] that bad,” she says.

She now runs a childcare consultancy and says many workers in the sector reach out to discuss issues with pay and workloads.

“The amount of educators who get gaslit into believing that they’re not entitled to A, B, or C or are put on the wrong award level is rife,” she says.

“It’s a vicious cycle because not only are we doing overtime, we’re not getting our proper breaks and we’re not getting the entitled time to do our paperwork. There’s a reason that we’re all leaving,” she says.

Chey says childcare workers are low-paid despite the recent 15 per cent wage subsidy over two years.

“I did a little bit of digging and people that work in car parks get paid more than us,” she says.

In a statement, Affinity said it took the mental health and wellbeing of staff seriously and was “deeply concerned to hear about these experiences”.

It said it was committed to upholding the highest standards in all aspects of its operations.

“We acknowledge that there is always more work to do, and we will continue to invest time, resources and capital in our centres to the benefit of children, our educators and the community.” 

Affinity said in the past three years it had spent more than $70 million to improve its compliance, safety, care, systems and processes.

‘It was crazy’

The NSW Education Department has flagged 1,900 breaches in the past four years across Affinity’s 103 centres, including inappropriate child disciplining and inadequate safety standards. Affinity says the breaches in NSW were more like 1,700, and the total number of breaches last year in NSW was 364.

Affinity’s Kids Academy centre at Spring Farm in Sydney’s South West is one of the worst.

In 2024, the department reported 41 confirmed breaches at the centre, including cases of inappropriate discipline.

 Affinity disputes this, claiming its Spring Farm centre had only 20 breaches that year. The company says it has been working with the regulator for the past 18 months to improve systems and processes to ensure ongoing compliance.

A father whose child attended Spring Farm says serious incidents were ignored, including the day his son choked and turned blue. On other occasions, his son went without lunch and a friend’s child was hospitalised after being given the wrong formula.

The father also says he remembers staff yelling at children to “shut up,” and once he saw an educator lifting a baby by the arm.

The other issue was the high turnover of staff. “They’d hire a bunch of new teachers, and within a month, all those new teachers were gone. It was crazy,” he says.

A mother says Spring Farm didn’t tell her when her son fractured his ankle.

Another mother says she saw an educator drag a girl across the classroom by the arm after she had an accident during toilet training.

The company confirmed it had been issued with five Emergency Action Notices over the past four years in NSW, each demanding urgent intervention to address immediate dangers to children.

It also received three Show Cause Notices, which are a final step before enforcement actions, including fines, license conditions, suspension or even cancellation. Affinity said they had been remediated and closed off with the department.

Affinity said it had developed an extensive remediation plan in collaboration with the department, including increasing staff numbers.

The disturbing pattern of misconduct at Affinity centres isn’t limited to NSW: it has surfaced at other facilities, too. In the past four years, the company has admitted that its Queensland centres have been issued 13 Emergency Action Notices.

Former Affinity worker Johanna Hugo says when she tried to report inappropriate conduct to her centre manager, she was ignored.

Johanna says it was only when a parent made a formal complaint to the centre and the state regulator that an investigation was triggered.

In an October 2024 meeting with the state regulator, Johanna detailed several incidents, including one in which an educator incited more than 20 children to hit and spit on a child.

Four Corners has obtained a recording of that interview.

“She told the children, ‘Everyone spit on [boy’s name]’ … and he was screaming. And the children did hit him … there was, like, more or less 20 children sitting there and they all, like, got up onto the knees and they smacked him,” Johanna recalls.

Then she says the educator restrained the child, “basically kind of kneeled over him, like hands and legs to try and stop him from moving and calm him down”.

Johanna was fired three weeks after her interview with the regulator, with Affinity citing “performance issues” that she says had never been raised before.

Her dismissal came shortly before the end of her probation period.

Affinity says Johanna’s dismissal was not retaliatory: it was linked to performance.

With over seven years of experience in child care, mainly in South Africa, Johanna says her time at Affinity was the worst of her career.

“My experience at Affinity was basically the worst experience that I’ve ever had working with children, any centre, anywhere.”

Fight for transparency

NSW Greens politician Abigail Boyd has spent six months helping Four Corners expose the industry’s secrets.

The former corporate lawyer says her most shocking discovery is how much is kept hidden from parents.

“Nobody wants people to know what’s actually going on,” Boyd says. 

In November, Boyd invoked a Standing Order 52 (SO52) — a powerful parliamentary order to force the release of internal departmental documents to scrutinise the regulator’s handling of breaches in the childcare sector.

She requested incident reports that document injuries, neglect, abuse and safety hazards as well as the responses of the regulator, ranging from compliance notices to fines and closure of centres.

“I wanted to see for myself exactly how effective the regulator was in making sure that these places were fit to send our children to.”

She says the NSW government and the education department fought hard to keep them secret — deploying lawyers, applying pressure, and warning that transparency itself could put children at risk.

“The worst thing is they have said to me now numerous times that … I’m putting children at risk because the regulator will somehow be distracted from their core function by me just simply asking for them to be transparent and accountable,” she says.

Boyd gained access to a fraction of the documents.

She was horrified by what she read.

“To read about that abuse and the lack of action from the regulator, I cried a couple of times.”

“I had this deep pit, this feeling in my stomach of just revulsion and horror. And this is just a smidgen … literally a thousandth of what I asked for,” she says.

Parliamentary rules prevent Boyd from revealing specific details to the public, or naming centres, but she can describe what she read in general terms.

“There were multiple reports of inappropriate sexual touching, multiple reports of educators treating children really roughly, lots of broken elbows, broken wrists, kids being kicked, kids being verbally abused and a lot of inappropriate restraint, force-feeding, putting pillows over their heads,” she says.

“This is just one little snapshot of what is going on in these centres that gets actually reported and investigated.

In late February, independent arbiter Keith Mason KC ruled in an interim report that some of the documents the government and department had fought to keep hidden should be made public.

That still hasn’t happened.

Some of those documents relate to Affinity.

Boyd says she was preparing to challenge the department as well as Deputy Premier and Minister for Education and Early Learning Prue Car on why critical information had been withheld from the public, when the minister announced an internal review.

Boyd says it was a political sleight of hand, to deflect scrutiny, stall accountability and bury the issue under layers of bureaucracy.

“Now, every time I ask any questions, they can say, ‘oh, yes, we’re doing a review’. As if that solves all of the problems, which of course, it doesn’t,” she says. The review had no terms of reference, timeline or assurance that its report would be made public.

Prue Car was unavailable for an interview. She says the government has worked to ensure the timely release of the documents every step of the way.

“I absolutely reject the claim that we have prevented disclosure,” she says.

She believes that more childcare centres are receiving breaches because more inspections are being conducted and ordered the review “to receive assurance that this is in fact the result of a crackdown rather than any rise in serious systemic concerns”.

The NSW Department of Education said it was complying with the SO52.

Federal minister Anne Aly was unavailable for an interview but told us the government was working with all jurisdictions to ensure child safety.

For parents like Emily, the failures of Australia’s childcare system are not just numbers, cases, or documents — they are a lifelong sentence. Her son still carries the trauma and she’s left battling a system that failed him.

“I want parents to know that their children aren’t being looked after properly,” Emily says.

“I trusted that child care was going to do the right thing, but they didn’t, they were wanting to look after themselves first, before my child.”

Watch Four Corners’s special investigation into the systemic issues plaguing Australia’s childcare sector, tonight from 8:00pm on ABC TV and ABC iview.

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