Church Compliance Training

Church compliance training is the structured learning a church gives its ministers, staff and volunteers so they can recognise harm, act on it and meet their legal duties. Child safety sits at the centre. The rest covers conduct, privacy and safe work, because a church runs a workplace as well as a congregation.

The National Principles for Child Safe Organisations give effect to the child safe standards recommended by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Principle 7 is the training one. It asks that staff and volunteers are equipped with the knowledge, skills and awareness to keep children and young people safe through ongoing education and training. In practice that means recognising grooming and neglect, responding well to a disclosure, and knowing the reporting obligations that apply where your church operates.

What the training usually covers

• Child safety and protection for anyone with contact with children, from the Sunday school room to a youth camp.
• Professional boundaries for pastoral care, counselling and mentoring, where the power imbalance is easy to miss.
• Work health and safety for working bees, kitchens, car parks and building maintenance.
• Incident reporting so a concern is recorded and escalated the same way every time.

Training sits alongside screening rather than instead of it. A working with children check, called a Blue Card in Queensland and an Ochre Card in the Northern Territory, confirms what is on a person’s record. It does not teach them what grooming looks like, or what to do in the ten minutes after a child tells them something.

Volunteers are not an exception. Under the model Work Health and Safety Act a volunteer counts as a worker when they carry out work for a person conducting a business or undertaking, so a church with paid staff owes its Sunday roster the same duty of care it owes the office team. Child Safe Standards differ across states and territories and they change over time, so confirm what applies where you operate and seek advice where the stakes are high.

Browse the guides below, or see the full range of compliance training courses.