Feel Safe, Be Safe: Protective strategies for everyday teaching, learning and care for birth to 5 year olds

Bright Futures is a national education and training project aiming to reduce and prevent child sexual abuse.

Goodstart’s Feel Safe, Be Safe: Protective Strategies Kit is an example of emerging and exemplary practice that supports educators and teachers of children aged birth-5 to meaningfully embed protective strategies within everyday teaching, learning and care.

Mixing pedagogy and play, protective strategies empower children with age–appropriate knowledge, strategies, and skills to respond to a range of unsafe situations (including online), understand their bodies, emotions, and early warning signs, set boundaries, and persist in seeking help from a trusted adult. Protective strategies are crucial in promoting personal safety and well-being, they are underpinned by the Universal Protective Behaviours Framework and are predicated on two key themes: 

• We all have the right to be safe all of the time  

• We can all talk with a trusted adult about anything.  

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse highlighted the importance of providing children with access to protective strategies to reduce the risk of child sexual abuse or harm. Protective strategies are woven throughout the vision, principles, practices and learning outcomes of the Early Years Learning Framework V2.0, and central to the National Principles for Child Safe Organizations and State-based Child-Safe Standards.

About the presenters

Marie Stuart Goodstart Early Learning Social Inclusion Coordinator, Queensland

Sara Evans Goodstart Early Learning National Lead Safeguarding Children