Complying with Child Safe Standard 8 – Physical and online environments (for transport providers)

Standard 8 – Physical and online environments promote safety and wellbeing and minimise the opportunity for children to be harmed.

How you can comply

Manage and consider the risks for children (any person under 18) using your physical spaces, like buses, and your online spaces, such as your website and social media pages.

How you may already be complying

Your risk management strategy may already deal with risks to physical and online safety. You can expand it to refer specifically to children.

Best-practice ideas

Make your organisation's child safety and wellbeing policy is accessible from your organisation's website or, if you don't have a website, any other online platform you use to communicate with customers.

Ensure your organisation's risk management strategy deals with physical and online risks to children using your services. Your strategy should also:

  • require you to do risk assessments on physical and online environments on a regular basis, to find possible problems and ways of reducing the chances of problems occuring
  • where appropriate, require third-party organisations you engage with to have child safe policies in place for their facilities and for the services contracted to them
  • be regularly reviewed and updated.

Provide your workers (as defined in the Child Safe Organisations Act 2024) with training on safety in physical and online environments:

  • drivers looking out for inappropriate behaviour between students on bus services
  • moderating online forums, by watching for and removing inappropriate content/comments
  • regularly reviewing content and blocking unsuitable users.

Look at best practice in your organisation, such as ways your drivers and supervisors on your school and specialist school transport services are applying child safe measures on bus routes and more broadly across services.

Ask students and families using your services to provide feedback on how safe they feel when using your service and when visiting your online platforms. This will help you identify places or situations where they feel unsafe.

Cultural safety and this Standard

Design your physical and online spaces so they are welcoming to and respectful of Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islander people, and co-design where possible.

Related Standards

Complying with this Standard can also help you comply with:

Also consider...