The ABC's explosive childcare investigations began with an email

It began with an email. An academic sounding the alarm about the rise of large private operators in child care. The reality, she said, was they delivered poorer quality services, paid less, charged more and had higher staff turnover.

That message would set in motion one of the most important investigations of my career.

Professor Gabrielle Meagher's email crystallised a feeling of unease I'd been carrying for months. Someone I knew had recently started a childcare course, hopeful, excited, certain she had found her forever career. Within six months she'd packed it in. The speed of her disillusionment was shocking.

And it wasn't just the course, run by a private college and largely online. The placement exposed something far darker: children left with unqualified staff, educators paid too little and casual staff told day-by-day whether they were needed. Work was unpredictable, support was minimal, and corners were cut at every turn.

It was a disturbing account — but it felt like the beginning of something larger. Meagher's email confirmed it.

Her message was matter-of-fact, but it resonated because it aligned so sharply with everything I'd learned over years of investigating companies, regulators and systems under pressure. The pattern was unmistakable. It was a sector beginning to buckle.

When I realised private equity, property developers and investment bankers were deeply embedded in child care, it set off even more red flags. Schools weren't run by private-equity firms for a reason — yet childcare had been left wide open to commercialisation.

The investigation began

It was May 2024 and my producer Chris Gillett immediately saw what I saw — that this was a story we had to pursue once our other projects had been cleared.

We were looking into the sector behind the scenes, and started working on it full time from November after getting the green light to build a story for Four Corners. Our small research team hit the ground running.

We identified the major operators, tracked ownership structures and followed the money, including the cost cutting, which was putting kids at risk.

Over the course of the investigation we spoke to hundreds of parents, educators, whistleblowers and experts, including Meagher, who helped analyse the National Quality Standards (Australia's benchmark for assessing safety, staffing and quality in childcare). The data revealed some blunt facts. 10 per cent of centres had never been given a quality rating; a similar proportion were operating with staff waivers, which allow services to run without the required number of qualified teachers; and for-profit long day care centres consistently performed worse against the standards than their not-for-profit counterparts.

It became clear we needed visibility inside the regulator itself. Freedom of information requests were never going to cut it. From bitter experience, I knew they would take months, come back late, redacted or gutted and the scope reduced.

That's why I turned to NSW Greens MP Abigail Boyd. I knew the power of a Standing Order 52 (SO52), a powerful parliamentary call for papers, where parliament can compel the release of documents by departments normally kept confidential. Breach notices, show-cause letters, internal briefings, compliance reports. Exactly the material that could expose how the regulator was really operating.

I'd used an SO52 before, including during my investigation into the country's biggest workers compensation scheme, icare, which forced the release of thousands of internal documents that revealed major mismanagement of icare and tens of thousands of injured workers underpaid up to $80 million.

Boyd recognised the importance of the project and agreed to work with us immediately. Within days she'd secured support from the Liberals and key crossbenchers, the kind of alliance that only forms when something needs serious sunlight.

A handful of boxes 

That's when the real fight began. The Department of Education and the NSW government pushed back hard, knocking back the request, then when they were outvoted, tried a different tactic: burying almost everything under parliamentary privilege, effectively locking it away from public view.

In the meantime, the handful of boxes that were made available publicly, were enough to give an insight into the state of regulation.

The files revealed serious failings at one of the country's biggest operators, private equity owned Affinity Education and how the regulator had allowed them to keep on expanding. They also exposed the collapse of a smaller for-profit operator, 3 Bears, which was finally shut down last year after more than a decade of repeated noncompliance and serious incidents including putting children in a van for three hours without water to hide them from the regulator due to over-enrolling.

They included the disturbing closure of Jumpstart — a service that had never met national quality standards with toddlers strapped into highchairs for up to six hours a day, some force-fed until they vomited.

We scoured social media parent and educator forums that were quietly swapping warnings about certain centres. Bit by bit, the scale of the problem came into focus.

It was the stuff of nightmares. There were cases of broken bones, third degree burns, toddlers yanked, smothered, dragged across the floor, or found unsupervised in car parks or roaming next to busy main roads. There were cases of babies found dead or near death. And then there were the paedophiles.

Put simply, physical and sexual abuse was not rare, it was widespread and regulation was deficient. Without Boyd and the SO 52 documents, this story about a $22 billion industry dominated by profit-driven operators, weak regulation and declining quality would not have had the cut through that it did.

Four Corners aired Betrayal of Trust in March. Its impact was immediate.

The NSW regulator suspended Affinity's worst-performing centre and pledged tougher penalties. A parliamentary inquiry into childcare was announced and the federal government announced a suite of policies to "crack down on unscrupulous operators" that included cutting off funding for egregious breaches.

Meanwhile, hundreds of educators, parents and experts made contact with harrowing stories of neglect and abuse.

ABC newsrooms around the country rallied around the story, uncovering fresh cases and building pressure with every new report.

We were sent a cache of leaked internal Affinity Education documents and CCTV footage of babies being dragged, pulled and yanked, along with a video of a defenceless baby repeatedly slapped across the face for fun by an educator, while her colleague films it then uploads it to Snapchat.

The breakthrough we needed

Then came another breakthrough: the documents that had been locked away under privilege were finally released. Boyd had fought hard for them, requesting an independent arbiter to review the government's decision. After assessing the case, the arbiter ruled in her favour, finding it was in the public interest for the documents to be released. The department was then compelled to comply, sending thousands of files each week, with only the most sensitive details redacted.

The boxes didn't just contain disturbing incidents, they revealed case after case of regulators repeatedly slow to intervene, granting expansion to centres already under scrutiny.

We eventually received more than 200,000 pages of documents outlining some of the most horrifying incidents, staff with fraudulent qualifications and countless centres with deficient record keeping, sexual abuse, physical abuse and child-on-child abuse.

The boxes would land each week, usually on a Thursday, and Chris Gillett and myself would spend countless hours, weekends, sometimes late into the night, trawling through them, sending each other messages about how shocking some centres were and how little the regulator had been done.

When news broke in July that 26-year-old Joshua Dale Brown — a former Affinity and G8 employee who held a valid Working With Children Check in Victoria — had been charged with more than 70 child-sex offences, including rape, everything shifted.

The pressure on governments and regulators to act intensified. Media outlets around the country were filing on childcare.

Victoria launched a "Rapid Child Safety Review." Federal ministers went on television in tears, apologising for being slow to act. Reforms included promises to ban mobile phones, a trial of CCTV in centres, promises to create a national educator register, the introduction of mandatory child-safety training and a move to unify Working With Children Checks across state borders.

This has been one of the toughest and most important investigations I've ever undertaken. The stories — in total two Four Corners, a series of 7.30 reports and multiple online articles — were devastating. Parents whose children suffered unimaginable harm, and educators who tried to speak up and were punished for it.

This story is about something deeper than policy or profit. It's about the trust parents place in child care every morning when they hand over their children, believing they will be safe — only to find they're not.

No big investigation is done alone, and this is no exception. It takes producers, researchers, editors, camera crews and colleagues. This story reflects the team effort of Four Corners including EP Matthew Carney, ABC investigations editor Sean Nicholls, the team at 7.30 including EP Joel Tozer and researchers Ben Butler, Jade Toomey, Dylan Welch, Lara Sonnenschein and Madi Chwasta.