Safe Inc

04/09/2026

What if the small signals around a child could be seen earlier, and connected before they became a crisis?

This National Child Protection Week, join us for Before the Crisis: Seeing the Signals That Keep Children Safe, a free webinar with David Salajan, our Science & Technology Lead and cofounder, and Angela White, our Case Review Specialist.

David has spent more than a decade building SAFE, working through research, pilot programs, and partnerships with government and scientific organisations. Angela brings the human and case-review lens to the work, helping us understand what a signal might actually be telling us, and why context and professional judgement matter alongside any system.

Together, they'll unpack the verbal and non-verbal ways children communicate distress, why no single carer or educator ever sees the whole picture alone, and how connecting what different people notice can help concerns surface earlier, before they become a crisis.

Register now: https://ap1.hubs.ly/H01lzWc0

03/09/2026

Are you ready for an honest conversation with Ruby O’Rourke?

As a child, Ruby’s warning signals went unseen for far too long. She was a survivor of domestic violence and abuse before she ever had the words for it.

This National Child Protection Week, Ruby opens up about that childhood, and how it became the reason she built SAFE: a mission to make sure other children are seen, heard, and protected sooner than she was.

Every Child Leaves Signals. Episode drops Monday 7 September. Stay tuned.

01/09/2026

85% of our educators describe this work as a profession, not a job. Chosen, and chosen again, every single day.

Yet turnover in early childhood sits close to 30% and it's often the most experienced who leave first. Not for lack of commitment, but because the sector rarely gives back what it asks for: fair pay, real career pathways, and support that shares the weight instead of leaving it on one person's shoulders.

We are people meeting people to protect children. In the middle sits SAFE's Triage, built so an educator's instinct never has nowhere to go.
This Educators Week, we wrote about what it would actually take for our educators to thrive, not just get through the week.

Read it at https://ap1.hubs.ly/H01lbLp0

Happy Early Childhood Educators' Day to every hero doing this work.

01/09/2026

This National Child Protection Week, our founder Ruby O'Rourke hosts a special episode about the signals children give when they don't yet have the words, the same ones she gave as a child.

NAPCAN's theme this year invites us to shift conversation into action. We'd add one thing: action starts even earlier, with noticing what children communicate through behaviour, long before they have the words to say it out loud.

Stay tuned.

26/08/2026

Attorney-General Michelle Rowland announced a real milestone for Working with Children Checks last week, then added that"there is more work to do."

She is right on both counts.

Banned in one now means banned in all. Every jurisdiction is now obliged to act on a refusal made elsewhere, so a person knocked back in one state is knocked back in all of them. Western Australia legislated last, closing a gap that let people cross a border and try again.

Two more fixes are underway. Continuous national monitoring of criminal history, connecting screening units this year and reaching full offence coverage by mid-2028. A registration system so a state knows when a cleared adult is working there on another state's card, also mid-2028.

Every one of those moves information about people who have already come to official attention.

The agreement is honest about this. It quotes the Royal Commission, saying checks alone do not make organisations safe for children, and over-reliance on them can be detrimental.

A police record exists after the harm. Children are hurt in the years before that, and the early warning signs are behavioural. A child who flinches at handover. Small injuries nobody connects. Concerns raised at three services that never meet each other.

Child safety is an infrastructure question. Screening alone will never answer it.
How do we move from responding to harm to preventing it?

https://ministers.ag.gov.au/media-centre/banned-one-banned-all-working-children-check-laws-now-place-nationally-20-08-2026

12/08/2026

The Census counts every person in Australia. It doesn't count what's happening to them.

We saw The Parenthood ask what the Census misses for parents, and it got us thinking about what it misses for child safety. Here's what we wish it asked:

1️⃣ Are you living with domestic violence or coercive control in your home?
2️⃣ Are you concerned about your child's safety at any service or institution they attend?
3️⃣ Would you know what to do if your child disclosed abuse or harm to you?
4️⃣ Do you know how long it takes for a child protection concern to be investigated in your state?
5️⃣ If you raised a concern about a child today, would you know who to call?

How would you answer these five questions?

11/08/2026

Sydney-siders, tomorrow morning, our founder Ruby O'Rourke will be on 2SER The Daily to talk about why she built SAFE.

Ruby lived through what happens when community doesn't have anywhere to connect the signals they see about a child in distress. Ruby exists to enable children and that starts with SAFE and ends with national law - so children should have the right to be free from violence. Because she doesn't want another child to grow up the way she did.

Tune in Wednesday 12 August, 10:30am AEST. Listen here: https://www.2ser.com/programs/the-daily

07/08/2026

Security Brief picked up SAFE's story too, how 12 years of lived experience became a system built to catch the signals nobody caught for our founder Ruby O'Rourke .

Thank you Tech Day Australia for having the conversation about child safety this nation needs.

https://securitybrief.com.au/story/ruby-o-rourke-launches-safe-for-child-safety-in-australia

Rising scrutiny of child care providers is driving demand for earlier risk detection, as the platform logs everyday observations into patterns.

05/08/2026

Yesterday one of the country's most senior technology journalists David Swan wrote about SAFE in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age and we are extremely grateful.

The story asked the questions you would expect about privacy and consent. When a national audience is asking how children are kept safe, child safety is finally being treated as the national issue it is.

SAFE turns everyday observations, a bruise, a missed meal, a change in a child's behaviour, into an early signal that would otherwise stay fragmented and go unseen. That is the gap it fills.

SAFE produces a risk probability. A qualified child protection practitioner then interprets it and, where the threshold is met, guides the service through the mandatory reporting pathway. The inputs are human observations, the same as any child protection process. We spent 14 years training and testing SAFE before scaling it, because this is social health technology, not off-the-shelf software.

A NSW parliamentary inquiry this year recommended better intelligence-sharing between regulators, police and screening bodies so concerns about children are not lost between systems. That is the problem SAFE was built to solve.

How many more reports does it take? Across NSW, detectives receive 10 to 15 reports of child abuse every weekend, and almost 16,000 landed at the state's Joint Referral Unit this past year alone.

It is a financial case as well as a moral one. The Cost of Late Intervention report, from the Minderoo Foundation and The Front Project, puts what Australia spends fixing problems caught too late at $22.3 billion a year, with $10.2 billion of that in child protection alone. Late intervention costs children their childhoods, and it costs the country billions it could be spending on catching things early.

The signals in our founder Ruby O'Rourke's childhood were there the whole time, long before the violence escalated to a near-fatal assault. Neighbours, teachers, group leaders all saw something. Nobody connected it. Nobody came. That is the failure SAFE exists to fix.

Educators are the eyes and ears in every room and nothing replaces that. SAFE was built to support the people already doing that work, and to give them confidence that what they notice is recorded, connected and taken seriously.

Child safety should sit ahead of every other measure in every child-facing organisation in this country. Not alongside it. Ahead of it.

David Swan, thank you for putting this on the agenda.

https://www.smh.com.au/technology/red-flags-a-tech-company-claims-it-can-identify-australia-s-most-at-risk-children-20260731-p60kag.html

Ruby O’Rourke says every warning sign of her own abuse as a child had been missed. She spent 12 years building software so that won’t happen to the next child.

03/08/2026

This Early Learning Matters Week, we're asking a simple question: what comes first, curriculum or safety?

Psychologist Abraham Maslow named the order seventy years ago in his Hierarchy of Needs. Safety sits just above our most basic physical needs. Everything else, belonging, esteem, and eventually learning itself, is built on top of it.

Our new blog post explains why that order matters. It also shares what it means for adults who support children every day: https://ap1.hubs.ly/H0198Ck0



Early Childhood Australia - Queensland Early Childhood Australia NSW Branch Early Learning and Care Council of Australia