Child care centre fined after child locked on bus

A CHILD care provider in Perth has been fined $15,000 after a five-year-old girl was left alone in a locked bus for up to 15 minutes.

The State Administrative Tribunal also ordered the Helping Hands Network to pay $2000 in costs over the May 2019 incident.

The WA Department of Communities said the bus had been used to transport children from some pre-primary and kindergarten sites to its service at Inglewood Primary School.

A parent from the school saw the girl and unsuccessfully tried to open the doors before an educator opened the bus.

It is the seventh time such an incident has been brought to the SAT in WA since 2016 and follows the recent death of a child left on a bus in Queensland.

In a separate incident, Goodstart Early Learning in Bunbury, in WA’s south, was fined $10,000 plus $2000 in legal costs after a three-year-old boy left unnoticed and walked alone to his mother’s house in September last year.

Earlier that day, an educator had seen him trying to climb the perimeter fence but staff did not notice the boy was missing until his mother brought him back.

“When parents place their children in the care of a child care service, they expect the safety of their children to be the priority for that service,” the department’s assistant director general Brad Jolly said in a statement on Wednesday.

“All providers should review their practices around children in their care being properly accounted for at all times.”