A daunting experience involving a child care centre and a dislocated elbow that occurred last August has motivated mother-of-two Stephanie Consiglio to take to Facebook and create an online group that reviews child care centres in.
The incident
Marco, Stephanie's husband, picked up his then-two-year-old daughter Amy from her child care centre, only to find her in pain and unable to move her arm.
"When Marco asked the centre if something had happened, no one seemed to know anything, and he was told that Amy was crying because she was tired," Stephanie said, saying that Marco asked them to check the CCTV camera and then immediately took his daughter to a health care centre, where she was found to have a dislocated elbow.
The following day, said Stephanie, the parents informed the playschool's principal of the injury to Amy's elbow and asked for updates regarding the CCTV footage to understand how the incident had occurred. "We honestly wanted to think it was an accident. We then informed more than one carer, as well as the principal, to take the necessary measures and not to grab Amy by her right arm because it was fragile," she said.
"When I picked her up later, a woman came out holding her by that injured arm," she said, adding that she "did not know anything about her arm as, apparently, a proper handover was not done," Stephanie continued.
CCTV footage
Stephanie and Marco's request to see the CCTV footage was also met with reluctance on the part of the principal. It then emerged that, from the footage, the principal could tell that "a carer grabbed her by her hand when they went to the play area and Amy did not want to go, so she pushed back, and that is probably when the arm became dislocated," said Stephanie, never having actually seen the footage.
When Stephanie insisted on seeing the CCTV footage, she said, the principal invented 'a thousand excuses', saying that he could not show the filming for data protection reasons, then claiming that the video had been deleted, as the "CCTV was on trial and they needed to replace the hard drive."
"If there's an incident recorded, you should make sure with your technician that you save that recording before changing the hard drive!" exclaimed Stephanie, recalling the situation.
At this point, Stephanie and Marco began to think that maybe it was more than just an accident. "Why did the centre not consider it necessary to keep such evidence in order to put our mind at rest and safeguard their reputation and that of their carers?" she asked.
When she asked who had been responsible for injuring her daughter, the principal told her to go to a lawyer, which she then did. As a result, and a fortnight after the incident, a call from her lawyer resulted in the principal suspending the carer who he deemed to be responsible. At this point Stephanie contacted the owners of the centre, who told her that she could bring her own technician to try to retrieve the video in question, "which by then was lost and/or deleted," she said.
To this day, Stephanie and Marco have still not seen the CCTV footage.
Contacting the authorities
Stephanie explained that, following the filing of a police report, and contacting the Education Department, she still did not manage to get a proper explanation of how the incident had happened or who had been responsible.
She said that when she asked for information regarding the police inquiry, the police told her she must file for a court case. However, Stephanie did not agree with the police's claim that it was a civil case rather than a criminal one.
"The Education Department told me that the principal had respected all policies and standards, and the only thing he had done wrong was to not give the incident report to me when it should have been given," she said.
Asked whether they found it suspicious that the video had been deleted after it had been watched by the principal, the Education Department told Stephanie and Marco that "centres are not obliged to have CCTV," according to Stephanie.
"However, regulations say that any recordings of incidents or accidents should be kept on file," argued Stephanie. "You are not obliged to have it," Stephanie repeated, "but if you do have it, you are required to keep it!"
She explained that, following the police report, the Education Department and the Child Commission did not wish to comment due to the ongoing inquiry.
Stephanie said she only received some answers recently – seven months later. "I had to involve lawyers and go further with the matter myself in order to get answers and, of course, everything comes at an expense." Under the Freedom of Information Act, she managed to obtain details of the communication between the police officer and the Principal, and the investigations carried out by the Principal himself with his staff, through emails and Facebook chat.
"It is like we are waiting for something tragic to happen to take action. It is very insulting for me that the authorities just saw it as an unfortunate incident. Really, doesn't the child care centre even get a warning?" she asked.
Creating a platform to share experiences
Since this experience, Stephanie tells how she began feeling uneasy about sending her daughter to playschool. She wanted to create a page to, firstly, find a place where she could send her daughter and, secondly, so that people could turn to it and suggest good child care centres as well as to make people aware of negative experiences in centres.
"There are good centres and bad ones. It is not that all centres are bad; bad incidents do happen but it is all about how these incidents are handled after they occur," Amy's father Marco told this newspaper.
The Facebook group, called 'Child Care Centres Malta. The Good and the Bad', which now has more than 2,000 members, is there to share experiences about different playschools and leave them open for playschool owners so that they can comment back. "We don't only want negative feedback but also positive feedback for people searching for good child care centres," said Stephanie.
Asked about the most common complaints that she hears, Stephanie said that one is that a child is bitten and the bites are unexplained. "If you see the photos, some of them are really bad," she said.
Stephanie said that she also gets many complaints about the way in which child carers shout at children, but she believes that perhaps the biggest concern is the child-to-carer ratio.
Child to carer ratio
"It's often the case that child care centres do not respect the ratio," said Stephanie. "I have a son who is seven and a daughter who is three, and when my son was in child care centres there was no government scheme." She went on to say that nowadays, if you are going to find a child care centre, you have to book at least one year in advance. "I don't think the government expected such a huge influx," she said.
Carer to child ratio policies say that for children aged up to 12 months, there should be no more than three children per carer. For children aged between 13 and 24 months, there should be no more than five children per carer and where children aged between 25 and 36 months are concerned, or for mixed aged groups, there should be no more than six children per carer. In such mixed age groups, however, there can only be one child under the age of 18 months.
"There are more working mothers, agreed, but no one thought about the subsequent consequences on the child care centres themselves," said Stephanie. She said it was her understanding that the current regulations for child care centres have been in place since before the government scheme. "They were written when there were many fewer working mothers. So if the ratio is, say, 1:6, at that time the child care centres probably had fewer than eight children booked in," she said.
The way forward
Stephanie believes that CCTV should be obligatory, and should be monitored not only by the child care centre, but also by an external body. "In Italy – and many other countries – such centres, including homes for the elderly, are obliged to keep such recordings and many things end up coming to light from these videos," she said.
She also suggested that perhaps another scheme could be implemented alongside the current one, which would encourage people to set up new centres and thus increase the number of child care centres in Malta.
Stephanie believes that there should be more regulation of the centres, more spot-checks where the centres are not advised beforehand, that the carer-to-child ratios should be reconsidered and standards should be checked regularly.
"Without tight regulation, some child care centres feel that if an incident happens, it's ok," she said, adding: "We're talking about children here, not toys!"
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