This article was last reviewed in June 2026. Child safety law is moving quickly across Australia. Queensland's standards reached churches in April 2026, and several states are still expanding their schemes. Always confirm the current requirements with your state or territory's child safe regulator before you act on what you read here.
Most small churches already know about the Working With Children Check. Fewer realise that screening the people who help is only half of what is now expected. A child and youth safety policy is the other half: the church's own written account of how it keeps young people safe. In most of Australia it is no longer optional. This article covers what that policy is, why your church needs one, what it should contain, and how a small or independent church can put one in place. It leaves the Working With Children Check itself, children's ministry curriculum, youth programs, and insurance to one side.
Why your church needs one
A child and youth safety policy is the church's standing promise that this is a safe place for young people, and a clear account of how that promise is kept. It is care first. It also happens to be the law. Following the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, every state and territory built its expectations on a shared national framework, the National Principles for Child Safe Organisations. Most states have since written those principles into law for organisations that work with children, churches included. Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory already require it, and from April 2026 Queensland's standards apply to churches as well.
The detail varies from state to state, but the direction is the same everywhere, and one point matters more than the variation. The obligation does not depend on size. A congregation of sixty is expected to have a policy in the same way a large church is, and so is an independent church with no denomination behind it. "We are too small" and "we know everyone here" are the very assumptions the Royal Commission found had let harm go unchecked. A written policy is the protection that does not rely on everyone simply being trustworthy.
What a good policy contains
The phrase "write a child safety policy" sounds heavier than the task really is, because a good policy is built from a known set of parts. You are adapting a credible model to your church, not starting from a blank page.
A complete policy usually covers:
a statement of commitment, signed by the church's leaders
a code of conduct for how adults behave around children and young people
recruitment and screening, including Working With Children Checks
supervision, including the practice of never leaving one adult alone with a child
responding to and reporting concerns or disclosures
risk management for activities, events and outings
record-keeping, training, and a date to review the policy
The code of conduct is the part your volunteers will actually live by, so it is worth making concrete. It is where the church sets out its expectations on one-to-one contact, appropriate and inappropriate physical contact, transport, photography, and private messaging or social media with young people. Written plainly, it protects children, and it protects good volunteers too, by making the boundaries clear before anyone has to guess.
Adapting it to your church, and your state
One part of the policy cannot be copied from a template: the reporting procedure. Mandatory reporting, the Reportable Conduct schemes, and the criminal offences for failing to report or protect a child all differ between states, and in several of them a church leader can be personally and criminally liable for staying silent about suspected abuse. Your policy has to name the right reporting bodies, thresholds and timeframes for your own state, not someone else's.
That makes the next step a simple one. Start with two places: your state or territory's child safe regulator, which you can find by searching your state or territory's name together with "child safe standards", and, if you belong to a denomination, its safe-ministry body. How much you write yourself depends on your tradition. In the Catholic and Anglican churches, much of the policy and code of conduct is set by the diocese or a national safeguarding body, and the parish's task is to adopt and apply it rather than draft its own. In a Baptist, Uniting, Pentecostal or independent church, the local congregation usually writes and owns the document. If your church stands on its own with no body behind it, the New South Wales Office of the Children's Guardian publishes a free guide written for faith-based organisations that is the most practical national starting point, whichever state you are in. For help adopting a policy and training people, the Safe Church Program run by the National Council of Churches in Australia is a cross-denominational place to begin. The National Office for Child Safety also offers a free policy template and example code of conduct you can adapt.
From there, the work is ordinary church governance. Have the policy formally approved or adopted wherever your structure puts that decision, whether that is a board, a church council, a parish council or an eldership, and record it in the minutes. Give a copy to everyone who works with children, paid or volunteer, and ask them to read it before they begin. Then put a date in the calendar, once a year as a sensible minimum, to read it again and keep it current. None of that takes an expert. It takes a church that has decided its young people are worth the trouble.