Creating a Safeguarding Culture: Why Leadership and Governance Matter

We can all feel it: the weight of reform, the pressure to get it right, and the growing sense that this time, it has to be different.

Across the NDIS, aged care, and child and family services, leaders are carrying more responsibility than ever. The pressure is real, but so is the opportunity — not only to strengthen systems and processes, but to reshape culture in ways that make people genuinely safer.

The lessons we can’t ignore

The reviews of recent years have told us a consistent story. The NDIS Review found systems fragmented and reactive, too focused on compliance instead of trust and inclusion. The Aged Care Royal Commission showed what happens when governance fails and the consequences are personal. The NSW Review into Out-of-Home Care revealed how children were moved without continuity or care, with oversight inconsistent at best.

And now, with the Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards (2025) placing ‘consumer voice’ and ‘governance’ at their core, and a new rights-based act. With the NDIS Review calling for stronger accountability at board level, the message is unmistakable: compliance alone was never going to keep people safe.

These weren’t simply policy failures. They were cultural ones. And culture doesn’t change with a new template or a ticked training record.

Why culture must lead

Safeguarding cannot be a document in a folder. It needs to be lived and visible every day in how decisions are made, in the tone of conversations between staff and clients, and how values are upheld when difficult choices are made.

Expectations on leaders are rising. Boards and executives are being asked to step into a role that goes well beyond oversight. They are being asked to create cultures where safety is experienced, not just reported. That is a significant shift, but it is also where meaningful safeguarding begins.

Compliance might ensure a policy exists or a module is completed. But safeguarding culture is about whether people feel safe to speak, whether they are believed when they raise concerns, and whether warning signs are noticed and acted upon before they become harm.

One you can audit. The other you can only experience.

What change looks like in practice

We’ve worked alongside boards and leadership teams navigating this shift in the middle of reforms, workforce shortages, financial pressure, and change fatigue. And we’ve seen what is possible when leaders take ownership.

A disability provider reframed its senior leadership meetings to include monthly safeguarding “deep dives.” Instead of simply reviewing incident reports, they reflected on near misses, staff concerns, and emerging patterns. The tone shifted from reporting to learning.

An aged care organisation redefined safeguarding as “upholding dignity.” That small change in language opened new conversations about consumer experience that compliance frameworks alone had never sparked.

A child and family service invited a young person with lived out-of-home care experience to join a governance subcommittee, not as a token voice but with voting rights. Their perspective redefined risk and reshaped the way safeguarding was understood.

Each of these organisations recognised something critical: safeguarding was not someone else’s job. It was theirs.

And these shifts reflect a broader direction. Regulators and funders are steadily moving towards measures that test culture through lived experience, not just audits. Boards will increasingly be asked not only what policies they have in place, but what safety actually feels like for the people they support.

The questions that matter now

In our work, we’ve seen the questions that separate compliance-driven organisations from those leading cultural change:

• Are we safe, or just compliant?

• Do we know what safety feels like for the people we support?

• Are we learning about risks early enough to act?

• Do people trust us enough to raise the hard things?

And then, beyond the basics:

• Do we have systems that enable learning, or just templates that record it?

• Are we creating environments where staff and clients believe they will be taken seriously?

• Where are the risks we are not yet seeing, and who could help us uncover them?

These are not abstract questions. They show up in how quickly staff escalate concerns, in how openly clients share feedback, and in whether boards hear the full story or the edited version.

Safeguarding, at its heart, is relational. It is about trust. It shows up in whether staff feel safe naming what worries them, in whether people who use services feel listened to, and in whether boards ask the uncomfortable questions before the regulator does.

Leading under pressure

We understand the reality of leading in reform conditions: stretched workforces, competing standards, financial constraints, and the fatigue that comes with constant change. In that context, it is tempting to retreat into compliance, because compliance feels tangible and measurable. But culture is what holds when systems bend.

Culture is what gives someone the courage to speak up instead of staying silent. It turns a code of conduct into lived values. It transforms a safeguarding breach into a moment of learning and growth.

And this is the gap: while leaders are being asked to carry more responsibility for safeguarding, most governance tools still measure compliance. Few boards have safeguarding dashboards, cultural indicators, or lived experience measures built into their oversight. That is the next frontier, and it is where leadership will determine whether reform translates into trust and safety on the ground.

Beyond compliance, towards trust

Reforms will keep coming, and they should. What will make them last is not the checklists we complete, but the cultures we create. When leaders embed safeguarding into governance, making it part of how decisions are made, how teams are led, and how accountability is shared, compliance becomes the starting point, not the end goal.

That is the shift that will define the next chapter for safeguarding in our sector. It is demanding, but it is also deeply possible. And it begins with leadership willing to go beyond compliance, towards a culture where people are safe, heard, and protected.