Walk into many early childhood services today and you will see signs of Aboriginal culture.
The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags might be displayed at the entrance. There may be Aboriginal-authored children’s books on the shelf, puzzles featuring Australian animals, artworks on the walls, an Acknowledgement of Country near the sign-in area and perhaps a carefully curated collection of resources.
These things matter. Representation matters. Visibility matters.
But cultural visibility and cultural safety are not the same thing.
A service can look culturally inclusive and still feel culturally unsafe to an Aboriginal child or family.
And perhaps the most important question we can ask ourselves is:
Who gets to decide whether our service is culturally safe?
Cultural safety is experienced, not declared
Recently, while attending the TIPIAC Riley Callie First Nations Conference in Brisbane, I attended a session presented by Rachel Phelps on cultural safety.
One statement particularly stayed with me:
“Cultural safety is experienced, not declared.”
That distinction is powerful.
We can write cultural safety into our philosophy. We can include it in our RAP. We can tell families during orientation that our service is inclusive and welcoming.
But none of those things, on their own, make a service culturally safe.
Rachel challenged us to consider cultural safety from the perspective of the people experiencing the service.
Do Aboriginal children and families feel respected?
Do they feel heard and believed?
Do they feel safe when they raise a concern?
Do the systems within the service protect their dignity and belonging?
Because, as Rachel pointed out, the deeper test is often how an organisation responds when something becomes difficult.
That is where cultural safety moves beyond what is hanging on the wall and becomes embedded in relationships, systems and everyday practice.
What does cultural unsafety actually look like?
One of the things I appreciated about Rachel’s presentation was that cultural unsafety wasn’t positioned only as something dramatic or overt.
Sometimes it is quiet.
Sometimes it is embedded within everyday practice.
It might look like asking the one Aboriginal educator or family to speak on behalf of all Aboriginal people.
It might be treating an incident of racism as an ordinary interpersonal conflict.
It might be only contacting an Aboriginal family when there is a problem.
It might be describing a family as “disengaged” without considering the historical, cultural or relational context influencing their engagement.
It might be trying to understand a child’s behaviour without understanding what is happening around that child.
It might be placing responsibility for Aboriginal perspectives, community relationships and cultural events onto the Aboriginal staff member.
Or it might sound like:
“We treat everyone the same.”
Equality can sound fair, but treating everyone identically can ignore different histories, experiences, cultural identities and barriers.
Rachel made another point that I think is particularly relevant to early childhood settings:
The issue is often not one sentence. It is the pattern people experience.
That pattern builds a message.
Do I belong here?
Can I trust these people?
Will I be believed?
Can I disagree?
Can I tell you when something doesn’t feel right?
Will you become defensive?
Will my child be seen through a strengths-based lens?
And importantly: what happens to our relationship when things become uncomfortable?
I have experienced this from the other side of the enrolment form
Choosing an early learning service for my own children was something I had dreaded.
After working in early childhood for so many years, I had incredibly high expectations. In some ways, I knew too much. I knew what wonderful early childhood education could look like, but I also knew how easily families could be misunderstood, labelled or dismissed.
So trust wasn’t something I automatically gave because a service told me it was welcoming.
It had to develop.
With my daughter’s educators, that happened slowly through hundreds of seemingly small interactions.
It was the thoughtful greetings in the morning.
It was the feedback I received about her day.
It was educators knowing the little things about her.
It was watching my daughter develop a sense of security within the environment.
It was seeing the joy with which she went to preschool.
Most importantly, I could see that she had developed warm, loving and genuine connections with the people caring for her.
None of those things would necessarily appear in a cultural safety policy.
But I could feel them.
And so could she.
Then the relationship was tested
Eventually our family needed more from our educators than warm greetings at the door.
They supported me through the process of seeking an AuDHD diagnosis for my daughter and, later, through a period of significant family trauma.
This was where the relationship that had been built through all those smaller interactions really mattered.
Their openness mattered.
Their warmth mattered.
Their flexibility mattered.
Their willingness to listen mattered.
And their lack of judgement mattered enormously.
They didn’t need to know every detail of what was happening in our family to respond compassionately.
They didn’t immediately interpret behaviour as a problem to be corrected.
They didn’t position me as a difficult parent because I needed something different.
They listened.
They adapted.
They worked alongside me.
And this brings me back to Rachel’s statement: cultural safety is a felt experience.
I knew how safe the relationship was because I experienced what happened when I needed to be vulnerable within it.
Safety is relational
Rachel’s presentation identified six core principles for cultural safety: Country, History, Safety, Relationships, Strengths and Voice.
Together they offer a much richer understanding of cultural safety than simply increasing Aboriginal representation within an environment.
Country asks us to recognise connection, place, kinship and identity.
History requires us to understand colonisation, institutional harm and intergenerational trauma rather than viewing today’s relationships with institutions in isolation.
Safety asks whether Aboriginal people actually experience an environment as respectful.
Relationships require trust, consistency and accountability.
Strengths shift us away from deficit narratives and towards resilience, culture and community knowledge.
And Voice means genuinely listening to Aboriginal children, families and communities.
These principles also remind us why cultural safety cannot be achieved through a shopping list.
You cannot purchase relationships.
You cannot display accountability.
You cannot laminate trust.
And you cannot put an Aboriginal artwork on the wall and assume that the people walking past it feel culturally safe.
What happens when a family raises racism?
Rachel also introduced a useful framework called SPEAK, encouraging professionals to:
S – Slow down
P – Position and power
E – Examine assumptions
A – Acknowledge and act
K – Keep the relationship
Imagine, for example, that an Aboriginal parent tells an educator that their child has experienced racism.
An unsafe response might minimise what happened, become defensive, immediately explain the other child’s intention or treat the situation simply as two children having a disagreement.
A culturally safer response begins differently:
Thank you for telling me. I want to understand what happened, how it affected your child and what they need to feel safe.
The educator doesn’t have to have every answer immediately.
What matters is that the harm is acknowledged, the child’s dignity is protected, action follows and communication continues.
As Rachel described it, a safer response names harm, protects dignity and keeps the relationship open.
That last part is important.
Cultural safety doesn’t mean never getting anything wrong.
It means developing relationships and systems capable of responding when we do.
So, look around your service
Absolutely display the flags.
Read books by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors.
Purchase authentic resources.
Engage Aboriginal artists.
Embed Aboriginal perspectives throughout your curriculum.
Connect children with Country.
Develop relationships with your local Aboriginal community.
All of this contributes to an environment where Aboriginal culture is visible, valued and normalised.
But don’t stop there.
Look beyond what Aboriginal families can see when they walk through your door and begin asking what they experience once they are inside.
Who is contacted when there is a problem?
Whose knowledge is valued?
Who carries the cultural load?
How are Aboriginal children’s behaviours interpreted?
What assumptions are made about families?
How comfortable is an Aboriginal parent disagreeing with an educator or director?
What happens when racism is identified?
What happens when a family is struggling?
Does your service become defensive when challenged, or curious?
And perhaps the biggest question of all:
Have we decided that we are culturally safe, or have Aboriginal children, families, educators and community actually experienced us that way?
Because cultural visibility is something a service can create.
Cultural safety is something Aboriginal people experience.
And they are ultimately the ones who get to tell us whether it exists.
