When the call came at 7pm on a Friday night, Sofie was told baby Lily needed a place to stay for the weekend. More than six months later, the child was still living with the Melbourne childcare worker who had first expected to look after her for two days.
The request landed only hours after a court decided Lily was too much at risk and removed her from her mother that morning. For Sofie, an early childhood educator at the Melbourne childcare centre, the ask sounded temporary at first. She said she told them, “I said, ‘no, we are not working here Saturday and Sunday’.”
The centre had already been drawn into Lily’s life before that Friday. Child protection had asked it to enrol the baby so daycare could provide stability while workers tried to support her mother. Lily had attended only a handful of days before the situation changed, and the weekend arrangement quickly became something else entirely. Sofie and the centre owner, Nina, agreed to care for the baby together on a 50-50 basis.
Nina said the immediate reaction was to help, not to debate the system around them. “At that moment, we just wanted to help the situation. We were saying: how about we do this together?” she said. “This is very short notice. The only way we can see this being done is we do this together, 50-50.”
What followed was a slow stretch of changing expectations. Sofie said the child protection worker first described the placement as something for the weekend, then maybe a week, and then maybe a month. “Like babysitting, you know?” she said. “Then when they start getting my details, they’re saying, ‘but maybe it will be a week’,” and then, after Nina asked again, “but maybe it will be a month’.”
The gap between what was said on that Friday night and what happened next is the part that makes the case land. The arrangement that began as an emergency placement stretched into more than six months, leaving a childcare worker in Melbourne caring for a baby whose future was still unresolved. Sofie said the responsibility was heavy, but she did not walk away. “It’s a big responsibility, but if she has nowhere to go,” she said.
That is what gives this case its weight in Victoria’s child protection system. A child removed by court order in the morning ended the day in the care of a childcare worker who had been asked to cover a weekend. More than six months later, the story had still not settled into a clear long-term answer, and the records here do not say what formal placement, if any, was finally put in place for Lily. That unanswered point is now the one that matters most.
