Sunrise host Matt Shirvington has confronted federal Education Minister Jason Clare over 37 childcare centres which have failed safety standards but which will stay open and operating for six months.

Clare said the 37 childcare centres will be given six months grace period in which to improve standards.

It comes as education ministers from across the nation meet in Sydney to discuss the unfolding crisis in the nation’s childcare centres.

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On Sunrise on Friday, Shirvington asked: “You have given them six months to improve. However, they’re still operating, aren’t they? Are you comfortable with that?”

Clare replied: “These 37 centres have been failing to meet the sort of safety and quality standards that we have expected (for) more than seven years.

“So, time after time regulators have told them that you are not meeting the standard and they have continued to not meet that standard. Now, what I have said is, if you don’t meet the standard we will shut you down.

“They have six months. They have informed the parents of the centres they’re subject to the new laws. They have six months to meet that standard or the funding cut will happen.”

CCTV, mobile phone bans, and a national register of childcare workers will be part of a new $189 million framework for childcare reforms. Clare said 300 centres would take place in the CCTV trial.

Shirvington quizzed Clare on the national register for childcare workers, saying currently a worker can fail a Working With Children Check in one state yet pass it in another.

“It’s one part of the puzzle. I don’t think anything is a silver bullet here. Work on (the register), if we get approval today, will start immediately,” Clare said.

“We’ve got to build that from scratch. We will have to pass laws to make it mandatory for centres to put the information in it.

“But we want to test and trial that by December of this year and have it rolling out from February of next year.

“The mobile phone ban is important. So is the training for all the educators, as well. The CCTV is part of it, as well. There’s not one single thing we need to do here. We need to do all of it.”

A national register would mean if a person was banned from working with children in one state, they would be banned from working in childcare nationally.

The federal government is set to table $189 million in funding over four years to tackle problems in the under-fire sector, describing it as the biggest child safety package the early learning sector has ever seen.

The $189 million package also includes about $20 million for mandatory childcare safety training for the entire national workforce.

Along with the training, Friday’s meeting is set to tackle more centre spot checks, a mobile phone ban and harsher penalties for breaches of standards.

It will also consider how parents can be given more information about the condition of childcare centres.

The meeting comes about a month after Melbourne childcare worker Joshua Dale Brown was charged with dozens of sex offences, including allegedly sexually abusing eight children.

Brown is known to have worked at 24 facilities between 2017 and the time of his arrest.

Early Childhood Education Minister Jess Walsh said state and federal governments would act “shoulder-to-shoulder” to make the sector safer.

Federal opposition education spokesman Jonno Duniam called for state and federal ministers to commit to measures “that will truly shift the dial in improving child safety”.

Clare said Australians have been sickened by the allegations which have surfaced over the past few months.

“I think every Australian gets it,” Clare said.

“Australians have been sickened ... and they expect us to act.

“Today’s meeting, as you rightly point out, is about the next step about a national educator register, so we can track people working from centre to centre and from state to state.

“National mandatory child safety training, so the people in our centres, the awesome people who work in our centres, who look after our kids, who educate our kids, have got the skills they need to be able to identify somebody who might be up to no good.”

— With AAP