All staff in early childhood education and care (ECEC) play an important role in embedding child safe practice across their services.

The NSW Department of Education, as the regulatory authority (NSW Regulatory Authority) for the ECEC sector in NSW, has launched a Child Safety Regulatory Priority Program to support ECEC providers, services and educators to strengthen child safe practice and support to keep children safe and prevent harm and abuse.

About the Child Safety Regulatory Priority Program

From May 2025, the NSW Regulatory Authority’s Child Safety Regulatory Priority Program will focus on supporting providers, service leaders and educators to embed child safe culture, behaviours and practices in ECEC services, and compliance with child safety regulatory requirements.

The 12-month regulatory priority program will:

• provide extensive information, guidance and resources to the sector on child safety

• spotlight key practice areas associated with child safety in ECEC settings
  

• uplift and embed quality practices for the safety, health and wellbeing of children.

Child safety resources and guidance will be shared with the sector through the department’s communications channels including emails, newsletters, Facebook posts and events.

Monitoring and evaluation

A key component of the regulatory priority program is the regular monitoring and evaluation of services’ child safe practices.

As part of ongoing monitoring and compliance activities, authorised officers from the NSW Regulatory Authority will pay close attention to a service’s child safety policies, procedures and practices. This aims to ensure compliance with the National Law and Regulations and to provide services with targeted feedback and guidance around areas for improvement to protect the health, safety and wellbeing of children in their care.

Key priority themes

Child safety is a broad topic that covers many practice areas. The Child Safety Regulatory Priority Program will focus on 5 priority themes key to building a safe environment in ECEC and protecting children from harm and abuse.

1. Staffing and supervision

Staffing and supervision are essential components of ensuring children are safe in ECEC. This theme focuses on robust child safe recruitment and induction processes to ensure all staff in ECEC are suitable to work with children and understand their roles in keeping children safe.

It also highlights the importance of maintaining adequate supervision at all times, and how supervision requirements and educator-to-child ratios work together to create environments that focus on the needs, safety and wellbeing of children.

2. Reporting culture

Upholding a strong reporting culture is critical to safeguarding children. Additionally, it is against the law to fail to report child abuse.

This theme focuses on the responsibility all staff in ECEC services have to report allegations of abuse and what to do if they witness or suspect that a child is at risk of abuse, harm, neglect or ill-treatment.

It covers child protection awareness, ensuring staff can identify signs of grooming or harmful behaviours exhibited towards children. It also focuses on the importance of having clear policies and procedures in place.

3. Safe physical environments

Safe physical environments are critical to protecting children from harm and ensuring their wellbeing in ECEC.

This theme looks at the importance of having premises and spaces that support adequate supervision and offer clear lines of sight at all times.

It also looks at the importance of effective risk management policies and procedures to identify and address potential hazards throughout the ECEC spaces, including in family day care services. Having effective risk management processes and practices in place reduce the likelihood of children being harmed or abused. By focusing on this theme, the program aims to increase ECEC services’ compliance in risk management and supervision practice.

4. Relationship with children

Building positive and respectful relationship with children is a key step in ensuring they feel safe.

This theme focuses on fostering supportive interactions with children and creating and maintaining environments where they feel safe, valued, understood and supported to learn. It emphasises the importance of using trauma-informed practices to recognise and respond to the emotional needs of children.

Theme 4 also aims to build awareness about appropriate interactions with children and what is considered an offence of inappropriate discipline under the National Law.

5. Child safe online environments

Creating child safe online environments is a key aspect of protecting children in the digital world. This theme focuses on promoting a child safe culture when it comes to taking, sharing and storing images or videos of children in ECEC settings, referencing the National Model Code. It aims to build awareness among educators and service providers about the potential risks and responsibilities involved in using digital media around children and provide services with regulatory knowledge and practical guidance on implementing a safe online environment for children.

Useful resources and support

The regulatory authority has worked with the NSW Office of the Children’s Guardian to develop a suite of resources to support services to understand and comply with the requirements of the Child Safe Standards. This includes Child Safe Early Childhood Education and Care e-learning modules with different pathways for centre-based services (such as long day care and preschools), outside school hours care and family day care.

Services are encouraged to engage with the 5 modules now available as part of their professional development and training. A final e-learning module, ‘Child safe leadership and policy creation’, will be available shortly.