The past year has brought the biggest shake-up to child safety in early learning in a decade — new funding powers, a national worker register, device rules and a strengthened National Quality Framework. Here's a calm rundown of what changed and what your service needs ready.
The Accorda Team · 24 July 2026
If you run or manage an early learning service, the last twelve months have probably felt relentless. New laws, new rules, new registers, and a steady drumbeat of headlines. It is a lot to hold in your head while you are also rostering staff, reassuring families, and keeping the room running.
Here is the reassuring part. When you strip the reforms back, almost all of them ask for the same thing: that you can show, quickly and on request, that your service is safe and that you can prove it. Not new heroics — just your existing good practice, written down, kept current, and easy to produce. This article walks through what has actually changed and what to have ready, in plain English.
The reforms come from several places at once — the Commonwealth, the states and territories, and the National Quality Framework (NQF) — which is part of why it has felt like so much. Here are the pieces that matter most.
The biggest shift is a new Commonwealth law: the Early Childhood Education and Care (Strengthening Regulation of Early Education) Act 2025. It gives the government stronger power to act on safety through the Child Care Subsidy — including refusing or cancelling a service's access to subsidy where it does not meet safety and quality expectations, taking a provider's compliance history and incident notifications into account, and allowing authorised officers to enter a service to monitor compliance without prior notice.
In practical terms, safety and your funding are now connected in a way they were not before. Your compliance record is no longer a filing-cabinet formality; it is part of how your service is assessed.
From 1 September 2025, states moved to ban or restrict staff using personal mobile phones and other image-capable devices while they are directly supervising children. Alongside this, a National Model Code and guidelines set expectations for how services take, store and handle images of children.
This one is straightforward but worth getting right in writing: a clear personal-device and photography policy, so every educator knows what is and is not allowed, and can sign to say they have read it.
A new national register for early childhood workers is being built to give regulators clear visibility of who is working in the sector and where. Testing began in December 2025, with national rollout from February 2026. It is designed to track identity, qualifications and Working With Children Check (WWCC) status.
The message for services is simple: your record of who is screened, qualified and in-date needs to be accurate and current, because it will increasingly be visible beyond your own walls.
Changes to the NQF are commencing in stages — some from 1 September 2025 and more from 1 January 2026. Among them: child safety is being made a paramount consideration under the National Law, there are tighter requirements around Working With Children Checks and notifying regulators of changes, a new "inappropriate conduct" offence, expanded oversight (including for family day care), and stronger regulatory powers. Maximum penalties for the most serious breaches have also increased.
The through-line across every one of these reforms is the same: safety is now something you are expected to demonstrate on demand, not just assert.
Two changes shift the day-to-day feel. From 1 September 2025, more information about services — including inspection dates, conditions, breaches and enforcement actions — is being published on the national StartingBlocks website. And unannounced spot checks began rolling out from November 2025.
Put together, that means the window to "get ready before the assessor comes" is closing. The services that cope best are the ones that are simply ready all the time.
None of this requires you to reinvent how you care for children. What it changes is the standard of evidence. Regulators, families and funding now all lean on the same question: can you show it?
That tends to surface in a few predictable places:
Policies that are current and understood. A child safe environment policy, a personal-device and image policy, a code of conduct — not just written, but read and signed by every staff member, with a record of who signed and when.
Incidents captured and notified on time. With safety tied to funding and a new inappropriate-conduct offence, how you record concerns and meet your notification obligations matters more than ever.
Screening that is accurate and in-date. Every educator's WWCC valid before they start and monitored for expiry — the exact information the new worker register is built around.
Evidence you can produce quickly. With unannounced checks, the ability to pull the right records in minutes rather than days is the difference between a calm visit and a scramble.
If you want a short readiness list to work through, it looks like this. Make sure your child safety, device and conduct policies reflect the current rules and that every staff member has signed off on the latest version. Tighten how incidents and concerns are logged so nothing slips and notifications go out inside the required timeframes. Keep a live register of every worker's WWCC and qualifications, with early warnings before anything lapses. And make sure that, at any moment, you could hand an assessor a clean, dated pack of the evidence behind all of it.
If that sounds like a lot to keep in spreadsheets and email folders, that is the honest problem most services are wrestling with right now.
This is the gap Accorda is built to close for care and regulated providers, including early learning services. Policy management with staff sign-offs keeps your child safe, device and conduct policies in one place and gives you a dated record of who has read and agreed to each version. Incident reporting with reportable-incident detection helps you capture concerns properly and flags the ones that carry notification obligations, so a deadline is far less likely to be missed. The credentials and licence register tracks every worker's WWCC and qualifications and warns you before they expire — the same information the new national register turns on. Regulatory Radar watches for changes like these NQF updates and flags which of your policies they touch, so keeping current is a prompt rather than a research project. And when an unannounced check lands, one-click audit evidence packs let you produce the proof calmly instead of scrambling.
None of this replaces good judgement or the relationships you build with families. It just means the evidence side — the part these reforms have made unavoidable — is handled, so you can spend your attention where it belongs.
The reforms are significant, but they are not a trap. They reward services that are quietly organised: current policies, tidy records, screened staff, and the ability to show it. Get those foundations in place and 2026 becomes far less daunting than the headlines suggest.
If you would like to see how Accorda keeps your policies, incidents and staff credentials audit-ready in one place, book a look at accorda.com.au.
Quality and safety — Australian Government Department of Education
NQF child safety changes from 1 September 2025 and 1 January 2026 — ACECQA
This article is general information only, current as at July 2026, and is not legal or compliance advice. Regulatory requirements can change.
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