CHILDCARE & EARLY LEARNING
An allegation is raised at 4pm on a Friday. The notification is due in 24 hours, not seven days.
The timeframe dropped from seven days to 24 hours on 1 September 2025, and every maximum penalty under the National Law tripled on 2 January 2026. Operating without approval moved from $114,900 to $344,700 for a body corporate. In Victoria a provider with 25 or more services now faces up to $1,034,100.
Regulator: State or territory regulatory authority (National Quality Framework) · 6 obligations already in force
What it watches
Notification clocks per incident, prescribed child protection and child safety training per person with its expiry, Working With Children Check status per worker, the digital technology and image policy with its version and review date.
How it runs today
Training certificates sit in a filing cabinet and a shared drive, and whose check lapsed last month is a question nobody asks until someone asks it.
The obligations, and where each one stands
Every row cites its primary source. Dates are commencement dates, not predictions. Anything still before Parliament is marked as such and carries no countdown.
24-hour notification of physical or sexual abuse
From 1 September 2025 an approved provider has 24 hours, down from 7 days, to notify the regulatory authority of any incident or allegation of physical or sexual abuse of a child while being educated or cared for by the service. The clock starts when the provider becomes aware.
Exposure: $13,500 individual; $68,700 body corporate (National Law s174(1), from 2 January 2026)
Source: Education and Care Services National Regulations regs 175-176; ACECQA — Information sheet: NQF child safety changes (August 2025) · Enforced by: State or territory regulatory authority (National Quality Framework)
Digital technology and image policy
Regulation 168 requires a policy and procedures for the safe use of digital technologies and online environments: how images and video of children are captured, used, stored and destroyed, what parents authorised, where optical surveillance devices sit, which service-issued devices staff may use, and children's own device use. It is a named policy with named required contents, which means a version, a review date and a person who owns it.
Source: Education and Care Services National Regulations reg 168; ACECQA — Information sheet: NQF child safety changes (August 2025) · Enforced by: State or territory regulatory authority (National Quality Framework)
National Quality Framework maximum penalties tripled
Every maximum penalty under the Education and Care Services National Law tripled on 2 January 2026. Operating a service without approval moved from $114,900 to $344,700 for a body corporate and from $22,900 to $68,700 for an individual. In Victoria a provider with 25 or more services faces up to $1,034,100 for the most serious offences, and may not hold insurance indemnifying itself or its staff against one of these penalties.
Exposure: $344,700 body corporate for the most serious offences, up from $114,900; $1,034,100 in Victoria for a provider with 25 or more services
Source: Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Act 2025 (Vic) No. 53 of 2025, s2(2) and Part 3 ss13-77, Part 5 Division 2; corroborated by VECRA and Queensland Early Childhood · Enforced by: State or territory regulatory authority (National Quality Framework)
Payday Super
Super is paid on every payday rather than quarterly, and the contribution has to reach the employee's fund within 7 business days of payday. Some exceptions apply, including for new employees. Every pay run is now its own compliance event with its own clock.
Source: ato.gov.au — About Payday Super (last updated 10 August 2026) · Enforced by: Australian Taxation Office
APP 1.7 — automated decision disclosure
If a computer program uses personal information to make, or do something substantially and directly related to making, a decision that could reasonably be expected to significantly affect someone's rights or interests, the privacy policy has to say so — naming the kinds of personal information used and the kinds of decisions made.
Source: OAIC — APP Guidelines Chapter 1 (APP 1.7–1.9); Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2024 (Cth) · Enforced by: Office of the Australian Information Commissioner
Prescribed child protection and child safety training per person
Sections 162A and 162B require an approved provider to make sure every nominated supervisor, person in day-to-day charge, staff member, volunteer and person with management or control completes the prescribed child protection and child safety training within the prescribed period. The Act set 27 February 2026 as the latest possible commencement and both duties bind today. The evidence is a row per person with a completion date and an expiry, not a policy saying training happens.
Exposure: $6,600 individual; $34,200 body corporate
Source: Education and Care Services National Law ss162A and 162B, inserted by the Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Act 2025 (Vic) No. 53 of 2025 s78; commencement s2(3)-(4) · Enforced by: State or territory regulatory authority (National Quality Framework)
Working With Children Check before starting work
A person must hold a current Working With Children Check before they start work at a service, and any change in the status of that check has to be notified to the approved provider and to the regulatory authority. Approved services must also enter and maintain their workforce information in the national early childhood worker register so a regulatory authority can read it. The Act set 27 February 2026 as the latest possible commencement and both duties bind today.
Source: Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Act 2025 (Vic) No. 53 of 2025, Part 4; VECRA — Child safety reforms: national and Victoria-specific legislative changes; SA Education Standards Board — National Child Safety Reform and Regulatory Changes · Enforced by: State or territory regulatory authority (National Quality Framework)
AI that does the admin. Humans that do the decisions.
The agent tracks the notification clocks, holds training and Working With Children Check status per person with its expiry, and flags what is short while there is still time. It does not decide whether an allegation is notifiable, write the notification, or make a child safety judgement. Those stay with the approved provider and the nominated supervisor.
The guarantee
Audit-ready documentation within 30 days, measured against five acceptance tests we agree before the build starts. Miss them and we rebuild it. The obligation register we build is yours either way.
First install slots are open. Pricing is shared inside the diagnostic.
Questions operators ask
Our training records are in a filing cabinet. Where does the agent read them from?
Wherever they already are. The first week of the install builds the register from what exists: certificates, a spreadsheet, the rostering tool you already pay for. You do not tidy up first. The agent is what does the tidying.
Sections 162A and 162B talk about a prescribed period. How do you track that?
Per person, with an expiry. The duty is not that training happened once. It is that every nominated supervisor, person in day-to-day charge, staff member, volunteer and person with management or control completed it inside the prescribed period. That is a row per person with a date, which is exactly what the register is.
We run services in two states. Do the rules differ?
The National Quality Framework is applied law. Victoria hosts it and every state and territory applies it, so the core duties travel. Enforcement does not: you answer to your own state or territory regulatory authority, and Victoria has added penalties of its own for providers with 25 or more services. The register is national, the escalation is per jurisdiction.
Do you specialise in early learning?
We specialise in obligation tracking. Our sector depth is NDIS — 13 years between us. The mechanism is the same wherever there are obligations, evidence, deadlines and penalties. If you want a vendor with a decade of early learning war stories, we are not it, and we will say so on the call.
Find out what your register is missing before your regulator does.
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