Back to basics: Championing paper-based documentation in a digitally cautious sector

Recent policy shifts, including the National Model Code for Taking Images and Videos of Children, ACECQA’s 2025 Policy Guidelines: Safe Use of Digital Technologies and Online Environments, and the eSafety Commissioner’s Early Years Program, reflect a growing movement within Australia’s Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) sector: a push to reassess the role of digital tools in children’s learning environments.

Growing concerns about digital safety, including heightened awareness of predatory risks, child image misuse, and lapses in supervision, are prompting educators to critically reflect on their documentation methods, with a renewed focus on ethical practice, child-safe alternatives, and educator presence. This scrutiny is not limited to technological systems but extends to the ethical choices underpinning how children’s voices, images, and learning stories are captured and shared. 

Reports from The Sector and recent reforms in jurisdictions such as South Australia and New South Wales reveal a sector-wide shift: a deepening recognition that “child-safe” approaches must go beyond physical protection to include digital safety and emotional wellbeing. The question now facing many educators is not just how to document, but why, for whom, and at what cost?

This moment invites early learning professionals to pause and ask: Is it time to challenge the long-held narrative of “out with the old and in with the new”? Could paper-based approaches to documentation, often dismissed in the digital era, hold fresh possibilities for supporting ethical pedagogy, strengthening educator presence, and empowering children as active co-constructors of meaning

Concerns with Digital Documentation

Digital documentation tools, such as apps and cloud-based portfolios, can offer convenience, aesthetic appeal, and perceived parental engagement. However, their use also introduces a range of vulnerabilities. Unregulated sharing of child images, the storage of sensitive content on personal devices, unclear consent pathways for families, and the potential for exposure to predatory behaviour through poorly secured applications reflect growing concerns regarding child safety in the ECEC sector.

National guidance such as the eSafety Commissioner’s Early Years Program, and ACECQA’s Policy Guidelines: Safe Use of Digital Technologies (2025), reflect a growing push for services to recalibrate their documentation practices. The emphasis is no longer on convenience alone, but on ethical and safe approaches that respect children’s rights and digital dignity.

As the eSafety Commissioner’s Early Years Program warns, when documentation is driven by compliance requirements or performance-based motives, rather than pedagogy or relationships, it can distort educators’ focus and their presence, distracting their attention toward screens and away from children. 

Research by Stratigos and Fenech (2021) cautions that when children are positioned as content to be captured and shared, rather than as active participants in meaning-making, documentation can become extractive. Instead, ethical practice demands that documentation be used to serve children, to empower and actively include them, not observe or assess them from a distance.

Ethical Alternatives: Reframing the Paper Toolkit 

Alternative paper-based methods and approaches to documenting children’s learning, such as journals, wall displays, and the Floorbooks Approach developed by Dr Claire Warden (1995), provide a valuable counterbalance to digital platforms. Rather than being considered basic or outdated, these tools should be recognised as dynamic ways to involve children and reflect real-time learning.

A study by Wang and Stratigos (2025) found that children were more likely to revisit and reflect on paper-based records than digital ones. These approaches are inherently more collaborative, inviting children to contribute drawings, annotations, and reflections. Unlike closed digital systems, physical materials are visible, re-visitable, and modifiable by both children and educators, making learning visible and participatory.

Moreover, these practices align with community-driven models of digital safety, which call for co-designed solutions that prioritise children’s rights and relational accountability. In this context, paper documentation is not regressive, it is responsive.

This reorientation aligns with Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, affirming children’s right to have a say in matters that affect them—including how their learning is captured and shared. It also echoes the National Principles for Child Safe Organisations, which urge early learning providers to ensure children are informed, involved, and empowered in safe and inclusive ways.

What Educators Can Do Now

1. Revisit your purpose
   Why do you document? For assessment? For families? For reflection? Reconnecting with purpose helps avoid “documenting for documentation’s sake.”
2. Minimise Image Reliance
   Prioritise drawings, transcripts, and story-based records. If photos are used, ensure they are printed and revisited with children in physical formats. Incorporate them into projects so documentation becomes interactive and meaningful rather than passive.
3. Use Documentation as a Relational Tool
   Make documentation a shared activity. Sit alongside children as they cut, paste, annotate and discuss the learning, and build a culture of mutual reflection. Use paper-based tools that children can see, touch, and actively contribute to — like Floorbooks, wall displays, and portfolios they help create and revisit.
4. Audit current practice and platforms
   What tools are being used? Are they secure, necessary, and child-centred? Ask: Who is this documentation for? Rebalance the purpose from parent-facing content to child-led inquiry.
5. Simplify and streamline
   Paper doesn’t have to be more time-consuming. Use templates, visual prompts, and collaborative tools to reduce duplication.
6. Focus on educator presence
   Choose documentation strategies that keep educators engaged in play, conversation, and co-learning — not on devices.
7. Review policies and training
   Ensure staff understand emerging digital safety requirements and feel confident implementing alternative documentation strategies.
8. Engage Families Differently
   Replace daily digital uploads with printed journals, group storytelling displays, or collaborative events where children lead the storytelling. Replace assumption that families want or need digital documentation with reflection and evaluation of what forms of communication are most meaningful to them.
9. Support Educator Confidence
   Build team capacity around ethical documentation through professional learning. Resources like those from The Sector can help guide teams in navigating safety-sensitive conversations and unpack the “who” and “why” of documentation.

Conclusion: Rethinking What Matters

As the ECEC sector strives toward safer, more accountable digital practices, it’s also an opportunity to reimagine documentation altogether. Paper-based tools, when used intentionally, can be ethical, empowering, and efficient, especially when children are at the heart of the process.

This isn’t about going backward. It’s about going forward with sensitivity and care.

Returning to paper-based documentation is not about rejecting digital tools entirely. It is about thoughtful integration of digital tools with paper-based alternatives, recognising when, how, and why certain each can support, not hinder, educator presence, children’s agency, and ethical practice. As the sector navigates complex reforms, the opportunity lies not in resisting change, but in thoughtfully rebalancing our practices to protect children and empower educators.

References
Alston, F. (2025, August 12). Strengthening child safety in ECEC: NSW Early Childhood Education available resources. The Sector. https://thesector.com.au/2025/08/12/strengthening-child-safety-in-ececnsw-early-childhood-education-available-resources/

Alston, F. (2025, August 7). ACECQA highlights resources to strengthen child safety and quality practice. The Sector. https://thesector.com.au/2025/08/07/acecqa-highlights-resources-to-strengthen-child-safety-and-quality-practice/

Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority. (2025). Policy guidelines: Safe use of digital technologies and online environments. https://www.acecqa.gov.au/sites/default/files/2025-07/PolicyGuidelines_SafeUseOfDigitalTechOnline_final.pdf

Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority. (2024). National Model Code for Taking Images or Videos of Children while Providing Early Childhood Education and Care. https://www.acecqa.gov.au/sites/default/files/2024-07/National%20Model%20Code%20Taking%20Images%20and%20Videos.pdf

Australian Government Department of Education. (2024). New guidance on using electronic devices in early childhood settings. https://www.education.gov.au/early-childhood/announcements/new-guidance-using-electronic-devices-early-childhood-settings

Australian Human Rights Commission. (2019). National Principles for Child Safe Organisations. https://childsafe.humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/2019-02/National_Principles_for_Child_Safe_Organisations2019.pdf

eSafety Commissioner. (2025). Early Years Program for Educators. https://www.esafety.gov.au/educators/early-years-program

Lucas, F. (2025, April 2). SA Government undertakes significant action to implement child protection reform. The Sector. Retrieved from https://thesector.com.au/2025/04/02/sa-government-undertakes-significant-action-to-implement-child-protection-reform/

Stratigos, T., & Fenech, M. (2020). Early childhood education and care in the app generation: Digital documentation, assessment for learning and parent communication. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 46(1), 19-31. https://doi.org/10.1177/1836939120979062 

United Nations. (1989). Convention on the Rights of the Child. Treaty Series, 1577, 3. https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-rights-child

Wang, Q., & Stratigos, T. L. (2025). Assessment as Learning in Practice: Children’s and Educators’ Views on Digital and Paper Documentation. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/18369391251358015

Warden, C. (1995). Talking and thinking floorbooks: An approach to consultation, observation, planning and assessment in children’s learning (3rd Rev. ed.). Mindstretchers.