AERO has named toilet learning as learning: ECEC now needs the practice to match

The Australian Education Research Organisation’s Early Childhood Learning Trajectories give the sector an evidence-based tool for observing and planning across five developmental domains. Read now, alongside the 2026 changes to the National Quality Standard, they bring into focus a milestone the sector has rarely treated as teaching at all. AERO maps the physical development trajectory to Quality Area 2, Children’s Health and Safety, and it is there, within that domain, that toilet learning quietly appears.

Once you see where it lives, it becomes difficult to keep regarding this milestone as a family matter alone, with services playing only a supporting role.

Where toilet learning sits in the framework

AERO divides physical development into four subdomains: gross motor skills, fine motor skills, sensory awareness, and physical health and self-care. The first three are familiar planning territory. The fourth, physical health and self-care, concerns children gaining independence in meeting their basic physical needs, including rest, activity, nutrition, safety and hygiene.

Within that subdomain are three strands. The third reads: take increasing care of their personal safety and hygiene. Its indicators describe a child who begins by depending on adults and participating in daily routines, progresses to participating in health and hygiene practices with toileting with help named explicitly, moves to following basic routines and managing simple risks, and finally manages daily health and hygiene confidently with increasing independence.

Read in sequence, those indicators describe a toilet learning trajectory: from dependence, to assisted participation, to routine, to independence. AERO has framed this as a capability that develops over time, with observable markers educators can notice, document and scaffold, in the same way they would for any other strand of learning.

Why the framing matters

For a long time, toilet learning has occupied an unusual position in early childhood education and care. It is developmentally significant. It takes up a real part of the day in any room with toddlers. Yet unlike the other capabilities educators scaffold deliberately, it has rarely been treated as something to teach. It has been left to happen to children, on a timeline set by families at home, while services change nappies and support children where they can. The intentional teaching the sector brings to language, to early numeracy, to social and emotional learning has seldom been extended to this milestone, not through any lack of will, but because educators were never trained to teach it and the sector never asked them to.

By placing toilet learning within physical development, AERO signals that it belongs alongside the motor and sensory skills educators already plan for intentionally. It is observable. It can be scaffolded. It has a place in documentation and in conversations with families about a child’s progress.

There is a developmental and demographic dimension to this as well. In the 1950s and 1960s, the average age of toilet independence sat at around 26 months, with 97% of children toilet independent by 36 months¹. More recent research presents a markedly later picture, with only 40 to 60% of children toilet independent by 36 months². The proportion of two- and three-year-olds attending formal care has risen substantially, with the Productivity Commission's RoGS 2026 reporting that 66.2% of two and three-year-olds now attend formal care, many for a substantial number of days each week, during precisely the window when this milestone unfolds.

Later initiation is also associated with poorer continence outcomes: research following children to school age has linked beginning toilet learning after 24 months with higher odds of persistent daytime wetting (Joinson et al. 2009)³. A systematic review and meta-analysis has associated later training with greater odds of lower urinary tract dysfunction, including overactive bladder and daytime incontinence (van Engelenburg-van Lonkhuyzen et al. 2020)⁴, and delayed bowel control has been associated with higher rates of functional constipation (Tabbers et al. 2014)⁵. The setting with the greatest opportunity to support toilet learning intentionally has often been the setting least equipped, structurally, to do so.

A tool for observation, not a method for practice

The trajectories are designed to support observation and planning, and they do this well. They give educators language for documentation, a way to identify the next step in a child’s development, and a shared vocabulary for discussing progress with families and colleagues. AERO is explicit that the trajectory is not a checklist, and that professional judgement remains central.

What the trajectories are not designed to do, by AERO’s own framing, is prescribe the practice that sits beneath each strand. They describe what progress looks like. They do not set out how a team should deliver it.

For most strands, that distinction causes little difficulty, because the underlying practices are already well established across the sector. Toilet learning is the exception. Here, the practice layer has never been consistently defined.

The trajectory describes what progress looks like. It does not, on its own, tell a room of educators how to teach this milestone through stories and play, or how to normalise body functions so that children feel safe rather than embarrassed. It does not specify how to respond consistently to an accident, so that a child meets the same calm, predictable response from every adult who supports them. It does not address how to recognise and respond to stool withholding, or to identify the constipation that frequently presents as behavioural refusal. It does not describe how to maintain consistency between the service and the family home, so that a child is not navigating one set of expectations during the week and another at the weekend.

This is not a shortcoming of the trajectories. It is a reminder that observation tools and practice frameworks do different jobs. The gap that becomes visible is not a gap in educator skill or commitment. It is the absence of a shared, whole-of-service approach to a milestone that has never had one. Without that shared approach, even highly capable educators are left to improvise, room by room and child by child.

An opening for the sector

Taken together with the 2026 reforms, the trajectories should be read as an opportunity, and as a prompt to act. AERO has named toilet learning as learning, situating it within a domain educators are already expected to observe and plan for. That recognition gives services a clear basis for treating the milestone with the same intentionality they bring to every other area of development.

The framing is now in place. What remains is a decision at the service level: to move toilet learning from something that is waited for to something that is taught, deliberately and consistently, with a shared approach across every room and a clear line of connection to the family home. The tools to do this well already exist. Services that choose to adopt a whole-of-service approach can give children an experience of this milestone marked by confidence, agency and independence, wherever they are enrolled.

The trajectories show the sector where children are heading. Choosing to build the path to get there is now within every service’s reach.

Monica Barker is the founder of My Binkie Bear and the creator of Go Time–Potty Time Early Learning, an evidence-based framework for toilet learning in early childhood settings. Drawing on developmental psychology, occupational therapy and the paediatric continence evidence base, her work reframes toilet learning as an area of intentional teaching rather than a task families manage and the centre merely supports. She is a passionate advocate for children’s agency and dignity in early learning.

References

1. Brazelton TB, A Child-Oriented Approach to Toilet Training, Pediatrics, 1962; historical completion data summarised in Blum NJ, Taubman B, Nemeth N, 2004.

2. Blum NJ, Taubman B, Nemeth N, Why Is Toilet Training Occurring at Older Ages? A Study of Factors Associated with Later Training, Journal of Pediatrics, 2004.

3. Joinson C, Heron J, von Gontard A, Butler U, Emond A, Golding J, A Prospective Study of Age at Initiation of Toilet Training and Subsequent Daytime Bladder Control in School-Age Children, Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, 2009.

4. Li X, Wen JG, Xie H, et al., Delayed Toilet Training Association with Pediatric Lower Urinary Tract Dysfunction: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis, Journal of Pediatric Urology, 16(3), 2020, 280-288.

5. Naenen L et al., Specific Behaviors of Young Healthy Children During Toilet Training and Their Associations With Functional Constipation: A Cohort Study, Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, 46(4), 2025, e383-e389.

6. Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO), Early Childhood Learning Trajectories: Physical Development, June 2023, last updated May 2026. Available at edresearch.edu.au.