NSW ramps up ECEC compliance: will stronger oversight build trust among families and the ECEC workforce?

The NSW Early Learning Commission has launched a statewide compliance “blitz”, signalling a significant increase in regulatory activity since the Commission was established in December 2025.

Throughout September, authorised officers will conduct unannounced visits across metropolitan, regional and rural NSW to assess whether early childhood education and care (ECEC) providers are meeting strengthened child safety obligations under the National Law and Regulations.

The latest campaign follows more than 10,000 unannounced compliance and monitoring visits conducted across NSW during the previous financial year, the highest number recorded in the history of the state regulator.

It is the Commission’s third statewide compliance initiative and reinforces a clear message for approved providers: child safety must be embedded in everyday practice, not demonstrated only during scheduled assessments or through written policies.

However, the scale and language of the campaign also raise a broader question for the sector. Will increasingly intensive regulatory activity help services strengthen their practice, or could it add pressure and reinforce an “us and them” relationship between the regulator and those it oversees?

The statewide initiative will focus on several areas connected to the strengthened national and NSW child safety reforms, including:

• maintaining accurate and current staff records;
• completing and updating the National Early Childhood Worker Register;
• verifying and documenting Working with Children Check information;
• ensuring staff have completed and understood mandatory child safety training;
• meeting existing NSW child protection training requirements; and
• complying with restrictions on personal devices within education and care environments.

These priorities reflect an increased focus on workforce suitability, governance and the practical implementation of child safety measures.

The emphasis on whether staff understand their responsibilities is particularly important. It suggests officers will look beyond the existence of a certificate, register or policy and consider whether educators and leaders can explain their obligations and demonstrate how these requirements influence everyday practice.

The Commission said unannounced visits allow authorised officers to observe services under normal operating conditions, identify emerging risks and intervene before those risks result in harm.

This approach reflects the broader shift towards continuous compliance, under which providers must demonstrate that policies, procedures and training are consistently translated into practice.

NSW Early Learning Commissioner Daryl Currie said child safety could not be treated as a requirement checked only periodically.

“Child safety isn’t something that can be checked once a year; it must be part of every decision, every process and every interaction within an early learning service,” Mr Currie said.

“Unannounced visits allow us to see how services operate day-to-day, identify any emerging risks and intervene early where improvements are needed.”

The Commission said it has worked extensively with the sector throughout 2026 to support providers to understand and implement the strengthened requirements.

While education and guidance remain part of the regulatory approach, the Commission has also made clear that it may use its full range of enforcement powers where serious risks to children are identified.

Stronger regulatory oversight can deliver clear benefits for children, families and the broader ECEC sector.

Unannounced visits may identify gaps that are less visible during scheduled assessments, particularly where written policies are not consistently followed. Increased scrutiny may also prompt providers to verify staff information, strengthen internal monitoring and address unsafe practices before an incident occurs.

A visible regulatory presence can reinforce shared expectations and give families greater confidence that child safety obligations are being actively monitored.

The focus on workforce records, mandatory training and personal devices may also help services translate recent legislative changes into consistent operational practice. Where visits include clear guidance and proportionate responses, they could help providers identify weaknesses and better understand what compliance looks like in practice.

Effective regulation also supports the many providers already investing in robust child safety systems by ensuring comparable expectations apply across the sector.

These potential benefits sit alongside practical concerns for providers and educators.

ECEC services are implementing multiple reforms while managing workforce shortages, qualification requirements, staff absences, administrative workloads and increasing community expectations.

Maintaining registers, verifying credentials, documenting training and monitoring devices are important safeguards. Each requirement, however, also requires time, systems and management oversight.

The cumulative impact may be felt most strongly by small, standalone, regional and remote services with limited administrative capacity.

Regulatory scrutiny may identify where practice is falling short, but it cannot independently resolve all the underlying factors that can contribute to non-compliance. Workforce shortages, educator fatigue, high turnover, inconsistent leadership capability and limited access to qualified staff can all affect a service’s ability to implement requirements reliably.

This does not diminish the importance of accountability. Rather, it highlights the need for enforcement, education and sector capacity-building to operate together.

The language used to describe regulatory activity may also influence how it is received by the sector.

“Compliance blitz” communicates urgency and sends a strong public message that shortcomings will be taken seriously. In the context of child safety, this visibility may reassure families and demonstrate the regulator’s willingness to act.

However, the term can also carry adversarial connotations. It may evoke an enforcement operation designed to catch services doing the wrong thing, potentially positioning the regulator and the regulated sector on opposing sides.

That distinction matters because effective child safety regulation depends on more than inspections and enforcement. It also requires services to feel able to seek clarification, report emerging concerns and acknowledge gaps before they result in harm.

Alternative language such as “statewide child safety assurance initiative”, “targeted compliance campaign” or “compliance and support program” would not necessarily weaken the regulator’s authority. It could instead signal that accountability, education and continuous improvement are intended to work together.

At the same time, changing terminology alone will not build trust if regulatory activity is experienced as inconsistent, unnecessarily punitive or disconnected from the realities of operating a service.

Likewise, collaborative language must not minimise serious non-compliance or weaken accountability where children are placed at risk.

The challenge is to communicate strong regulatory oversight in a way that keeps children’s rights, safety and wellbeing at the centre without implying that every provider and educator is a potential offender. A mature regulatory relationship should allow scrutiny, transparency and partnership to coexist.

The success of the statewide campaign will ultimately depend on whether it produces sustained improvements in children’s safety rather than a temporary increase in compliance activity.

Important considerations will include:

• whether regulatory expectations are communicated clearly and consistently;
• whether responses are proportionate to the nature and seriousness of identified risks;
• whether services receive practical guidance to address non-compliance;
• whether recurring issues are used to inform future education and support;
• whether systemic pressures contributing to non-compliance are recognised; and
• whether the campaign leads to measurable improvements in everyday practice.

For providers, the initiative is a reminder that documentation alone will not demonstrate compliance. Policies, registers and training records must be current, understood by staff and reflected in the way each service operates.

Services should be able to demonstrate that workforce records are accurate, WWCC details have been verified, mandatory training is complete and personal devices are managed in accordance with the strengthened requirements.

More importantly, educators and leaders must be able to show how these systems actively contribute to a child safe culture.

The NSW Early Learning Commission will release the outcomes of the statewide initiative once the campaign has concluded.

Those findings will provide an opportunity to examine the types of non-compliance identified and whether the strengthened regulatory approach is helping providers build safer and more consistent practice.

For families, the campaign is intended to strengthen confidence that children are receiving education and care in safe, high-quality environments.

For providers and educators, it represents both increased scrutiny and an opportunity to test whether recent reforms have moved beyond policies and training records to become embedded in everyday practice.

The question is not simply whether the sector needs strong regulation, it does, but whether regulatory activity is communicated and implemented in a way that combines accountability with trust, guidance and capability-building.

Moving away from language that reinforces an “us and them” mentality may be one small but meaningful step towards a more mature regulatory relationship, provided the commitment to children’s safety remains uncompromised.

Read the full NSW Government News release here.