The most intimate care practice in your service has no framework: the 2026 reforms just made that a Quality Area 2 question

What is the one developmental milestone your educators support every day that no framework has taught them how to teach?

For most services, the honest answer is toilet learning. We have frameworks for play, language, early numeracy, social and emotional development, for almost every domain of early childhood. Yet, for the most intimate and frequent care moment in the day, educators are largely left to improvise on instinct, on what a previous room leader did, on whatever little their own training covered.

This is not a failing of educators. It is a gap in what the sector has handed them.  As of 2026, that gap has quietly become a quality and safety question rather than simply a practical one.

Why this is now a Quality Area 2 conversation

From 1 January 2026, the National Quality Standard was refined to sharpen its focus on child safety, with changes concentrated in Quality Area 2 (Children's Health and Safety) and Quality Area 7 (Governance and Leadership). Element 2.2.3 was renamed Child Safety and Protection, making explicit that educators and staff understand their roles in keeping every child safe. A further tranche of National Law changes commenced on 27 February 2026.

Toilet learning sits squarely inside this. It involves a child's body, their privacy, their dignity, and a degree of adult assistance found almost nowhere else in the day. It is, by any reasonable reading, one of the most safety-sensitive practices a service delivers.

When an assessor now asks how your service ensures consistent, dignified, safe practice in toilet learning, “each educator manages it their own way” is no longer a comfortable answer. The reforms never named toilet learning. They did not need to. They raised the bar for documented, consistent, child-safe practice across the board, and exposed the one routine where most services have nothing documented to point to.

Why dignity is not a soft outcome

Erik Erikson named this stage more than sixty years ago: autonomy versus shame and doubt. Between roughly eighteen months and three years, children are working out whether they are capable and autonomous or dependent and doubtful, and toilet learning is the most repeated, most observable activity of that stage. The adult response in each moment either builds the child or quietly erodes them.

What activates shame is rarely dramatic. It is small, repeated and structural: a sigh when an accident is discovered, a clock-watch during a toilet visit, a hurried “quickly, we need to get outside”, a conversation about the accident conducted over the child's head. None of these reflects a careless educator.

They are what happens when skilled people work without shared language or pacing in a moment that asks a great deal of them. A framework is what removes the time pressure, standardises a calm response to accidents, and keeps the child an active participant in their own learning rather than a task to be completed.

Intentional toilet learning is not about pushing a child to perform earlier. It is the opposite: beginning the learning earlier, well before any outcome is expected, because readiness is built over months. It is a shared, documented approach every educator follows consistently, that protects dignity, responds to accidents without shame, and partners with families so home and room point the same way.

Relationships are the architecture of learning, a principle already at the heart of the EYLF and the NQS, and consistency is the hardest thing to hold across a team. The group setting also adds something with no equivalent at home, whether the bathroom culture is one of normalcy or embarrassment shapes far more than the single moment.

A documented framework turns good individual practice into reliable whole-service practice, relief and casual staff included. Dignity is not a nicety layered on the routine. It is the developmental work itself.

The gap is structural, not personal

It helps to understand why this gap exists. Toilet learning was historically a domestic task, owned by families and supported by the service. That made sense when most children reached the milestone at home. It no longer matches reality: on the Productivity Commission's figures, around two thirds of Australian two- and three-year-olds now attend early childhood education and care, many for substantial hours a week.

The milestone has moved into the service, but the framework to support it has not. So, educators inherited responsibility for something their training never prepared them for and their frameworks never described. The result is practice that varies room to room, a workload carried quietly by educators, and children who meet inconsistency exactly where they most need calm routine

The cost of getting the timing wrong

There is a developmental dimension too, and it is generational. In a study of over a thousand children trained in the 1950s, over 97 per cent had completed daytime toilet learning by 36 months; in recent studies, only 40 to 60 per cent complete by the same age (Blum, Taubman and Nemeth, 2004).

The same research names what sits behind later completion: a later start, stool toileting refusal, and frequent constipation. These are patterns a consistent, observant approach can notice early, and later completion is associated in the literature with continence difficulties that can persist into the school years.

A question worth sitting with

Children deserve to learn this milestone with the dignity, consistency and intentionality we bring to their language, their play and their friendships. They deserve a shared framework that protects them from shame, applied the same way by every educator and carried through to home, so the experience does not change shape depending on who supports them or where they are.

The 2026 reforms have made the case for us without naming toilet learning: they asked services to demonstrate consistent, documented, child-safe practice, and for most services’ toilet learning is where that question now lands hardest.

This gap has been there for decades, hiding in plain sight, easy to overlook while toilet learning was treated as someone else's job. It cannot be ignored now. So, it is worth asking, before an assessor asks first, in your service, who decides how this milestone is taught, and could you show them how?

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.