The Early Childhood Legislation (Child Safety) Amendment Act 2025, which passed in late 2025, is delivering a significant overhaul of early childhood safety standards. At the centre of it sits a structural change to how the ECEC workforce is tracked and monitored nationally: the new National Early Childhood Worker Register.
Built and administered by the Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA), the Register is set to reshape the compliance obligations of approved providers, and the responsibilities of the HR, recruitment and people compliance teams who manage their workforces [2].
If your organisation operates an NQF-approved education and care service, this is a change you should start preparing for; by auditing your records, updating your processes and understanding your obligations. Most amendments under this reform package commenced on 27 February 2026, and ACECQA has indicated it will provide further detailed guidance in early 2026 [3].
What Is the National Early Childhood Worker Register?
The National Early Childhood Worker Register is a centralised, national workforce database being built by ACECQA within the existing National Quality Agenda IT System (NQA ITS), the same platform that the ECEC sector already uses for service management and regulatory reporting [2]. Its use by approved providers will be mandated through changes to the Education and Care Services National Law and the National Regulations [2].
According to ACECQA, the Register’s primary purpose is to give regulatory authorities better visibility of who is working in the sector and where [2]. In practical terms, it will enable regulators across all states and territories to monitor, identify and respond to risk regarding people working in education and care, with a level of national consistency that has never previously existed.
For HR and compliance managers, the most important thing to understand about how the Register works is this: approved providers are responsible for entering and maintaining all workforce information [2]. Individual educators, staff and volunteers will not be required to self-register or provide additional information beyond what they are already obligated to give to their employer. The accountability sits with the provider.
Who Must Be Included?
According to ACECQA, the information entered and maintained by approved providers must cover the full breadth of their workforce, including [2]:
- All educators
- Volunteers and students on placement
- Non-educator staff
- Teachers — regardless of whether they hold teacher registration or accreditation with a teacher registration body
- Nominated supervisors
- Coordinators
- Family Day Care (FDC) educator assistants
Note that adult residents of a Family Day Care residence are excluded from the National Register, as they are captured separately under regulation 153(1)(n) [2].
For HR teams managing large or complex ECEC workforces (particularly those with a significant casual, relief or volunteer component), this scope warrants careful review. If someone is engaged by or working in your service in any of the roles listed above, they must be represented in the Register.
What Information Must Be Recorded?
ACECQA has confirmed that the Register will capture the following information for each person within scope [3][4]:
- Identity: full name, date of birth, any aliases and/or former names
- Contact information: address, telephone number and email
- Place of employment: linked to service details, and residence/venue location for FDC services
- Employment dates: date of commencement and date of employment cessation
- Employment type: whether employed directly or indirectly (e.g. through a recruitment agency)
- Qualifications: relevant qualifications held, including whether the staff member is actively working towards a qualification or counted in ratios by virtue of a probationary period
- Training: approved training completed, including first aid training
- Clearance details: current Working with Children Check (WWCC), Working with Vulnerable Person Check (WWVP) or state equivalent — including the identifying number and expiry date; or, where applicable under state/territory legislation, teacher registration number and expiry date
It is important to note that the Register will record clearance details provided by the approved provider but will not independently verify an individual’s qualifications or WWCC/WWVP status [4]. This is why independent verification tools, such as those offered by Kinatico Compliance, remain an essential, complementary step in your pre-commencement screening process.
Critically, this is not new data. Approved providers are already required to collect and maintain this information under existing staffing and educator record obligations [2]. What the Register does is digitise it, centralise it, and make it accessible to regulatory authorities, transforming what has previously been an internal administrative function into a nationally visible compliance record.
This has significant implications for data quality. Errors, outdated entries or gaps in your current records become compliance failures when they sit inside a regulator-accessible national system. HR teams need to approach Register-readiness as a data quality project, not just a process update.
What About Victoria?
Victoria has moved ahead of the national framework with its own Early Childhood Workforce Register as part of its 2025 Child Safety Overhaul [5]. ACECQA is working to align the national Register with Victoria’s, though the details are still being finalised [4]. Victorian providers should monitor updates from both ACECQA and the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority (VECRA) — the new independent regulator operating since 1 January 2026 [5] — as further guidance is confirmed.
What HR and Compliance Teams Need to Do Right Now
- ACECQA has confirmed that approved providers will have a one-month transition period after the Register commenced on 27 February 2026 to update their records [3]. Approved providers must then update the Register within 14 days of a worker being employed, engaged or appointed, and within 14 days of becoming aware of any change to a worker’s information [3].
- Here are some suggestions for where to focus your energy now:
- Audit your existing workforce records against the full list of information fields required by the Register, and identify gaps
- Remediate data gaps before commencement — particularly WWCC/WWVP numbers, expiry dates, qualification records and email addresses
- Update your onboarding processes to capture all required Register fields at the point of engagement, before a worker starts
- Assign ongoing maintenance accountability — establish who is responsible for updating the Register when worker information changes
- Plan for the one-month transition period — treat it as a verification phase, not a starting point
- Stay close to ACECQA communications — the National Regulations are still being finalised, and further guidance is expected in early 2026 [3]
Built for What Comes Next: Ongoing Workforce Compliance with Kinatico Compliance
Kinatico Compliance is built for the ongoing, day-to-day challenge of keeping your entire workforce compliant in a regulatory environment that doesn’t stand still.
For ECEC providers preparing for the National Early Childhood Worker Register, that distinction matters. The Register is not a one-time data submission, it requires approved providers to maintain accurate, up-to-date records on every worker, with updates required within 14 days of any change to a worker’s information [3]. Managing that obligation manually, across a large or complex workforce, creates exactly the kind of administrative pressure that leads to compliance gaps.
Kinatico Compliance is designed to take that burden off your team. Key capabilities relevant to ECEC providers include:
- Continuous monitoring of WWCC. Rather than relying on your team to undertake periodic re-screening, Kinatico Compliance automatically monitors WWCC status and flags changes as they occur — including if a worker’s WWCC is revoked or expires. For the Register’s ongoing maintenance obligations, this kind of automated alerting is far more reliable than manual tracking.
- Centralised compliance visibility. Kinatico Compliance consolidates compliance data across your entire workforce: employees, casuals, contractors, volunteers and agency staff, into a single platform. For approved providers with multiple services or large teams, this means a clear, auditable compliance picture at all times, rather than information scattered across spreadsheets and individual service records.
- Custom activities for evidence collection. One of Kinatico Compliance’s most practical capabilities for ECEC providers is the ability to build custom activities that gather compliance evidence directly from your staff. Whether you need to collect copies of certifications, identity documents, qualification records or any other supporting documentation, custom activities allow you to configure exactly what you need, send it to the relevant workers, and capture responses in a centralised, auditable record. For approved providers preparing for the Register, where accuracy of workforce information is now a legal obligation, having a structured, repeatable mechanism to collect and verify that evidence is a significant operational advantage over manual processes.
- Custom training and information distribution. The same custom activity framework can be used to deliver training modules and information packages directly to your workforce. For ECEC providers required to ensure all staff, volunteers and students on placement complete mandatory child safety and child protection training under the new legislation [1], Kinatico Compliance provides a way to send, track and record completion of that training within the same system you use for compliance management. This means your training compliance sits alongside your screening and verification records, giving you a single, complete picture of workforce readiness rather than evidence spread across multiple systems.
Kinatico Compliance offers ECEC providers comprehensive workforce compliance solutions, helping you to keep pace with the Register and everything that comes after it. Talk to our team about which of our solutions may be right for you.
This article references information published by ACECQA. It is intended as general information only and does not constitute legal advice. Organisations should seek independent legal counsel regarding their specific compliance obligations.
References
- Department of Education, Australian Government. Landmark National Legislation Passed to Strengthen Child Safety in Early Education. https://www.education.gov.au/newsroom/articles/landmark-national-legislation-passed-strengthen-child-safety-early-education
- ACECQA. Early Childhood Worker Register. https://www.acecqa.gov.au/national-quality-framework/child-safety/early-childhood-worker-register
- ACECQA. Information Sheet — Early Childhood Worker Register. https://www.acecqa.gov.au/information-sheet-early-childhood-worker-register
- ACECQA. Child Safety — Changes to the National Quality Framework. https://www.acecqa.gov.au/child-safety-changes-national-quality-framework-strengthening-safety-education-and-care
- Russell Kennedy Lawyers. Incoming Overhaul of Child Safety — Changes to the Victorian Working with Children Check Scheme. https://www.russellkennedy.com.au/insights-events/insights/incoming-overhaul-of-child-safety-changes-to-the-victorian-working-with-children-check-scheme-commence
