By BEST Childcare Consulting
Starting November 2025, the Federal Government will significantly step up compliance monitoring, introducing an additional 1,600 unannounced spot checks every year across early childhood education and care (ECEC) services. This forms part of the Department of Education’s Joint Action on Child Safety, aimed at ensuring every service is meeting safety, quality, and governance requirements under the National Quality Framework (NQF).
For providers, this means being “audit ready” at all times — with current policies, staff records, attendance data, and safety procedures available for immediate inspection. The Education and Care Regulatory Unit (ECRU) has released updated compliance monitoring checklists (1 September 2025) for Long Day Care, OSHC, and Family Day Care services to help you prepare.
Additional unannounced spots checks
Starting from November 2025, the Federal Government will introduce an additional 1,600 unannounced spot checks per year in early childhood education and care (ECEC) services.
Department of Education – Joint Action on Child Safety
Resources you need to download today
ECRU NEW Compliance checklists for spot checks (as of 1 September 2025)
Long Day Care
Long day care compliance monitoring checklist (DOCX, 215.06KB)
Documents Required for Compliance Monitoring – LDC and OSHC (DOCX, 563.61KB)
Outside School Hours Care
OSHC compliance monitoring checklist (DOCX, 223.07KB)
Documents Required for Compliance Monitoring – LDC and OSHC (DOCX, 563.61KB)
Family Day Care
FDC Principal Office compliance monitoring checklist (DOCX, 217.04KB)
FDC Educator compliance checklist (DOCX, 227.44KB)
Compliance action to lift safety in child care
The federal government has taken a significant step toward raising safety standards in early childhood education by launching compliance actions against 30 long-underperforming centres. These actions, enabled by recent legislation, use funding as leverage to enforce improvements in safety and quality. Providers have tight timelines to inform parents and improve performance. The government maintains that the intent is to raise standards—not close centres—and is coordinating with state regulators to enforce the new measures while supporting the vast majority of providers who already meet expectations.
For the full media release 15 August 2025 from the Australian Government’s Ministers’ Media Centre:
https://ministers.education.gov.au/clare/compliance-action-lift-safety-child-care
Summary of Key Information
- Compliance action initiated: The Department of Education has launched compliance actions against 30 early childhood education and care (ECEC) services under newly enacted legislation.
- Focus on long-term underperformance: These services were identified for failing to meet the National Quality Standards (NQS)—particularly in areas related to child health and safety—for seven or more years, in collaboration with state and territory regulators.
- Not criminal prosecutions: These actions are administrative and relate to quality and safety standards—not criminal allegations, which are handled by state regulators and law enforcement.
- Power to enforce change through funding:
- Under the new laws passed weeks prior, the Commonwealth can now withhold Child Care Subsidy (CCS) funding from centres that fail to meet minimum safety and quality requirements.
- Affected services may have conditions placed on their CCS approval, or risk suspension or cancellation of their subsidy eligibility, depending on compliance.
- Urgent timelines imposed:
- Centres have 48 hours to notify parents of the compliance action.
- Centres have a window of up to six months to improve against NQS benchmarks, or face further consequences.
- Collaboration and next steps:
- The Commonwealth is working closely with state and territory regulators to support improvement.
- This is only the first phase of compliance activity—further actions will be published later.
- Government messaging:
- Minister for Education Jason Clare: “This is not about closing centres down, it’s about lifting standards up… Over the next six months, these centres will need to lift their game…”.
- Minister for Early Childhood Education Jess Walsh: Emphasised that most providers are “decent, dedicated professionals” and that regulators should work with non-compliant centres to bring them up to community standards.
- Upcoming discussions:
- Education ministers are scheduled to meet soon to discuss further safety improvements—such as establishing a national register of workers, exploring CCTV usage in centres, and mandating child safety training.
BEST Childcare Consulting
At BEST Childcare Consulting, we make sure your service is always prepared for unannounced visits. We help you stay confident, compliant, and ready to demonstrate quality practice — any day of the year.
Contact us today to schedule a readiness review and turn spot-check stress into an opportunity to showcase your commitment to children’s safety and wellbeing by setting up your system to be fully compliant with ECRU spot checks.
