In Focus

June 2025

Regulatory Spotlight

Policies and procedures: Not just a tick and flick

Your service has a whole range of policies and procedures, but are you confident that all staff understand their content and follow them correctly every day?

Staff training in policies and procedures, with regular updates and knowledge checks, are key systems of control for incident prevention and management, and should be a regulatory priority.

The Queensland Regulatory Authority have written an article, Policies and procedures: Not just a tick and flick sharing how approved providers and educators successfully implement this regulatory priority.

Dr Ros Sambell, Senior Lecturer from the School of Medical and Health Services at Edith Cowan University and her team are undertaking a study to co-design a Best Practice Guide for Food Environments in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) services across Western Australia.

We urge services to take part in the survey below from the project team.  Your feedback will contribute to achieving the best results for improving practices in the ECEC sector. Please see further information from Ros below:

Be part of something nourishing

Share how food is provided in your service by 17 June 2025

Edith Cowan University has received a Healthway grant to co-design a Best Practice Guide for Food Environments in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) services across Western Australia. The project—Nurturing Healthy Futures—will support long day care (LDC) and family day care (FDC) services to create nourishing, inclusive food environments that reflect the everyday realities of children, educators, and families.

We’re starting with a simple question:
How is food provided in your service?

If you’re a director or manager at a licensed LDC or FDC service, we’re inviting you to complete a quick 5-10 minute survey. Your insights will help us build a statewide picture of food provision practices and guide the development of practical tools to support real-world service needs.

What’s it about?
This short survey asks about your service demographics, how food is currently provided in your setting—whether meals are cooked on-site, provided by families, outsourced to caterers, or somewhere in between. There’s currently no consistent data on this in WA, and your input will help fill that gap.

Survey closes: 17 June 2025

Why take part?
This is your opportunity to influence the development of resources that reflect what’s realistic, meaningful, and nourishing in your context—not just what looks good on paper. All responses are non-sensitive and service-level only. The survey includes a brief information sheet and simple consent tick box.

If you have any questions, please contact
Dr Ros Sambell
Email: r.sambell@ecu.edu.au
Phone: 08 6304 5424

Let’s build something useful, together - grounded in practice, shaped by the sector.

Foodcore Nutrition Services Inc are pleased to be working on a brand-new project to offer support to Out of School Hours Care (OSHC) providers

This project aims to increase healthy eating and improve the wellbeing of children attending OSHC by empowering OSHC educators through capacity building activities and direct food and nutrition support.

Do you work in the OSHC sector? YES – your feedback is needed to ensure the most appropriate tools and resources are developed.  Please participate in the short survey below.  

The survey should take less than 8 minutes to complete. To say thank you for your input, you can enter the draw to win one of two $50 Rebel Sport Vouchers.

WWC Check online session for parents

The Working with Children (WWC) Screening Unit has recently launched a social media campaign promoting the importance of parents sighting and validating the WWC Card of a self-employed individual they’re engaging to work with their child.

The 'Have you checked?' campaign will run across social media from 26 May 2025 and encourages parents to validate the WWC Card of someone they are engaging in child-related work, like a children’s party entertainer. 

To complement the campaign, the Unit is holding an online information session for parents on Wednesday 11 June at 12:30pm. The free online’ session will outline what the WWC Check is, how to know when it is required and parents need to know have if they are hiring someone to engage in child-related work, like a child’s party entertainer. You can register for the online session via the WWC Screening Unit Eventbrite page.

The Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) has highlighted the critical role of intentional teaching and play-based learning in early childhood education and care (ECEC).

Findings suggest that when educators and teachers purposefully support learning through play, children benefit significantly academically, socially and developmentally.

The AERO discussion paper 'Play-based learning with intentionality' provides a plain language definition of intentional teaching and includes visual concept maps that link the evidence to the National Quality Standard and the updated Early Years Learning Framework V2.0.

The paper is an excellent source for staff and educators to use as the basis to critically reflect on their current knowledge, beliefs and practices.

Explore the resource AERO – Play-based learning with intentionality

Upcoming Next Assessment Support and Advice (NASA) webinars

NASA webinars provide guidance and clarity to services about the Assessment and Rating process including:

• What to expect during an Assessment and Rating visit by the Regulatory Authority (ECRU).
• What to consider when self-assessing your service.  
• How to develop your quality improvement plan (QIP).  

Register on Eventbrite to join our Next Assessment and Advice (NASA) webinar: