Education and Care Services National Law — the rules that govern your service.

Why an ECEC educator needs to know about the Law

If you work as an educator, an assistant, a cook, or in any other role inside an approved education and care service in Australia, your day-to-day work is shaped by a piece of legislation called the Education and Care Services National Law. The Law is the framework that sits underneath the National Quality Framework (NQF), the Education and Care Services National Regulations, and the National Quality Standard. It is the reason your service has to be approved, has to be staffed at certain ratios, has to have first aid trained educators on site, and has to follow specific procedures when a child becomes unwell or is injured.

The Law applies to most long day care, family day care, outside school hours care, and preschool services in every state and territory except Western Australia (which has its own equivalent legislation that mirrors the National Law in almost all respects). It is the legal foundation on which your service operates, and any first aider working in that environment is operating inside its requirements whether or not they have ever read the Law itself.

This chapter is the orientation: what the Law is, what it requires, and where first aid fits inside it. The detail of state-specific regulations is in the education and care state regulations chapter, and the broader duty-of-care principles that apply to any first aider are in the duty of care chapter.

What the Law is — a brief history

Before 2012, every Australian state and territory had its own legislation governing early childhood services. This produced a confusing patchwork of different rules, different terminology, different ratios, and different inspection regimes — particularly difficult for services that operated across borders or for educators who moved between states.

In 2012 the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) introduced the National Quality Framework (NQF), which brought education and care services across most of the country under a single regulatory scheme. The framework consists of:

• The Education and Care Services National Law — the legislation itself, applied uniformly in each participating state and territory.
• The Education and Care Services National Regulations — the detailed rules made under the Law.
• The National Quality Standard (NQS) — the assessment framework against which services are rated.
• The Australian Children's Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA) — the national body that administers the framework.

Each state and territory has its own Regulatory Authority that enforces the Law and Regulations within its jurisdiction — for example, the Department of Education in NSW, the Department of Education and Training in Victoria, and so on. The Regulatory Authorities conduct service approvals, assess and rate services against the NQS, and investigate breaches.

Western Australia operates an equivalent scheme under its own state legislation, with the same NQS and the same ACECQA-administered ratings. For practical purposes, the principles and obligations are the same.

What the Law requires — the headline obligations

The Law and Regulations are extensive — running to several hundred pages of detailed rules — but the obligations that matter most for a first aider sit in a small number of areas:

Approved provider and approved service

Every education and care service must be operated by an approved provider under an approved service approval. The approval is granted by the relevant state or territory Regulatory Authority and can be suspended or cancelled for serious breaches of the Law. The approval comes with conditions, including the maximum number of children, the physical premises, and the categories of children for whom the service is approved.

Your service has been through this approval process. The approval is on display somewhere in the service — usually at the entrance — alongside the most recent NQS rating.

Educator qualifications and ratios

The Regulations specify the minimum qualifications that educators must hold (or be working toward) to count toward the legal staffing ratios, and they specify the adult-to-child ratios that must be maintained at all times. Ratios vary by:

• Age of the children — infants under 24 months require more adult attention than older children.
• Type of service — long day care, family day care, outside school hours care, and preschool have different ratio rules.
• State or territory — some states have stricter local rules than the national minimum.

The ratios are not optional. They are a legal requirement, and a service that drops below ratio is in breach of the Law. From a first aider's perspective, the implication is that at any moment when you are responding to an injured or unwell child, the rest of the children must still be supervised at the legal ratio. That usually means another educator picks up your supervision while you respond to the casualty — a procedure your service should have written into its policies.

First aid qualifications on site

The Regulations require that at least one educator with current first aid qualifications, current asthma and anaphylaxis management qualifications, and current CPR qualifications must be present at the service whenever children are being educated and cared for. (See the currency requirements chapter for the refresher intervals.)

In practice, most services train multiple educators in first aid so that the requirement is met whether or not any individual educator is on shift. The HLTAID012 unit you are studying is the unit specifically required for this regulatory purpose — it covers paediatric first aid in the context of education and care settings.

Health, safety and wellbeing of children

The Regulations include a substantial set of provisions about the health and wellbeing of children. The relevant areas include:

• Incident, injury, trauma and illness procedures — every service must have written policies for managing children who become unwell or injured, and must keep records of every notifiable incident.
• Medication procedures — written authorisation requirements, storage, administration, recording.
• Anaphylaxis and asthma management — every child with a known severe allergy or asthma must have a current ASCIA Action Plan or asthma plan held at the service.
• Sleep and rest practices — safe sleep policies, particularly for infants, including the SIDS-prevention principles.
• Hygiene and infection control — handwashing, nappy changing, food handling, exclusion periods for infectious illness.
• Sun protection — hat, shade, sunscreen.
• Emergency and evacuation procedures — written plans, regular drills, posted at the service.

Each of these has its own policy in your service's policy folder, and each is the subject of NQS assessment. As a first aider, your role intersects with most of them — particularly the incident/illness procedures, medication administration, and emergency and evacuation procedures.

Notification of serious incidents

The Law requires the approved provider to notify the Regulatory Authority of any serious incident affecting a child at the service. "Serious incident" is defined in the Regulations and includes:

• The death of a child while in care, or following an incident at the service.
• Any injury or illness requiring attendance by emergency services or hospital admission.
• Any incident requiring emergency services attendance, regardless of outcome.
• Any child who appears to be missing, locked in or out, or who has been taken from the service by a person who is not authorised.
• Any allegation of physical or sexual abuse.
• Any incident or circumstance that poses a risk to the health, safety or wellbeing of a child.

The notification has to be made to the Regulatory Authority within prescribed timeframes (often 24 hours or sooner). The first aider's role is usually to provide accurate information to the service's nominated supervisor (who makes the actual notification), in line with the workplace procedures chapter and the privacy and confidentiality chapter.

Record keeping

The Regulations require that incidents involving children be documented in writing in the service's incident, injury, trauma and illness record. The record must include:

• The child's name and age.
• The date and time of the incident.
• The circumstances and nature of the incident.
• The first aid that was provided.
• Whether emergency services were contacted.
• Whether the child was collected by their parent/guardian, transported to hospital, etc.
• The name of the person who provided the first aid and completed the record.
• The notification of the parent/guardian.

This record is a legal document. It should be completed promptly and accurately. It is the record on which any later inquiry — by the Regulatory Authority, by the parents, by a court — will rely. The incident record is also the source document for the notification to the Regulatory Authority where a serious incident has occurred.

Where first aid sits inside the Law

The Education and Care Services National Law is the framework. The Regulations are the detail. The National Quality Standard is the quality benchmark. Your service's policies and procedures are the operational instructions that turn the Law into day-to-day practice.

A first aider in an ECEC setting operates at the operational level — following the service's policies, which are themselves written to comply with the Regulations, which implement the Law. The chain is:

1. Law says: "An approved service must ensure the safety, health and wellbeing of children."
2. Regulations say: "The service must have written policies covering [specific areas including incident management, anaphylaxis, asthma, etc.] and must have a first aid qualified educator on site at all times."
3. National Quality Standard assesses the service against benchmarks of children's health and safety.
4. Service policies translate all of the above into the specific procedures your service follows when (e.g.) a child has an asthma attack: who responds, who supervises the others, who calls the parents, who calls 000, who completes the record.
5. You follow the policies.

This means that as a first aider, your most important reading is your service's own policies and procedures, not the Law itself. The policies are the version of the Law that applies to you, in the language of your specific service. If you have not read your service's incident/illness policy, your medication policy, your anaphylaxis policy, your asthma policy and your emergency procedures, do that before you ever need to use them.

The Law and the parent-educator relationship

One of the things that sets ECEC first aid apart from other first aid contexts is the legal relationship between the service and the parent. When a parent enrols a child at an approved service, they sign an enrolment agreement that includes consent to first aid being provided in an emergency, authorisation for specific medications to be administered, and contact information for emergency notification. This is the basis on which the service can act when a child is injured or unwell.

The parent retains the right to make decisions about their child's care — including the right to refuse certain treatments, request specific procedures, or take their child home. The service's obligation is to inform the parent promptly, to follow the parent's reasonable wishes where possible, and to act in the child's best interests where the parent cannot be reached.

In a true emergency — a child in cardiac arrest, severe anaphylaxis, severe bleeding — the educator does not wait for parental consent before acting. The Law explicitly authorises (and requires) immediate first aid in life-threatening situations. The detail of consent and the parent relationship is in the parental consent chapter.

The Law and you as an individual

The Law's primary obligation is on the approved provider (the legal entity that operates the service) and the nominated supervisor (the person designated as in charge). As an individual educator, you are not personally liable for most of the obligations of the Law, but you are responsible for following your service's policies and for performing your role as set out in your job description.

Where an individual educator can be in personal breach of the Law:

• Misconduct — abuse, neglect, or wilful disregard for a child's safety.
• Failure to report — knowing about a serious incident or a safeguarding concern and failing to report it.
• Working outside qualifications — claiming a first aid qualification you do not hold, or administering medication you are not authorised to administer.
• Falsification of records — incident records, medication records, attendance records.

These are rare and are not the everyday concern of a first aid trained educator. The everyday concern is to know your service's policies, follow them, and document your actions accurately.

Where to find the Law

If you want to read the Law itself (and you do not need to, for your day-to-day work, but you may want to for interest):

• The Education and Care Services National Law is published by ACECQA at acecqa.gov.au.
• The Education and Care Services National Regulations are also published by ACECQA.
• The National Quality Standard is published by ACECQA with detailed guidance on each Quality Area.
• Your state or territory Regulatory Authority publishes guidance specific to your jurisdiction — see the education and care state regulations chapter for the list.
• Your service's nominated supervisor or approved provider can answer specific questions about how the Law applies to your service.

For first-aid purposes, the ACECQA website has plain-English summaries and policy templates that are much easier to use than the Law itself, and most services maintain their policies in line with these templates.

What not to do

• Do not assume your service's policies are optional. They are the Law in operational form.
• Do not improvise a response that goes outside your service's written procedures, except where doing so is the only way to save a child's life.
• Do not delay reporting a serious incident to the nominated supervisor. The Regulatory Authority has prescribed timeframes that the service must meet.
• Do not falsify or omit information from the incident record.
• Do not discuss a serious incident outside the people who need to know — privacy obligations apply (see the privacy and confidentiality chapter).
• Do not claim a qualification you do not hold or administer a medication you are not authorised to administer.
• Do not wait until an incident happens to read the policies. Read them now.

The Education and Care Services National Law is the legal foundation underneath your service. It requires first aid trained educators to be on site, written policies for managing illness and injury, and accurate documentation of every incident. As an individual educator, your job is not to memorise the Law but to know your service's policies and follow them — because those policies are the Law in the form that applies to you. Read them, follow them, and document what you do.

— Education and Care Services National Law and ACECQA guidance