January Foreword from the Acting Registrar

Welcome to the first bulletin for 2025.

Following a year of significant growth and change for the Education Standards Board, we remain focused on continuously improving and embedding our practices in 2025 and achieving our critical outcomes and our roadmap to regulatory reform.

This year, we will establish a joint state and commonwealth compliance and deterrence program, focused on aligning regulatory processes and data sharing between the Australian Government Department of Education and participating state and territory early childhood education and care (ECEC) regulatory authorities, for a consistent national compliance approach to prevent and detect fraud and regulatory non-compliance amongst the ECEC sector.

We will continue to partner with peak bodies and large providers through our ECEC Regulatory Roundtable, which next meets in late February, to leverage our partnerships and support delivery of our regulatory priorities.

We will continue to deliver our provider engagement approach and our actions from our 2024 ECEC Sector Survey Action Plan. One of our actions was to share our approach to compliance monitoring, which has been in included in this month's bulletin.

We also share in the bulletin the data from the National Quality Framework (NQF) Annual Performance Report for 2024 and provide details on the extension of workforce transitional provisions and an update on assessment and rating.

Finally, Safer Internet Day takes place on 11 February, raising awareness of online safety. Our second education and guidance series this year will be on eSafety so this is a great opportunity to start thinking about teaching safe practice to children, young people and educators.

Sean Heffernan
Acting Registrar
Education Standards Board