Priorities and targets for 2024-25

The Education Standards Board (ESB) works to ensure every action is backed by strong strategic thinking and forward planning. The ESB is committed to a contemporary approach to regulating education and early childhood services, to support the best interests of children and young people, their families and our other stakeholders.

Strategic plan

The 2024-27 Strategic Plan provides an overarching framework of our regulatory priorities and how we intend to measure success. It recognises the need for high standards of conduct and competence and the ESB's role in taking proportionate risk-based action when potential risks to children's safety, health and wellbeing are identified.

To achieve this, we have developed a range of delivery plans to improve our practice and enhance the work we do as a regulator. These include plans to support the education and guidance work and to address the response to the sector feedback survey.

Sector survey action plan

In May 2024, the Australian Children's Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA) facilitated a sector-wide survey to determine how stakeholders felt about their regulators and to identify areas for improvement. A summary of these results was presented at the July Regulatory Roundtable. To better understand the results and ensure any action was targeted to the right issues and outcomes, we convened a subgroup.

An action plan has been developed that focuses on areas for improvement. This was shared at the October Regulatory Roundtable detailing the targeted deliverables and deadlines for each area. Thank you to those participated in the sector survey in May and also the members of the subgroup for their invaluable insight.

Service standards and targets

Recommendation 7 of the Royal Commission into Early Childhood Education and Care was based solely on improving the function of the Education Standards Board. Part of this recommendation included establishing benchmark timeframes for assessments and establishing systems to make sure that these are met.

To address this part of the recommendation, we have developed and published a series of service standards and targets that we will report on biannually via our monthly bulletins. This includes timelines for our functions as a regulator as well as customer service and support we provide to stakeholders.

Our targets relate to a number of regulatory activities and functions including:

• applications
• incidents triage
• complaints triage
• assessment and rating
• enquiries.

People who contact us (services, providers, families, and the general public) can expect to hear from us within one working day when we receive a complaint or incident notification, and we aim to meet this expectation 100% of the time. We aim to answer 70% of general phone calls within two minutes and respond to 70% of email enquiries within three business days. While this is the target, our goal is to exceed that expectation.

We have set an additional target to decrease the number of services still assessed under the 2012 National Quality Standard, to 20% or less within the 2024-25 timeframe. While the overarching goal is to have all services assessed under the current framework, we have set this achievable outcome to keep us moving forward in this work. To assist us in reaching this outcome, 100% of services operating under the 2012 NQS will receive a pre-assessment and rating monitoring visit.

The remaining targets are linked to our legislative obligations as a regulatory authority. We will share our progress on all service standards as we aim for continuous improvement.

We will share our progress on these service standards as we aim for continuous improvement.