The new National Early Childhood Worker Register is an important part of recent child safety reforms.
This Worker Register has been developed by ACECQA to provide a clearer picture of who is working in education and care services, and where they’re working.
The Worker Register will help regulatory authorities to monitor, identify and respond to risks more effectively, with cross border movement being no barrier to information access.
What this means for childcare providers
Providers who operate services regulated under the National Quality Framework are now legally obliged to enter workforce information into the Worker Register, and this covers more than just core staff.
Approved providers must update the National Early Childhood Worker Register to include any person:
- Who is employed, engaged or appointed by the provider or service, and
- Undertakes an education and care role at a service during operating hours, while children are there, and
- Isn’t a visitor.
This means the Worker Register applies to:
- Educators (permanent, fixed term, casual or agency)
- Early childhood teachers
- Volunteers
- Students or trainees
- Non-educator staff, like cooks, cleaners, maintenance staff, administrative staff and bus drivers
- Nominated Supervisors
- Coordinators (centre-based or family day care)
- Family day care educators, and
- Family day care educator assistants.
Timing for the National Early Childhood Worker Register updates
Providers have had since 27 February 2026 to add workers’ information to the Worker Register, and all the necessary information must be added by Friday, 27 March 2026.
After that, there is an ongoing obligation to keep the workforce information current and correct.
This means providers must update the Worker Register within 14 days when:
- A worker starts, leaves or changes roles, or
- A provider becomes aware of a change to the worker’s details
Why the National Early Childhood Worker Register updates are manageable
The Worker Register is simple to update, because it asks providers to record information they already collect.
If you’re doing the updates, then ‘Personal and Contact Details’ and ‘Training and Qualifications’ are the two fields that need to be filled out, and the following details should be included for each worker:
- Their name and date of birth
- Address, phone number and email
- Role
- Where they work and the nature of their employment
- Qualifications held or being worked towards
- Completed training, and
- Working with Children Check or teacher registration details
How OWNA can help
OWNA’s new built-in National Worker Register Report makes it easy to enter and maintain workforce information.
You’ll find this new feature under Reports > Compliance.
And it enables you to automatically extract staff information into one ready-to-export Report that’s formatted exactly to ACECQA’s NQA IT System specification.
OWNA’s National Worker Register Report can be exported as an Excel or JSON file for direct upload.
Both document types can be used to bulk upload staff details to the Worker Register, and along the way, OWNA’s National Worker Register Report makes it simple to:
- Track Working with Children Checks, teacher registration and qualifications, as well as First Aid, Anaphylaxis, Asthma and Child Safety training
- Auto-map to all required register fields, and
- Exclude placeholder profiles, like agency staff, with one tick
All in all, this new feature will enable you to meet the Friday deadline, and stay on top of compliance going forward.
OWNA also makes it easy to manage rostering, so you’ll have a clear picture of who’s working where and when.
