Build your knowledge, one focus area at a time

Understand the legal, regulatory and quality frameworks that guide OSHC services across Australia, with children’s safety, rights and best interests at the centre. You will look at how the National Quality Framework, child safe requirements, service roles, and policies and procedures fit together and shape everyday practice. You will finish understanding your responsibilities as an educator and how you contribute to safe, high-quality education and care.

Understand work health and safety laws, rights and responsibilities that keep educators and children safe in OSHC. You will learn how to identify hazards, assess and control risks, respond to incidents and emergencies, and support psychosocial and cultural safety. It also covers hygiene, safe food handling and supporting children’s individual health needs. You will finish ready to help create a safe, healthy environment for everyone at your service.

Understand how to build positive, respectful relationships with children and young people and help them build respectful relationships with others. Drawing on children’s rights, the National Law and Regulations, Quality Area 5 and My Time, Our Place, it covers inclusion, social and emotional learning, co-regulation and conflict resolution. You will also learn your legal responsibilities around inappropriate discipline and inappropriate conduct, so every child’s safety, dignity and rights are upheld.

Explore what adequate supervision means in OSHC and why it takes more than counting heads or meeting minimum ratios. You will learn how to plan supervision around the children, the environment and the educators, and how to prepare before children arrive. It also covers the skills and supervision systems that help you respond to changing risks as they happen. You will finish ready to supervise with confidence, keeping children safe, engaged and supported while respecting their growing independence.

Understand My Time, Our Place V2.0, the approved learning framework for school age care, and how its themes, principles, practices and outcomes guide everyday OSHC practice. You will learn how play, leisure, routines and children’s voices shape a meaningful program. You will also learn how to use the planning cycle to observe, assess, plan, implement and evaluate experiences. You will finish ready to make useful contributions to your service’s program and documentation.

Understand what it means to work in a position of trust and to act as a professional OSHC educator. You will learn about professional boundaries, ethical conduct, Codes of Conduct, and your responsibility to speak up and report concerns. It also covers how to engage professionally with colleagues, families, schools and the community, both in person and online, and how to prepare accurate, professional records. You will finish understanding how professional judgement and accountability protect children and build trust in you, your service and the OSHC sector.