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Creating and maintaining a child safe physical environment at your early childhood education and care (ECEC) service is critical to protecting children from harm and abuse.

It’s vital that all ECEC leaders and staff understand their responsibilities and work collaboratively to consistently implement child safe practices and take steps to provide a safe environment for children every day.

Under and of the Children (ÌÇÐÄvlog¹ÙÍø and Care Services) National Law (NSW) (National Law), approved providers, nominated supervisors and – where applicable – family day care (FDC) educators, have a legal obligation to ensure all children are adequately supervised at all times.

They must ensure that educators position themselves to:

• maintain clear lines of sight of all children
• regularly scan indoor and outdoor areas
• maintain appropriate child-to-educator ratios
• anticipate potential risks during transitions, routines or play.

Educators must continually assess their surroundings to identify potential risks and taking every reasonable precaution to protect children from harm, hazards and abuse.

A child safe environment goes beyond physical structures – it must also support active supervision. This includes designing spaces that allow for clear visibility of all educator-child and child-to-child interactions, supporting responsive staff practices, and enabling timely interventions to address behaviours or risks to children’s safety and wellbeing.

By maintaining high standards of supervision and environmental safety, service leaders and educators can together build a strong safeguarding culture and demonstrate their commitment to prioritising the needs, rights, safety and wellbeing of children.

Lines of sight

Clear lines of sight mean that educators have unobstructed visibility across indoor and outdoor areas where children are present. This requires careful consideration of room layouts, placement of furniture, visibility through windows and doorways, and ensuring supervision is never compromised by blind spots or barriers.

When planning and building new service premises, approved providers should consider how they can minimise or prevent opportunities for situational risk and ensure the design supports maximum visibility, while balancing children’s right to privacy. For example, they should avoid creating spaces or using design features or materials that obstruct views or create secluded areas.

Educators play a critical role in maintaining visibility throughout the day. When setting up learning environments or making changes during the day, they should consider how furniture placement, equipment and layout impact lines of sight and adequate supervision.

This includes avoiding high or bulky items that block views, ensuring windows and viewing panels are clear from posters or artworks, and adjusting setups as needed to respond to children's movements and play patterns.

Policies and procedures

requires education and care services to have a child safe environment policy that supports the provision of a child safe environment, including the promotion and embedding of a child safe culture in all aspects of the service, the safe use of online environments, and guidelines around how staff will identify, manage and respond to risks of harm and abuse.

Clear supervision guidelines and active supervision practices are a key part of this, with a focus on maintaining clear lines of sight to support the safety and wellbeing of children.

Embed these policies into everyday practice by participating in regular training and reflection opportunities. Strengthening knowledge and understanding of child safe practice encourages a culture of shared responsibility, vigilance and responsiveness.

Regularly reviewing child safe policies as a team helps ensure they remain practical and relevant. Encouraging staff to share feedback and insights from their daily experiences supports continuous improvement and keeps the policy aligned with the needs of the children in your care.

Visit ACECQA’s and pages for practical strategies to help your service strengthen its current supervision approaches.

Staffing arrangements

Approved providers, nominated supervisors and family day care educators are responsible for ensuring educator-to-child ratios are met at all times, including during transitions such as toileting and staff breaks. However, maintaining minimum educator requirements alone does not guarantee compliance with all laws and regulations – service leaders and staff must also consider adequate supervision requirements.

Adequate supervision requires careful consideration of the physical environment and effective staffing arrangements, including how staff work across and within the learning environments. This may mean above staff ratio is required based on the supervision needs of the environment and the children within that environment.

Effective team communication

Teamwork and communication are essential to maintaining safe environments for children. When educators work collaboratively and remain aware of each other’s locations and responsibilities, they help reduce the risk of children being left unsupervised or educators being alone with children unnecessarily.

Supervision plans are a valuable tool to support this. They help services to identify high-risk areas (such as bathroom, nappy change and sleep areas) and ensure educators move with children as they transition through different parts of the environment. Clear and consistent communication of these plans across the team support all staff to understand their roles and are aware of priority supervision areas.

Reflecting on your practice

• How do you prepare educators and staff for effective supervision during transitions and outdoor play? Where are they standing? Do they have line of sight of children and other educators? Are there barriers to your line of sight (trees, cubby houses, large spaces to supervise)? Do any educators have their backs to the children?
• What can you do to ensure you can always see and hear children during activities?
• What processes do you have in place to assess environments before children enter them, such as scanning for posters or artwork that might reduce lines of sight?
• How do you reflect on your service’s physical environment, layout and design to ensure it is child safe and supports child safe practices? Are there any areas within your service that pose a risk for unsupervised access, and how can you address these?
• How do your policies, procedures and risk assessments consider the balance of children’s privacy with the need to provide a safe environment for children?
• When supporting children with nappy changes and toileting, what child safe practices do you implement? Do you have additional practices in place with children who have support needs with toileting that are different to their age-equivalent peers?
• When school-aged children attending outside school hours care go to the bathroom, do they go alone or with other children? How long are they expected to be gone before an educator would go to check? How do educators check on children in the bathroom in an appropriate, child safe way?

Practical tips

By implementing these strategies, educators and staff can enhance their awareness of lines of sight and promote a safer environment for children.

• When using multiple spaces in a building, ensure doors are left open where possible, windows are unobstructed and unused spaces are locked.
• Perform regular audits of physical environments to identify risks to children’s safety and changes in room set-ups that could indicate areas of higher risk and become supervision ‘blind spots’.
• Ensure policies and supervision plans consider all physical environments including indoor and outdoor learning spaces, sleep and rest areas, bathrooms, transition zones (such as doorways and corridors), and any off-site locations used for excursions or community activities. Each environment should be assessed for visibility, potential supervision challenges and specific risks based on how children use the space.
• Conduct risk assessments for all physical activities. Identify areas where adults may have opportunities to interact with children unsupervised.
• Establish risk management strategies and processes for activities including transportation, excursions, events, regular visitors who attend the service, and nappy change/toileting areas. Seek educator, staff and family input on these processes that support regulatory requirements.
• Supervision plans are designed so that staff are not alone with a child (where possible).