The register went national in eighteen months. The clearance has taken eleven years.
From 27 February 2026 there is one national register of early childhood workers. There are still eight working with children checks, each under its own Act. National consistency was recommended by the Royal Commission in 2015.
Steps this would change
Rationale
Two reforms, same sector, same purpose, same decade.
The register. Education Ministers asked ACECQA to build a national view of who is working in early childhood and where. It went live with mandated use on 27 February 2026, inside an IT system the sector already used, populated from information providers were already required to hold.
The clearance. National consistency of working with children checks was recommended by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in 2015, which stopped short of recommending a single centralised check. Eleven years later the system is still eight separate state and territory schemes, each with its own laws, standards and processes, and a worker still applies in their own jurisdiction.
The gap this leaves is specific. A regulator can now see that an educator is working at a service in another state. What they cannot do is rely on that educator's clearance, because it was issued under a different Act against a different list of disqualifying offences. The second application takes about as long as the first and asks the same questions of the same criminal history.
And the harm the check exists to prevent is the harm that moves. A person excluded in one jurisdiction and unknown in the next is the exact failure mode. That is why this is the most uncomfortable of the ten partial-national instances recorded here, alongside NDIS worker screening, pharmacist scope and rolling stock.
Progress is real and should be stated fairly. The Agreement to Deliver National Working with Children Check Reform was endorsed by the Standing Council of Attorneys-General in November 2025. By mid-2026 all jurisdictions had agreed:
- a meaningfully consistent approach to disqualifying offences;
- a framework and benchmarks for risk assessments;
- the information types that must be shared within jurisdictions.
What is agreed only in principle is the information shared across jurisdictions — which is the whole of mutual recognition. And the national criminal history checking capability is reported to be about three years away.
What should change. Mutual recognition of a clearance, on the model already legislated for occupational licences: a clearance issued in one jurisdiction is valid in all, with the issuing unit retaining the assessment and every unit obliged to act on adverse information from any other. That requires the cross-jurisdiction information sharing that is currently agreed in principle, and nothing else.
Who acts: attorneys-general, collectively, through the council that has already agreed the substance.
What is being traded away
A national clearance is not obviously safer than eight. Mutual recognition means a jurisdiction accepting an assessment it did not make, against criteria it did not set, by a unit it does not fund. If any one scheme is weaker, mutual recognition exports that weakness to the other seven immediately — and the harmonisation of disqualifying offences and risk assessment benchmarks agreed in 2026 exists precisely to stop that, which is an argument for sequencing, not for speed.
The Royal Commission itself stopped short of a single centralised check. That was a deliberate judgement by a body with far more evidence than this database has. Anyone arguing for national consolidation here should carry that, and this entry's proposal is deliberately mutual recognition rather than a single national check for exactly that reason.
Continuous monitoring is jurisdictional and does not travel automatically. The value of a modern check is not the card; it is the unit re-checking the holder against new criminal history as it arises. A clearance recognised interstate is only as good as the flow of adverse information back to the issuing unit — which is the capability that is three years away, and until it exists mutual recognition would recognise a card whose monitoring stops at the border.
And the comparison in this entry's title is unfair in one respect. The register digitised information providers already held, under a national law that already existed. Working with children checks are eight separate statutes creating eight separate powers to exclude a person from employment, and unifying them is a harder legal act, not merely a slower one. The comparison still stands as a statement about urgency — but the difficulty was never identical.
Precedent
The National Early Childhood Worker Register itself, delivered by the same ministers for the same children on the same timescale as the crisis that prompted it. Also the National Domestic Violence Order Scheme, where an order made anywhere has been automatically recognised everywhere since 25 November 2017.
Sources
- ACECQA: the National Early Childhood Worker Register commenced national rollout with mandated use on 27 February 2026
- The working with children check system remains eight separate state and territory schemes, each with its own laws, standards and processes; a worker still applies in their own jurisdiction
- National consistency of working with children check systems was recommended by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in 2015; it stopped short of calling for one centralised check
- The Agreement to Deliver National Working with Children Check Reform was endorsed by SCAG in November 2025
- By mid-2026 all jurisdictions agreed a meaningfully consistent approach to disqualifying offences, a framework and benchmarks for risk assessments, and information types shared within jurisdictions, with agreement in principle to information shared across jurisdictions to support mutual recognition
- ABC News, 23 February 2026: three-year wait for a national criminal history checker