How Kids Can Benefit From Building Blocks

If you have heard that the rules around mobile phones and electronic devices in early childhood settings have changed, you are right. If your child attends a childcare centre in NSW, these changes are already in effect.

Here is a plain-English breakdown of what changed, why it happened, and what it means for your family.

Why Did the Laws Change?

The changes were introduced as a child safety measure. In 2025, Australia’s Education Ministers agreed to amend the Education and Care Services National Law to address concerns about the potential for personal devices to be used to capture, store, or transmit images of children in care without authorisation.

The intent is straightforward: children in early learning settings deserve an environment where their privacy and safety are actively protected.

What Changed Nationally

From 27 February 2026, amendments to the national Education and Care Services National Law took effect across Australia. Under these changes, educators and staff who work directly with children are restricted from using personal electronic devices in care settings.

Before this, from 1 September 2025, all early childhood education and care services nationwide were required to have written policies in place addressing the use of digital devices.

What Changed in NSW

NSW moved ahead of the national timeline. The Education and Care Services (Supply, Authorisation and Use of Devices) Order 2025 took effect on 6 November 2025, applying across NSW’s 6,000 or more early learning services, including long day care centres, preschools, and family day care.

Under this order, educators and staff must use service-issued or service-authorised devices rather than their own personal devices when working directly with children.

What Counts as a Personal Device?

The definition is broad. A personal device is any device owned by an individual (not the approved provider) that is capable of capturing, storing, or transmitting an image. This includes:

Mobile phones
Smartwatches
Cameras and tablets
iPads and laptops
Hard drives, USB drives, and memory cards
Wearables such as camera glasses

Who Does the Ban Apply To?

The restrictions apply to anyone working directly with children at a service, including permanent and casual educators, students on placement, volunteers, contractors, and allied health professionals delivering programs on-site.

Parents, carers, and other visitors are not covered by the ban. In NSW, parents and carers remain free to use their personal devices during drop-off, pick-up, centre visits, and events involving their own children. There are also authorised exceptions for essential purposes, including emergencies and health or disability support needs.

What About Screen Time for Children?

These new laws specifically address staff device use, not children’s screen time. Screen time limits for young children are not mandated within childcare regulation at a national level.

The relevant guidance comes from the federal Department of Health and Aged Care’s 24-Hour Movement Guidelines, which recommend no screen time for children under 2 years, and no more than 1 hour per day for children aged 2 to 5 years. These are health guidelines, not regulatory requirements.

What This Means for Your Family

If your child attends a childcare centre in NSW, their service is already required to operate under these rules. Any educator or staff member working directly with your child should not be using a personal device to take photos or videos. Only service-authorised devices should be used for that purpose.

If you have questions about how your centre handles digital devices or image capture, you are well within your rights to ask. Most services will have a written policy in place that covers exactly this.

At Clovel, the safety and wellbeing of every child in our care is at the heart of everything we do. If you would like to know more about how we support your child across our centres, we would love to have that conversation with you.

Building blocks is one of the best educational toys for toddlers that develops multiple skills in a child. It’s a great way to stimulate learning in various domains such as intellectual, physical, language, social-emotional and development.

There is substantial research indicating that playing with Building Blocks is crucial for future cognitive success in the learning of numbers and math. Researchers have proved that children that are exposed to block play during early childhood (ages three, four and five years) tend to perform better in Algebra and other math subjects in middle school.

Why Building Blocks and how do they help?

When it comes to block play in infants and toddlers, there is a natural progression that occurs, and here we take a look at it:

Toddlers

When a toddler is introduced to blocks, there is a lot of learning involved; they learn how heavy they are, what their shape and feel is and how to hold on to them. The bright colours entice them, and that can keep them engaged for long periods in of time. They will also start carrying the blocks around and experiment with them by banging them together and judge how they sound when dropped to the floor.

It doesn’t take very long for toddlers to learn the effect of stacking, knocking, dumping and filling or laying blocks on the floor in different forms. During this play, they also learn concepts such as the order of objects, comparing objects by creating exact matches and learning sizes. There are social benefits too. Playing with blocks contributes significantly to helping them develop self-confidence.

For instance, when they build any structure with the blocks and stack them successfully, they feel a distinct sense of accomplishment which increases their self-confidence and makes them feel proud. When playing with blocks, young children are also expanding their receptive and expressive language because they are also learning different words such as “tall”, “short”, “ stack”, “ build”, “ pick up”, “ dump”, “ fill” etc.

Three-Year-olds

By the age of three, block play begins to look very different to children. They start progressing in their play, and it gets more constructive. Three-year-olds generally play near other children or alone, and they also begin engaging in pretend play by this age.

They begin building enclosures that look like castles, roads, farm pens and zoos. They learn various concepts such as counting, ordering and sorting, shape, size as well as one-to-one correspondence.

Four & Five-Year-olds

Children in this age group are more structured, organised, balanced, coordinated, developed and experienced in their block play. Constructive play is more exploratory and open-ended. Children start building more complex and combined structures. From a social standpoint, four & five-year-olds start to cooperate with their peers, share ideas and start building blocks with others.

Sometimes, they also include different types of block accessories, including animals, people and vehicles while engaging in pretend or imaginary play. They even begin to learn concepts such as sequencing, classifying, patterns, and fractions; and their problem-solving and design building skills significantly improve.

When children are involved in block play, it allows them to improve their conceptual understanding as they automatically explore forces such as tension, compression, gravity, aesthetic sensibility, stability as well as the relationship between materials while achieving successful design.

Preschoolers start exploring and noticing more 3D objects like prisms, cubes, cylinders and cones and that’s all part of geometry. Children begin to learn science through block play when they start experimenting, comparing and making predictions with balance, stability and cause an effect. It expands their understanding of words like” through”, ” top”, ” bottom”, “off”, ” over”, ” under” and other spatial relations.

Children Learn the Fun Way

It’s important to mould children minds when they are young. It is at this age that their minds are like sponges and they learn and absorb different concepts. This is why block play is something parents and educators should encourage from an early age.

At Clovel, we are always in-sync with the latest trends in learning for preschoolers and include block play and other activities regularly so that the children have a well-rounded learning experience. It’s an excellent way to help them build confidence and learn various skills through play.

For any more information, call Clovel Childcare and Early Learning Centre, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. For any information about our Educational Programs, give us a call at 02 9199 0294 or fill in this contact us form.

Thanks for reading,
Clovel Childcare
1300 863 986

Lyn Connolly

Founder and Company Director

Lyn Connolly is the Founder and Company Director of Clovel Childcare & Early Learning Centres, a family‑owned group of eight centres across Western Sydney established from her first service at Merrylands. Active in early childhood education since 1977, she also serves as President of the Australian Childcare Alliance (ACA) NSW, representing providers in state and federal consultations, media, and public hearings.

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