Preschool Activities & Child Development: How Are They Connected?

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.

Oh, the magic that lives in the preschool mind! While you may sometimes tire of the never-ending stream of questions that fly from the mouths of preschoolers (those children age 3 – 5 years old), this truly is an incredible time of development for them.

Little personalities begin to blossom, bodies grow stronger, and they begin to interact with the world around them—and the preschool environment is an important part of this development. While some may dismiss preschool as glorified babysitting, nothing could be further from the truth. Educators in the preschool world work hard to develop learning plans that improve a child’s development in four critical areas:

Language Development
Cognitive Development
Social Development
Physical Development

Language Development

As children move into their preschool years, they begin to communicate using increasingly longer sentences. They can use words to describe how they feel—happy, sad, scared, angry—and begin to understand how to talk about events that happened in the past and those that will occur in the future.

In the preschool environment, students learn much about language development by modeling after their teacher. When a child asks a question using improper grammar “Where he goes?”), the teacher will repeat the same sentence using correct grammar (“Where did he go? He went to the restroom.”).

Reading to children is another wonderful way to help improve language development, but it is equally important to allow children to tell the story…even if they cannot read. Picture books of familiar fairy tales without words give children the freedom to retell a story without the pressure of deciphering letters on a page.

Cognitive Development

Cognitive development refers to the way children interact with the world around them and what they think about it. As they grow, children learn how to solve problems independently, a skill that will serve them well into adulthood.

Teachers are excellent at modeling the problem-solving methodology to children:

Teacher: I see you are looking at that book on the top shelf. What are you thinking?

Child: I want to read it, but I can’t reach it.

Teacher: I see. How could you reach the book?

Child: I could climb the shelf.

Teacher: You could, but you might get hurt if you fall. What’s another idea?

Child: I could use the stool by the hand washing sink.

Teacher: Excellent idea! You are a very good problem solver!

By modeling problem solving skills, teachers help students become more confident in their own problem-solving capabilities. Simple board games or memory games are also great for teaching children how to problem solve.

Social Development

Preschool is the perfect place to learn proper social skills because there are other children to interact with. Knowing how to get along with those outside of your family, to take turns, and to empathise are critical life skills.

Reading is a great way to improve . Through the actions of story characters, children get a clear picture of which actions are “good” and which are “bad”. They can empathize with characters and imagine that experience as if it were their own.

Teachers will also help preschoolers identify their emotions, many of which may be new to the child. Shyness, jealousy, loneliness, or feeling like part of the team are all emotions children can face in a classroom setting. Being able to recognise these emotions is helpful in developing strong social skills.

Physical Development

In preschool, there are plenty of opportunities to engage in activities that improve both gross (large muscle) and fine (small muscle) motor skills.

Gross motor skills use the large muscles of the body: arms, legs, and torso. Games like hopscotch or using tricycles or scooters are great ways to develop gross motor skills.

Fine motor skills use the small muscles in the hands and fingers. Stacking blocks, tracing, putting puzzles together and playing with playdough all help strengthen those small muscles and improve fine motor skills.

Ralph Waldo Emmerson once said, “It’s a happy talent to know how to play” and this is certainly true of preschoolers. While the activities they engage in may initially seem like silly play they are, in truth, the lynchpin for learning. It is through educational-driven play that children learn about the world around them and their place in it.

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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