The National Model Code—safe practices for early childhood education and care services
For early childhood education and care (ECEC) services, sharing pictures and videos of children with families is a daily practice. Families are eager to see what their children are doing during the day. Sharing photos and videos helps them feel close—even when they’re apart. The National Model Code aims to help ensure ECEC services share and store this media securely to help keep children safe.
There have been recent cases of educators illegally storing images of children on their personal devices. To help combat this problem, ACECQA and governments worked to create recommendations for ECEC services to better protect children
What is the National Model Code?
The National Model Code for Taking Images or Videos of Children while Providing Early Childhood Education and Care (National Model Code) was developed by ACECQA in partnership with governments. It was introduced to ensure child-safe practices around the use of digital devices in ECEC settings.
The National Model Code is a voluntary, interim measure while governments are considering future legislative reform. Providers of centre-based ECEC under the National Quality Framework (NQF) are strongly encouraged to adopt the National Model Code as further support to promote a child-safe culture.
The code is designed to:
- Promote a child-safe culture when it comes to taking, sharing and storing images or videos of children.
- Support ECEC educators as champions of child safety.
- Complement child safety activities and strategies already in place across the sector.
This National Model Code has been developed for approved providers and their services. This includes educators, other staff and volunteers who provide care for children at centre-based early childhood services.
The National Model Code targets centre-based services whose primary purpose is to educate and care for children 0-5 years old under the NQF (long day care and pre-school/kindergarten services). However, providers of other types of children’s education and care may wish to consider adopting similar practices. This may include OSHC and FDC services.
Breaking down the National Model Code
National Model Code—Part 1
Only service-issued electronic devices should be used when taking images or videos of children while providing education and care. The appropriate use of service-issued electronic devices for taking, sending and storing images or videos of children should be clearly outlined in policies and procedures.
National Model Code—Part 2
Personal electronic devices that can take images or videos (such as tablets, phones, digital cameras, and smart watches) and personal storage and file transfer media (such as SD cards, USB drives, hard drives and cloud storage) should not be in the possession of any person while providing education and care and working directly with children. Any exceptions to this should be for limited, essential purposes. These should be authorised in writing (or through another means if written authorisation is not reasonably practicable) by the approved provider of the service and where that access does not impede the active supervision of children.
National Model Code—Part 3
Essential purposes for which the use and/or possession of a personal electronic device may be authorised for purposes other than taking images or recording videos of children include:
- Communication in an emergency situation. This includes a lost child, injury to a child or staff member, or other serious incident. It also extends to lockdowns or evacuations of the service premises.
- Personal health requirements (e.g., heart or blood sugar level monitoring)
- Disability (e.g., where a personal electronic device is an essential means of communication for an educator or other staff member)
- Family necessity (e.g., a worker with an ill or dying family member)
- Technology failure (e.g., when a temporary outage of service-issued electronic devices has occurred)
- To receive emergency notifications through government warning systems (e.g., bushfire evacuation text notification) in the event of a local emergency
National Model Code—Part 4
Approved providers and their services should have strict controls in place for the appropriate storage and retention of images and videos of children.
How does Xplor Education support ECEC educators as champions of children’s online safety?
Office (admins) and Playground (educators) allow you to create and manage users using Single Sign-On (SSO). SSO makes it easy to onboard and offboard users as necessary. It ensures that only relevant users can access children’s data, photos and videos. Admins can rest assured that employees can no longer access this data when they leave the business. SSO features also allow services to lock down devices to a specific location or Wi-Fi network. This ensures unauthorised users cannot access children’s data/photos/videos off premises.
The Playground app requires a service login in order to access children’s data/photos/videos. This means that if an employee downloads the app on an unauthorised personal device without service level credentials, they cannot access children’s data/photos/videos. Services must continue to keep these credentials safe and update them regularly to ensure children’s data/photos/videos remain protected at all times from all types of devices.
When using Playground, a child’s image or video deleted from the media library is also deleted from all content it’s been used in. Playground presents educators with a message warning them of this, and the user must confirm the action. This ensures you can comprehensively remove any child photos or videos across the platform.
Families are in control
Additional parents/guardians and family members need to make a request to the service for an invite to use the Home family platform. This means that families are in control of who can access their children’s data/photos/videos at all times. They can revoke access as needed.
Our digital enrolment form process captures family permissions regarding children’s photos/videos. Families can opt in or out of sharing media from the beginning of their journey with Xplor Education. They can update/revoke these permissions at any time during the child’s time with the service and at the family’s discretion. Playground highlights this permission (or lack thereof) for educators when sharing media. Multiple checkpoints and reminders ensure educators honour the family’s media sharing permissions. They also limit the exposure of children’s data and photos/videos when requested.
Draft and share your policies with families with Playground and Home
Services can document and share their policies relating to the National Model Code, child safety and data protection using Playground and Home. With Playground, educators can draft their policies and formalise the process of requesting educators for their input and feedback. They can then share the final version with families. You can also use Playground to see how families have engaged with these policies with the ability to track views, reactions and comments left by families. As you change and amend policies over time, families can be easily notified through Home.
If an educator has been provided with authorisation to use a personal electronic device, you can capture this information in their educator profile in Office. You can also store any supporting evidence or documentation here. If this is a time-sensitive/dated authorisation, you can create an expiring attachment on the educator’s profile. The service admin will receive a dashboard reminder as the due date approaches. They can determine if any actions are required for individual educators as they see fit.
Where other platforms fall short
Not all educator/family engagement platforms provide the same level of data security as Xplor Education. Some platforms allow any user to add additional app users. This means there’s no opportunity for families or services to vet or control who can access children’s data, images and videos. Educators may also have access to all children’s full names and images in the app, not just their own. They may also have access to this information for all time, as they cannot be made inactive or easily offboarded once the child has left the service.
For platforms without SSO, managing which educators can access the software, children’s data, photos and videos is more challenging. Educators may be able to access the platform on any device at any time, including personal devices. This means services cannot monitor who has access to these personal devices, children’s data, photos and videos. This leads to the potential for users to export data, photos or videos from the app and share them inappropriately.
Additionally, if a child leaves an ECE service using another platform and is removed from their account, families may continue to have access to and be able to manage their child’s profile for as long as they wish. This could include any family members they’ve invited, who’ll also have continued access.
Xplor Education is committed to helping ECE services maintain digital security. With SSO available in our Office and Playground platforms, we provide ECEC services with the tools they need to keep child data safe.
Please get in touch with us for a demo of how our platforms can help you keep children, including their data, photos and videos, safe.
Tracy Kipady
Training Team Lead
