Does the EYLF apply to babies and toddlers?

Yes. The EYLF covers children from birth to age 5 across the full developmental range.

How do I know if a centre is following the EYLF?

Ask to see learning stories connecting play to specific EYLF outcomes. A genuine centre has examples, not just policy documents.

Written by Amie Andrews, Nominated Supervisor Castle Hill

EYLF Early Learning Castle Hill: What It Means for Your Child

The Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) is Australia’s national framework for early childhood education. It guides every approved childcare service under the National Quality Framework and shapes how educators at Dashing Ducks in Castle Hill approach each child’s development every single day.

Understanding the EYLF helps you make sense of what actually happens at childcare. It explains why your child’s educator is building sandcastles rather than drilling letters, why the outdoor garden matters, and why relationships sit at the foundation of everything else. This post covers the real substance of V2.0, the version in use since the original was revoked in February 2024.

What is the EYLF?

The EYLF’s full title is Belonging, Being and Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia. Version 2.0 was released in 2022 and is now mandatory for all approved early childhood services. The original version was formally revoked in February 2024.

The framework is built around three concepts:

Belonging: children learn and grow when they feel connected to family, community and place. Belonging is not just emotional safety; it is the condition that makes development possible. Without it, even the best educational content fails to land.

Being: childhood has intrinsic value, not just as preparation for adulthood. The EYLF asks educators to honour a child’s present experience, their wonder, their play, their ways of understanding right now.

Becoming: children are constantly changing, constructing identity, expanding knowledge and developing capability. The educator’s role is to support and extend that transformation, not rush it.

V2.0 expanded the EYLF’s guiding principles from five to eight. The three new ones are sustainability (caring for the natural world and understanding our place in it), collaborative leadership, and a significantly strengthened focus on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives, languages and ways of knowing.

The five EYLF learning outcomes

The five learning outcomes are the areas where the EYLF tracks children’s progress. These are not academic tests or tick-box checklists. Educators observe children during play and everyday moments, documenting what they see against each outcome in learning stories and reflective notes.

Outcome 1: Children have a strong sense of identity. Children show this by forming secure attachments with educators, taking age-appropriate risks and making choices with growing confidence. They also start naming and expressing their emotions and needs. Educators support this by being consistent, warm and responsive, every time, not just sometimes.

Outcome 2: Children are connected with and contribute to their world. This outcome covers cooperation and community. Children learn to negotiate roles in play, show concern for peers, and develop an early sense of responsibility toward their environment and the people in it.

Outcome 3: Children have a strong sense of wellbeing. Wellbeing includes both physical health and emotional resilience. Educators support this by helping children self-regulate, celebrating effort over performance, and building healthy daily routines that give children a sense of security.

Outcome 4: Children are confident and involved learners. Children express wonder, persist with challenges and connect ideas across different experiences. Play is the primary vehicle here. Research from Evidence for Learning Australia found that high-quality play-based approaches can generate up to four additional months of learning progress compared to traditional direct instruction.

Outcome 5: Children are effective communicators. Communication spans verbal language, creative arts, gesture and early literacy. Children engage with stories, use language to narrate their own experiences, and begin exploring symbols, drawings and written text as forms of meaning-making.

EYLF early learning in practice at Dashing Ducks

At Dashing Ducks, the EYLF is not a document on a shelf. It is how educators structure the day, the environment and their interactions with children.

Each morning, educators observe what children are drawn to and extend on those interests intentionally. A child who lingers at the water table is testing cause and effect, building persistence and using early scientific thinking. That is Outcome 4 in action. A child who notices a friend is upset and offers comfort is demonstrating the social awareness mapped to Outcome 2.

This practice of observation and documentation is known as assessment for learning, one of the EYLF’s eight core practices. Unlike formal testing, it is built into the flow of the day. Families receive regular updates through learning stories and communication books, so you can see exactly what your child’s educators are noticing and how they are responding.

Because Dashing Ducks is set in a heritage-listed home with a genuine outdoor sensory garden, the environment itself supports EYLF-aligned learning. The physical space is not just a backdrop; it is a tool educators use to deliver all five learning outcomes every day.

EYLF and getting ready for school

There is a common misconception that play-based childcare is not serious about school preparation. The EYLF addresses this directly. Outcomes 4 and 5 together build the foundation for formal literacy and numeracy through storytelling, mark-making, problem-solving and language-rich play.

Dashing Ducks’ School Readiness Program for children aged 3-5 is built on EYLF principles while targeting the dispositions kindergarten teachers report mattering most: the ability to self-regulate, to listen and follow multi-step instructions, to take turns, and to persist when something feels difficult.

Research consistently shows that the most important predictor of school success is not letter recognition. It is emotional regulation, confidence and communication. These are precisely what EYLF Outcomes 1, 3 and 5 are designed to develop. Children who arrive at kindergarten with these foundations tend to settle faster, form peer relationships more easily and approach learning with greater resilience.

The Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA) confirms that Quality Area 1 of the National Quality Standard, which covers the educational program, requires all approved services to implement the EYLF as their guiding framework.

What to look for in an EYLF-aligned centre

Not every childcare centre uses the EYLF with the same depth. Here is what genuine practice looks like when you visit or ask questions.

Ask to see a sample learning story. It should connect a specific moment in play to a named EYLF outcome, not just be a photo with a caption. “Jake built a tall tower and then knocked it down” is a record. “Jake persisted with balancing blocks despite multiple failures, demonstrating the inquiry and persistence aspects of Outcome 4” is documentation.

Look at the physical environment. Open-ended materials, natural textures, spaces that invite curiosity and child-led exploration are signs of an EYLF-aligned room. Rigid, activity-based setups with little room for children to follow their own interests tend to indicate a more adult-directed program.

Families should be genuine partners. The EYLF’s eight practices include “cultural responsiveness” and “continuity of learning and transitions.” Families should be asked to share their values, home routines and cultural practices because these belong in the program, not just as background information. Ask how the centre communicates with families about the EYLF and whether your input shapes the educational program.

Quality ratings are public. Every service’s National Quality Rating is on the ACECQA website. A rating of “Meeting NQS” or higher in Quality Area 1 is a baseline indicator of EYLF compliance. Dashing Ducks has operated for over 30 years with consistent ratings and a reputation built on long-term educator relationships and genuine family trust. Read what local families say here.

How the EYLF supports children's wellbeing

Wellbeing in the EYLF (Outcome 3) covers far more than physical health. The framework treats emotional regulation, a sense of agency and physical development as equally important and deeply connected.

Emotional regulation is the ability to manage and recover from big feelings: frustration, disappointment, excitement, fear. Children develop this capacity through consistent, responsive relationships. When an educator reliably helps a child through a difficult moment without dismissing the feeling, the child’s nervous system gradually learns to manage similar moments independently. This is not soft skill development. It is neurological development, and it takes time and consistency.

Agency means genuine choice within the day. Children who are given real choices about where to play, what materials to use and how to approach a problem develop an internal sense of control closely linked to long-term learning motivation.

One notable addition in EYLF V2.0 is an expanded focus on sustainability and children’s relationship with the natural world. Nature-based play at Dashing Ducks’ outdoor sensory garden is not just about fresh air. Research supports the role of green space and natural environments in reducing cortisol levels in young children, improving attention and supporting emotional recovery after stress.

The role of educators in delivering the EYLF

The EYLF describes eight practices that skilled educators use to bring the framework to life. Understanding these helps you recognise what quality teaching looks like in an early childhood setting.

The eight practices are: holistic and integrated approaches, responsiveness to children, play and leisure as the primary vehicle for learning, intentional teaching, learning environments, cultural responsiveness, continuity of learning and transitions, and assessment for learning.

Intentional teaching is worth understanding specifically because it is often misread as explicit instruction. It is not. Intentional teaching means educators have a clear educational purpose behind every interaction: asking a question that extends a child’s thinking, introducing new vocabulary during play, or scaffolding a challenge so the child can just manage it with a little support.

Responsiveness to children means educators genuinely follow children’s lead rather than redirecting them back to a predetermined plan. This requires skill, patience and a deep knowledge of each child’s current developmental stage.

At Dashing Ducks, our educators hold Certificate III, Diploma and Bachelor-level qualifications in Early Childhood Education and Care. Our low staff turnover means children form stable, long-term relationships with the same educators over months and years, which the EYLF identifies as the most foundational condition for learning. Learn more about our Castle Hill team here.

EYLF and outdoor learning at Dashing Ducks

The EYLF explicitly identifies the learning environment, both indoor and outdoor, as one of its eight core practices. Educators are expected to design outdoor spaces with the same intentionality as an indoor classroom, not treat them as free time or supervised movement breaks.

At Dashing Ducks, the outdoor sensory garden gives children daily access to natural materials: soil, water, plants, uneven surfaces and living things that indoor environments cannot replicate. Digging in soil develops fine motor skills, introduces the concept of living systems, and gives children a tangible relationship with the natural world that the EYLF’s sustainability principle asks educators to build.

Outdoor play tends to support multiple EYLF outcomes at once. Physical risk-taking (Outcome 3), cooperative negotiation during group games (Outcome 2) and open-ended sensory investigation (Outcome 4) can all happen in the same afternoon outside. Being set in a heritage-listed home with genuine garden space means this kind of learning is available to Dashing Ducks children every day.

How families can support EYLF learning at home

You do not need to be an early childhood educator to support the EYLF at home. The framework is about relationships, curiosity and communication, things families already do naturally.

Ask open questions after care. “What did you notice today?” or “What did you make?” draws out more than “What did you do?” That last one tends to get a one-word answer. Open questions encourage children to narrate their own experience, which builds the communication skills at the heart of Outcome 5.

Follow your child’s lead. The EYLF’s core practice of responsiveness to children applies at home too. When your child wants to dig in the garden for twenty minutes, they are doing science. When they re-tell a story from a book using their toys, they are practising narrative comprehension. Time spent playing in ways that feel purposeless to adults is often the most educationally productive time.

Share your family’s knowledge with educators. The EYLF’s principle of respect for diversity means your family’s language, customs and cultural practices belong in the childcare program, not just tolerated but genuinely embedded. Tell your child’s educator what matters to your family. That context shapes how they document your child’s identity and support their sense of belonging.

Frequently asked questions about the EYLF

Is the EYLF the same as a school curriculum?
No. The EYLF is a framework, not a curriculum with fixed content. It sets principles, practices and outcomes, but gives educators flexibility in how they achieve them. Each childcare service designs its own program within that structure. No two EYLF programs look identical, which is intentional.

Does the EYLF apply to babies and very young toddlers?
Yes. The EYLF covers children from birth to age 5, or the start of formal schooling. Even the youngest babies in long day care are supported under EYLF principles, through secure relationships, responsive caregiving and rich sensory experiences. The framework is designed to be developmentally appropriate across the full 0-5 age range.

How is EYLF V2.0 different from the original?
V2.0, released in 2022, expanded the principles from five to eight. The additions include sustainability, collaborative leadership, and a much stronger emphasis on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives and ways of knowing. The original EYLF V1 was formally revoked in February 2024, so any service still referencing it is out of date.

How do I know if a childcare centre is genuinely following the EYLF?
Ask to see a sample learning story or developmental documentation. Ask how educators plan and extend on children’s interests. A centre truly implementing the EYLF will have specific examples to share, not just a policy document on a website. You should be able to see evidence of intentional teaching, not just supervision.

What is the difference between the EYLF and long day care?
Long day care is a type of childcare service. The EYLF is the educational framework that long day care services are legally required to use under Australia’s National Quality Framework. Every approved long day care centre must operate under it. It is not optional, and compliance is assessed during National Quality Standard ratings.

How do I know if my child is meeting the EYLF learning outcomes?
Your child’s educators should provide regular documentation: learning stories, developmental notes, photos with reflections. These should reference specific outcomes and explain what educators observed. If you are not receiving this documentation, ask for it. It is a core requirement of the EYLF, not an optional extra.

See EYLF early learning in action at Castle Hill

Come and visit us at 14 Garthowen Crescent, Castle Hill to see what EYLF-aligned early childhood education looks like in practice. You can meet the educators, explore the outdoor sensory garden and ask any questions about our program, our School Readiness program for 3-5 year olds, or how CCS subsidies apply to your family’s situation.

Book a tour here, read what other Hills District families say, or visit our Castle Hill child care page for more detail on enrolments and the day-to-day program.

Looking for a school readiness program in Castle Hill?

Our programs combine structured early learning, play-based development, and warm educator relationships to give children aged 3 to 5 a confident start before kindergarten. CCS-subsidised, EYLF-aligned, and backed by over 30 years serving families in the Hills District.

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