Designing Childcare Centres for Compliance

About this course.

Childcare buildings are special because their principal occupants are young children — including infants and toddlers — who cannot recognise danger, cannot reliably self-rescue in an emergency, and depend entirely on adults and on the building itself to keep them safe. That single fact changes everything about how the building must be designed, and it is why a childcare centre attracts more, and stricter, requirements than an ordinary building of similar size. The rules come in layers. The building itself is designed and approved under the National Construction Code (NCC), developed by the ABCB and adopted by each state and territory. The service that operates in the building is regulated under the National Quality Framework, through the Education and Care Services National Law and National Regulations, administered by the education and care regulatory authority in each state or territory. And the development is subject to state and territory (and local) planning controls. All three layers must be satisfied.

The most important thing to understand at the outset is that "compliance" for a childcare centre is not one approval but several, from different authorities with different purposes. A building can satisfy the NCC and still not be able to operate as a childcare service if it does not also meet the National Regulations; and it can meet both and still be refused development consent if it does not satisfy planning controls about land use, traffic, parking, noise and amenity. Practitioners who think only about the building code, or only about the education regulations, will miss requirements that determine whether the centre can actually open. Designing a childcare centre well means designing to all the layers together, from the start, and coordinating the approvals rather than treating them in isolation.