Early Childhood

This bill replaces Queensland's old overseas students law, creates a new statutory regime for international secondary student exchange programs, and sets up the legal framework for the new senior assessment system and ATAR that began with Year 11 students in 2019. It also makes minor amendments to home education rules, school councils and school terminology.

This bill creates a new independent state body called the Healthy Futures Commission Queensland, focused on helping children and families live healthier lives. The Commission will fund community projects, partnerships and research aimed at promoting healthy eating, physical activity and reducing health gaps between different Queensland communities.

This bill adds early childhood education and care workers to Queensland's list of mandatory child abuse reporters. From 1 January 2017, qualified staff, nominated supervisors and individual approved providers at child care centres, kindergartens and family day care services must report suspected physical or sexual abuse to Child Safety.

This bill lets Queensland childcare services refuse to enrol or exclude children who aren't up to date with their vaccinations, and protects operators from being sued for those decisions. It also gives the Health Ombudsman stronger powers to compel people to attend and answer questions during healthcare complaint investigations.

This bill amends Queensland's Education (General Provisions) Act 2006 to reduce red tape for schools, parents and students, and to strengthen student safety when children transfer between schools. It implements a Royal Commission recommendation to make student transfer notes mandatory, streamlines consent for digital learning platforms, extends home education eligibility, and modernises the rules for Parents and Citizens' Associations.

This bill introduces a 'No Card, No Start' policy for Queensland's blue card system, meaning no one can begin paid work with children without first holding a working with children clearance. It also modernises the blue card application process with online options, expands the criminal offences that automatically disqualify a person from working with children, closes loopholes that allowed high-risk people to rely on exemptions, and creates a centralised register of home-based care services.

This bill overhauls Queensland's blue card (Working with Children Check) system. It introduces a new risk-based decision-making framework replacing the current 'best interests' test, expands the types of work and businesses that require blue cards, simplifies the disqualification process, removes blue card requirements for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kinship carers, and improves information sharing between agencies.

This bill amends Queensland's tobacco laws to ban smoking in many more outdoor public places, including bus stops, outdoor malls, public swimming pools, skate parks, under-age sports grounds, childcare centres and aged care homes. It also stops the sale of smoking products from pop-up stalls at festivals and gives councils a new general power to ban smoking at other outdoor public places.