Levels of Care
‍The Registration Requirement
Under Chapter 4: Satisfactory Levels of Care of the Guide to the registration standards and other requirements for non-government schools effective 1 January 2024, the Director General must be satisfied that your proposed school will provide satisfactory levels of care for its students. Your proposed school's governing body and executive leadership team hold absolute operational and common law accountability for embedding robust systems that safeguard student physical health, psychological wellbeing, safety, and human rights across all localised and external learning environments.
To satisfy this overarching care requirement, your proposed school must demonstrate an integrated, multi layered pastoral ecosystem before opening. This framework must detail clear parameters for proactive student support, implement robust risk mitigation plans for future external programmes, and explicitly guarantee unassailable anti-discrimination protections for all intended cohorts. To meet the Department's basic rules, this initial levels of care portfolio must be fully submitted at least six months before the school is proposed to commence.
đź’ˇ Expert Compliance Note: Case managers use a rigorous forensic approach when evaluating care plans during initial registration reviews. For a brand new school entity, case managers cannot look at live risk registers, staff induction rosters, or populated student care files. Instead, they will thoroughly examine your proposed pastoral policies, blank risk templates, draft student handbooks, and prospective staff training schedules. Gaps in your non-delegable duty of care mappings, an inability to outline how you will manage student pregnancy protections, or an informal, untracked approach to anti-discrimination adjustments will trigger an immediate compliance flag during your pre-operational review. The templates in our bundle are systematically engineered to clear these hurdles from day one.
‍Official References
The application form and guide are available for download via the links below.
👉 Application for registration document.
‍ 👉 Guide to the registration standards and other requirements for non-government schools effective 1 January 2024‍ ‍
Your Downloadable Template Bundle
‍Your membership includes full access to our Levels of Care Templates Bundle. This all in one ZIP file contains every document, policy, and register required to build a compliant framework.
👉 Download Levels of Care Templates Bundle ZIP File
‍📌 Please Note: Not all of these templates will suit your school, but they give you a good range to get through registration.
‍Inside your download, you will find:
Pastoral Care, Support, and Duty of Care
Duty of Care Policy
Pastoral Care Policy
Student Learning and Wellbeing Policy
Student Pregnancy and Parenting Support Policy
Anti-Discrimination and Inclusive Frameworks
Disability Discrimination Policy
Racial Discrimination Policy
Sex Discrimination and Sexual Harassment Policy
Risk Management and Co-Curricular Programs
Community Service Program Parental Consent and Liability Waiver
Community Service Program Policy
Risk Management Policy and Procedure
Risk Register
Internal Proposed Evidence
Recommended Checklist for Part B Submission: To help build out your submission folder for Part B of the Application for initial registration, we recommend gathering these key internal files from your school records. Please note that while these specific documents are recommended to help evidence your compliance, this is a practical guide rather than an exhaustive checklist.
Proposed Duty of Care and Pastoral Policies: Your finalised, board endorsed policies explicitly setting out the non-delegable care boundaries for all future teaching and support staff.
Blank Master Operational Risk Register Template: A blank copy of your central tracking spreadsheet, proving your future leadership team is equipped to identify, score, and treat hazards systematically across all campus sectors.
Blank External Activity Risk Assessment Forms: Pro-forma risk worksheets detailing staff to student supervision multipliers, medical triage profiles, and local emergency contacts prepared for high risk co-curricular operations.
Blank Community Programme Consent Forms and Waivers: Pro-forma parental permission templates built to ensure no student leaves campus for external service or off-site tasks without formal parental sign-off.
Blank Student Welfare and Individual Care Plan Layouts: Master templates designed to record targeted student adjustments, support matrices, or academic accommodations under your student wellbeing frameworks.
Blank Parenting and Pregnancy Accommodation Templates: Pro-forma learning arrangement sheets designed to ensure flexible pathways and continuity of education lines are preserved without bias.
Proposed Staff Duty of Care Induction Checklists: Blank professional briefing checklists and sign-off registers ensuring that 100% of future employees formally review and accept duty of care boundaries during onboarding.
Blank Discrimination Grievance Tracking Ledgers: Pro-forma incident registers built to ensure any future complaints are centrally logged with separate columns for intake dates, investigation steps, and formal resolution timelines.
Proposed Student Voice and Consultation Blueprints: A documented framework detailing your planned methods (such as student focus groups, feedback boxes, or safety committees) to ensure students actively contribute to the school's care culture.
Proposed Board Pastoral Review Schedules: A formal governance calendar proving that the school board is structurally programmed to evaluate aggregated, de-identified pastoral metrics and risk profiles at least once a year.
Compliance Tips & Hidden Requirements
School registration reviews in WA have a few unique, specific traps that catch boards out. Make sure your team knows these hidden rules:
The Legal Scope of Non-Delegable Duty of Care (Page 16): Your documentation will instantly fail an initial review if it implies that staff duty of care obligations stop at the physical school boundary or outside standard operating hours. Under common law and the parameters explained in Chapter 4, a school’s duty of care is completely non-delegable. Your Duty of Care Policy must explicitly state that this legal responsibility covers all school sanctioned co-curricular programmes, community service blocks, and alternative delivery environments.
The Absolute Continuity of Education for Student Parents (Page 16): A common registration pitfall is operating a pastoral framework that treats student pregnancy or parenting as an administrative disruption or a disciplinary issue. Under Chapter 4 guidelines, your child welfare and inclusive safety frameworks must protect vulnerable student profiles from exclusion. Your Student Pregnancy and Parenting Support Policy must enforce strict equity safeguards. To pass an audit, your procedures must explicitly guarantee that pregnant or parenting students are provided with flexible learning arrangements and modified attendance pathways, ensuring their enrolment cannot be unlawfully restricted or cancelled.
The Anti-Discrimination Systemic Link (Pages 16–17): Case managers look very closely at how your school handles systemic inclusion and protective behaviours under the broader care mandates. Your Disability, Racial, and Sex Discrimination policies cannot simply be a copy paste of general legislation. They must detail clear, localised intake paths, specify strict internal resolution timelines, and explicitly show a friction-free link to your staff disciplinary procedures. If an initial review reveals that a discrimination complaint or boundary issue involving a vulnerable student lacks a clear, documented investigation track, it will be flagged as an operational failure.
The Student Co-Design and Consultation Imperative (Page 17): A common trap is designing child safe frameworks entirely from a top down corporate lens. Under Chapter 4, your school must prove that its care systems incorporate active student voice in safety and care practices. To clear a registration review, your Pastoral Care Policy and Student Learning and Wellbeing Policy structures must include documented frameworks proving that your cohorts will be formally consulted and will actively contribute to shaping the school's care and safety culture.
The Co-Curricular Risk and Critical Incident Interlock (Standard 7 / Standard 14 Intersect): Your community service and external co-curricular operations must tell a perfectly aligned safety story. While Standard 14 governs your external delivery tracks, any off-site service programme managed under your Community Service Programme Policy must mandate a pre-departure risk calculation that maps directly into your master Risk Register. Furthermore, if an accident occurs off-site resulting in injury, your procedures must show that the localised crisis instantly triggers your Standard 7 critical incident response protocols and mandatory reporting timelines within 24 hours.
House Operational Risk Tips (Not Explicitly in the Guide)
Mask Technical Database Fields and Keys: When saving your proposed risk tracking software blueprints, database configuration maps, or sample care log layouts to your Part B evidence folder, maintain a strict privacy boundary. All system keys, database rows, or mock student data indicators must be completely blocked out or replaced with standard placeholders like [ID Number Redacted] to satisfy strict administrative data protection expectations.
Remove Personal Names from Welfare Templates: Ensure your draft individualised student welfare plans, pregnancy support portfolios, and special consideration forms utilise entirely neutral tags like Student A or Case Profile B instead of real personal names before saving copies to the compliance folder.
Enforce Secure Document Version Controls: Lock cell editing configurations or apply secure password encryption to your master operational risk register templates and discrimination grievance logs on your shared drive. This stops casual updates from accidentally modifying your board approved safety tracking parameters before they are evaluated by your case manager.
Compliance Quick Check
Before you finish, double check that your school leadership has completed and marked off these specific items required on the official initial application form:
Does your proposed public facing pastoral/ Anti-Discrimination and Inclusive Frameworks feature an explicit, board approved anti-discrimination pathway that details exactly how future grievances are triaged and resolved?
Can you prove through your master risk register template that all future co-curricular and community service programmes must undergo formal, written risk evaluations prior to student departure?
Is your draft duty of care policy fully integrated into your staff onboarding workflows, ensuring that 100% of future employees must complete signed compliance attestations on file during induction?
Do your student care procedures explicitly guarantee that pregnant or parenting students will be provided with flexible learning arrangements and modified attendance pathways?
📌 Now don’t forget to save your evidence in your created folder in your school's shared drive (Google Drive or OneDrive).