The VEYLDF Names Self-Care as Learning. Toilet Learning Belongs There.

The 2026 update to the Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework gives the sector a refreshed, research-informed map of how children learn from birth to eight years. It is built around three connected elements: Practice Principles that describe how professionals work, Learning and Development Outcomes that describe what children learn, and Transitions that describe how learning carries across settings. Read closely, it also has something to say about a milestone the sector has rarely treated as teaching at all.

Toilet learning is not named in the framework. But the capability it represents is. And once you see where that capability sits, it becomes difficult to keep regarding this milestone as a matter of care alone.

Where the milestone lives

The clearest space for toilet learning is Outcome 3, children have a strong sense of wellbeing. The framework states that physical wellbeing is promoted through active play, movement, rest and nutrition, and that children learn to maintain their own basic hygiene practices and they contribute to and maintain basic health and safety practices. The outcome is evident, it continues, when children become strong in their physical learning and wellbeing, and are aware of and develop strategies to support their own mental and physical health and personal safety.

Toilet independence is one of the clearest examples a young child will ever encounter of taking on a self-care routine and exercising agency over their own body. It is a hygiene practice, a health practice and a moment of growing autonomy, all at once. By the framework’s own description, it sits inside the wellbeing outcome rather than beside it.

The framework asks for intentional teaching

The more telling point is not where the milestone sits, but how the framework says learning should happen. The VEYLDF is explicit that play works alongside deliberate teaching. It defines intentional teaching as professionals being deliberate and purposeful in their decisions about what children learn and how to support them, including understanding where a child’s learning is at, planning experiences, asking thoughtful questions and building on what children already know.

Its integrated teaching and learning model weaves three approaches together: child-directed learning, guided learning and adult-led learning. The framework is clear that professionals move intentionally between following, guiding and leading, depending on what the learning requires.

For most areas of early learning, this is exactly what happens. Literacy, numeracy, social and emotional development and early scientific thinking are observed, planned for and taught. Toilet learning has rarely had the same treatment. Not because educators lack care or commitment, but because they have never been trained to teach it. Where guidance exists at all, it tends to be sporadic and unstructured rather than a shared method. The gap is in the sector, not in the practice.

Families are named as partners

The framework’s second Practice Principle holds that families are children’s first and most important teachers, and that partnerships are built on trust, shared decision-making and the exchange of information about what children are doing in each other’s care. It also names continuity across home and centre as central to children’s wellbeing and to smooth transitions.

Toilet learning is one of the few milestones that genuinely unfolds in both places at once. A child may be supported one way at home and another way at the centre, across different educators and different rooms, often without a shared plan. The framework’s emphasis on family partnership and continuity is precisely the structure this milestone needs, and rarely has.

The through-line to school

Underpinning the whole framework is a developmental argument. Play-based intentional teaching in the early years, it says, builds the foundation for the explicit teaching that follows in school, and the experiences children have now build strong foundations for lifelong wellbeing. Self-care mastery is part of that foundation. A child who moves through toilet learning with confidence and dignity carries that security into the transitions ahead.

From naming to practice

None of this requires the framework to mention toilet learning by name. The capability is already described, the teaching method is already prescribed and the family partnership is already expected. What has been missing is a way to bring intentional teaching, family partnership and whole-centre consistency to this one milestone the way the sector already brings them to literacy and numeracy.

That is the gap Go Time–Potty Time Early Learning was built to close. It is a structured, whole-centre approach to toilet learning, mapped to the EYLF V2.0 and the National Quality Standard, and sitting comfortably inside the VEYLDF’s own language of self-care, wellbeing and intentional teaching. When this milestone is treated as learning, and taught with intention, children move through it with more agency and more dignity. The framework already tells us that is worth planning for.

A note on scope: the VEYLDF is one of three approved national frameworks alongside the EYLF and My Time, Our Place, and is mandatory for Victorian Government-funded kindergarten services, with other settings able to use the VEYLDF, the EYLF or both. Because the five Learning and Development Outcomes are shared across these frameworks, the alignment described here holds nationally, not only in Victoria.

State of Victoria (Department of Education). (2026). Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework: For all children from birth to 8 years. Melbourne: Department of Education. Reproduced and quoted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. 

Monica Barker is the founder of My Binkie Bear and the creator of Go Time–Potty Time Early Learning, an evidence-based framework for toilet learning in early childhood settings. Drawing on developmental psychology, occupational therapy and the paediatric continence evidence base, her work reframes toilet learning as an area of intentional teaching rather than a task families manage and the centre merely supports.