Healthy living in Out of School Hours Care

Building healthy habits can help kids to live a healthier life and do their best at school.

Our Eat Smart Play Smart manual can assist your Out of School Hours Care (OOSHC) service to support children’s health. It also helps you meet National Quality Standards.

The benefits of healthy living programs in OOSHC

Healthy eating and physical activity support children’s healthy growth and development. Healthy living can also reduce their risk of many diseases and help them succeed at school.

Research suggests students who eat healthily are more likely to:

• concentrate better and remember more
• perform better academically
• have better mental health.

As an OOSHC service provider, you and your staff can play an important part in helping kids create healthy habits – for life.

Eat Smart Play Smart manual

The Eat Smart Play Smart manual supports OOSHC services to meet the National Quality Standards for healthy eating and physical activity. It is designed to help you encourage school-aged children to enjoy preparing and eating healthy food and getting active.

This resource is full of information to help your service provide healthy options for kids in your care. Developed by experts, it covers:

• healthy food ideas
• food allergies and intolerances
• planning for and delivering physical activity

Download Eat Smart Play Smart - A Manual for Out of School Hours Care, Third Edition (2016) (PDF 5.8MB).

The manual was updated in 2018 to reflect revisions to the National Quality Standards (NQS). To see pages of the manual affected by the NQS changes, refer to NQS Updates to Eat Smart Play Smart manual (PDF 360 KB). In the copy of the manual, these are on pages 9 to 14.

Other OOSHC resources

The National Quality Standards (NQS) sets a high national benchmark for early childhood education and care and outside school hours care services in Australia. The Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA) has resources available to help your service promote and prioritise children’s health, safety and wellbeing.

How to engage a physical activity program provider

In OOSHC  kids can get active by playing and taking part in sport, games and activities. Your centre might also like to use an external provider to deliver physical activity programs.

To help you with this, we’ve developed guidelines for choosing and engaging a provider. They include:

• information about the benefits of physical activity and how you can help kids get active
• a checklist of what to consider when hiring an external provider
• a checklist of your responsibilities when you hire an external provider
• a list of organisations and resources you may choose to access.

Download the Guidelines for Using External Providers for Physical Activity in Out of School Hours Centre (PDF 741 KB).​