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.
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:
As an OOSHC service provider, you and your staff can play an important part in helping kids create healthy habits – for life.
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:
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.
To help you get started, you might like to try these easy recipes from the Eat Smart Play Smart manual.
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.
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:
Download the Guidelines for Using External Providers for Physical Activity in Out of School Hours Centre (PDF 741 KB).