This guide explains Tanda's Australian Child Employment Rules feature, how to enable it, and how to manage school details and exemptions for under-18 employees.
When a rostered shift may breach a state-based child employment law, Tanda flags it as a warning on the roster so you can review and adjust before publishing.
This feature is still rolling out to all customers, so you may not see this feature in your account yet. Please reach out to the support team if you would like it enabled now.
What this help guide covers:
Prerequisites
Before Tanda can apply child employment rule checks, a few things need to be in place:
Location state must be recorded. Tanda uses the state of each location to determine which rules apply. Go to Workforce > Teams, open each location, and confirm the address includes a valid Australian state.
Date of Birth on the employee profile. The employee's age must be set for the employment rule validations to apply.
School details on the employee profile. Tanda needs to know whether an employee attends school to calculate school-day and non-school-day limits. Most warnings will not appear for an employee until their school details have been filled in. See Adding School Details below.
Enabling Child Employment Rules
Child employment rules are a type of roster validation. To enable/disable them, navigate to Settings > All Settings > Roster Validations and look for Child Employment Rules:
By default, child employment rule breaches appear as warnings and do not prevent the roster from being published. You can adjust the validation to be Blocking or Disabled from here.
Adding School Details to Employee Profiles
Managers and admins can add school details to an employee's profile, or the employee can add their school in the app. An employee must have their school details entered for every employment rule to flag in the roster.
Note: Some employment rules like curfews and minimum age requirements will be triggered in applicable states regardless of whether school details are entered.
To set up an employee's school details for them:
Go to Workforce > Staff and open the employee's profile.
Open the Personal > School Details tab. This tab will only appear if the employee is under 18 years of age.
Select whether the employee attends school. If yes, set the school type as Public or Private.
If the school is private, you will be prompted to select the year and enter the term start and end dates for each term.
If the school is public, you will not be required to set the term dates. Choosing the year will just display the term dates for that year.
Click Save.
Note: Public school term dates are pre-loaded in Tanda based on each state's published school calendar. You do not need to enter term dates manually for public school employees.
Applying Exemptions
Some employees may be legally exempt from certain child employment rules, for example, if they work in a family business, in the entertainment industry, or as a delivery worker under a permit. Exemptions are applied per employee from their profile.
Go to Workforce > Staff and open the employee's profile.
Click the School Details tab.
Under Child employment exemptions, click Add Exemption.
Enter the details of the exemption and click Add.
Click Save.
Once an exemption is applied, Tanda will not flag warnings in the roster for that employee and date range.
Student Free Days
Schools sometimes close for students on days that fall within a school term. On these days, a child is not required to attend school, so the stricter school-day rules should not apply.
You can mark specific dates as student free days on an employee's School Details tab. Tanda will then treat those dates as non-school days when checking roster rules.
To add a student free day:
Go to Workforce > Staff and open the employee's profile
Click the School Details tab
Under Student Free Days, click the relevant date on the calendar. The day is saved immediately and can be viewed with all other selected student free days on the right-hand side.
To remove a student free day, click the same date again to deselect it.
Note: Student free days are recorded per employee. There is no shared calendar, as student free days vary by school. Private school term dates also need to be entered per employee for the same reason.
Employees Adding Their Own School Details
Employees can enter their own school details during the onboarding process, or update them at any time from the mobile app.
This can be found under their profile in the top right of the app > Personal Details > School Details.
Only employees under 18 in Australia will be asked if they attend school. If they select yes, they can set whether they attend a public or private school. If their school is private, they will need to enter their term dates, whereas if they are public, the term dates will be automatically entered.
Note: Public school term dates will be automatically updated for each year, whereas private school employees will need to update them manually.
Employees cannot enter exemptions and student-free days themselves. These must be entered on staff profiles by a manager or admin.
Roster Warnings
When a shift may breach a child employment rule, it will appear under the Warnings tab on the roster if the validation is set to Warning or Blocking, as configured above.
Common rules that can trigger warnings include:
School hours restriction: Children cannot be rostered during school hours (generally 8:30am to 3:30pm on school days). The exact age this applies to varies by state.
Daily and weekly hour caps: Some states limit how many hours a child can work per day or per week, with different limits during school term and school holidays.
Curfew: Several states restrict late-night work for children (for example, after 9:00pm in Victoria or after 10:00pm in Queensland).
Break requirements: Some states require a break of a minimum length after a set number of hours in a shift.
Important: Tanda's hour checks only count hours rostered in each Tanda account. Child employment laws count hours worked across all employers, so if an employee works for another employer as well, the actual total hours may be higher than what Tanda can see.
Shifts rostered for locations in South Australia, New South Wales and Tasmania will only flag child employment rules if the School Details tab is set up for staff, as restrictions only apply in these states on school days.
Shifts rostered in other states/territories can still flag certain warnings when the school details tab is not configured, such as:
Curfews (e.g. no work between 10pm and 6am)
Shift Gaps (e.g. at least 12 hours between shifts)
Shift Counts (e.g. at most one shift per day)
Minimum working age (e.g. must not be employed under 13 years)
Break requirements (e.g. no more than 4 hours worked before a 1-hour rest break)
Daily/weekly maximum hours for a non-school week (e.g. At most 38 hours in a non-school week)
Viewing the Rules Reference
To see a breakdown of the child employment rules that apply to each of your locations, go to Settings > Roster Settings > View Child Employment Rules. This page lists the applicable rules per state and includes links to the relevant legislation for each jurisdiction.
FAQs
Why aren't warnings showing for my under-18 employee?
Why aren't warnings showing for my under-18 employee?
Check the following:
Confirm the location (Workforce > Teams) has a valid Australian state recorded in the address.
Confirm the employee has a date of birth recorded on their profile. Without a date of birth, no child employment rules will apply.
If warnings for school hours restrictions or term-time hour caps are missing, check that the employee's School Details tab has been filled in. These rules require school details to determine when school days and term weeks fall.
Note: In NSW, SA, and TAS, all child employment rules depend on school day information, so no warnings will appear for employees in those states until school details are set up.
What if the employee's school doesn't have term dates on file?
What if the employee's school doesn't have term dates on file?
Public school term dates are pre-loaded in Tanda by state. For private schools, the manager or employee needs to enter term dates manually. These dates are stored on each employee's profile individually.
Private school term dates can typically be found online (such as on the school's website).
If an employee has no school details set up, or is marked as not attending school, Tanda cannot determine school days or term weeks. In that case:
School-hours restrictions and term-time hour caps will not fire, as Tanda has no school calendar to check against
Age-based rules will still apply, including curfews, minimum age blocks, shift gaps, and break requirements, which fire based on date of birth alone
For NSW, SA, and TAS specifically, all rules require school day information, so no warnings will appear at all without school details
To ensure full coverage of all applicable rules, school details should be set up for every employee they apply to.
Can I enable rules for some locations but not others in the same state?
Can I enable rules for some locations but not others in the same state?
Not currently.