Can you keep working in childcare while pregnant?
Most educators can, for most of a pregnancy, and many do. What should change is the work, not your employment: your service should review the manual tasks in your room with you and adjust them as the pregnancy progresses, because pregnancy alters your balance, ligaments and fatigue and makes the same lift harder on your back and pelvis than it was before. Telling your director early, agreeing which tasks to reduce or stop, and following your own health professional's advice are the three things that make it work. This guide covers what a risk assessment should look at, what adjusted duties typically involve, how to have the conversation and where to get advice.
Last reviewed September 2026 · Applies to the Manual Handling Training for Childcare and Early Childhood Educators course.
What pregnancy changes about manual handling
Three things change. Hormonal changes loosen ligaments throughout the body, including in the pelvis and lower back, so joints are less stable under load. Your centre of gravity moves forward and your balance changes, which matters when you are lowering a child into a cot or carrying one on uneven ground. And fatigue arrives sooner, particularly in the first and third trimesters, so the posture that was fine at 9 am is not fine at 4 pm. Later in pregnancy, holding a child close to your body — the single most important element of a safe lift — becomes physically harder.
None of this is a reason to stop working with children. It is a reason to treat pregnancy as a change in the risk assessment for the tasks you do, which is exactly what WHS law expects: a hazardous manual task must be reassessed when something about the worker, the task or the environment changes. Module 6 of the course, Lifting, Carrying and Working with Children, includes a section on pregnancy, and Module 4, Risk Assessment and the Hierarchy of Controls, covers the reasoning.
This guide is general safety education. It is not medical advice, and it does not replace the advice of your own doctor or midwife about what you should and should not do in your particular pregnancy.
What a risk assessment and adjusted duties usually involve
When you tell your service, the director or nominated supervisor should sit down with you and go through the manual tasks in your room. Good services use a written checklist and revisit it each trimester or whenever you ask. The adjustments below are typical, and the course outlines the same ones.
Adjustments should be written down and shared with the room team so that a colleague picks up the lift without you having to ask each time. If a change is not working, say so; the assessment is meant to be revisited, not filed.
- Fewer lifts overall — more time in the preschool or kindergarten room where children walk, climb and carry things themselves
- No double carries, and no carrying a child while also carrying bags, bins or equipment
- No lifting loaded buggies, water troughs, sandpit covers, stacks of stretcher beds or trestle tables; a colleague or a trolley does it
- Seated settling in an adult chair rather than standing and rocking; a hand on the child in the cot where your service's sleep practice allows
- Cot bases and change tables set high enough that you are not stooping, and steps used for every child who can climb
- More frequent short breaks, and a chair available during floor time and outdoor supervision
- A review of the excursion role — pushing a buggy over kerbs and hills is a sustained-force task
Talking to your director, and your rights
Tell your director as early as you are comfortable doing so. Many educators wait until the second trimester for personal reasons, which is entirely your choice, but the first trimester is when fatigue and nausea often peak and when the service can quietly reduce your lifting without anyone else needing to know why. You can frame it purely as a manual handling review if you prefer.
Under WHS law your provider must manage the risks of hazardous manual tasks so far as is reasonably practicable, and that duty applies to you as a pregnant worker just as it does to an injured one. Australian workplace law also protects employees from being treated unfavourably because of pregnancy, and the Fair Work Act includes an entitlement for eligible employees to be transferred to a safe job, or to take no safe job leave, where a medical practitioner certifies that it is inadvisable to continue in the current position. The Fair Work Ombudsman publishes plain-language information on these entitlements, and the details depend on your employment arrangement, so check them for your own situation rather than relying on this guide.
If your concerns are not acted on, escalate them in writing through your service's process — Module 8, Reporting, Incidents and Ongoing Safety, covers how — and, if necessary, to your health and safety representative or the WHS regulator in your state or territory.
Where the provider's duty starts and this course stops
The course gives you the reasoning: why pregnancy changes the risk, which tasks are highest, what adjusted duties look like and how to raise them. Your approved provider must actually do the assessment, change the roster and the room, provide the equipment and keep checking in as the pregnancy progresses. Your health professional advises on what is right for you medically.
Returning to work after the birth needs the same review in reverse. Abdominal and pelvic floor recovery affects lifting for some months, and the tasks should be reintroduced with that in mind rather than all at once on your first day back. Again, follow your own health professional's advice and ask your service for a written plan.
Common questions
Sources
- Safe Work Australia — Model Code of Practice: Hazardous manual tasks — The national code the state and territory regulators adopt or mirror.
- Safe Work Australia — Lifting, pushing and pulling (manual tasks)
- ACECQA — National Quality Framework — Education and Care Services National Law and Regulations.
General information about Australian work health and safety duties, not legal advice. Your employer’s procedures and the regulator in your state take precedence.
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