Arrival: Information for long day care services

What is Arrival?

Arrival is a new purpose-built system that replaces the Kindergarten Information Management System (KIMS) for mandatory kindergarten data reporting. Arrival also includes functionality to enable services offering a sessional kindergarten program services to collect and report attendance data.

Why is there a new system?

Arrival replaces KIMS, making it the central place for managing existing data reporting and the digital collection of daily kindergarten attendance data from services offering a sessional kindergarten program. Arrival’s increased functionality makes it easier for Victorian funded kindergarten services to input information about their funded kindergarten programs.

Data collected through Arrival will help drive our collective efforts to support kindergarten attendance, so that all Victorian children receive the full learning and developmental benefits of a quality early childhood education.

When will long day care services need to start using Arrival?

Since January 2025, all funded kindergarten services started entering their enrolment, teacher or educator and program information into Arrival in place of the department’s previous data collection system, KIMS.

All mandatory data collections (Annual Confirmation and the Annual Kindergarten Census) are also managed through Arrival.

Transitioning to Arrival

KIMS will remain in use in 2026 for the following purposes:
- Historic funding reports viewed and exported
- SRF planning and acquittals
From 2027, it is expected that all KIMS functions will be managed through Arrival. 
The department is strengthening user access requirements to meet best practice standards for information security. Arrival users require an individual email address with a service or provider-based domain (e.g. tilly.smith@ examplekinder.com.au).

By implementing robust security measures across multiple levels (network, data, and application) the system supports all required laws, regulations, and standards relating to security, compliance, and privacy, including government standards for protected data. These measures all work together to safeguard sensitive personal child data.
Community-based service providers will be supported to set up compliant emails through the department’s free Kindergarten IT program (operated by the State Library on behalf of the department).
Private providers can access publicly available support to register an email domain and set up a business email account.
- How to set up your own business email account | Business Victoria
- Domain Registrar | Education Services Australia
Instructions on how to identify and update non-compliant email addresses in KIMS are available for community-based providers and private providers.
Arrival uses a role-based access model with different levels of user access. This provides organisations with control over who can access different types of information at a service level and across the organisation.
The different roles in Arrival include:
- service provider administrator
- service administrator
- service provider user
- service user.
The Service Provider Administrator is able to create and update users’ accounts, including changing their level of access.
At a service-level, the Service Administrator is also able to create and update users’ email accounts, including their level of access.
To safeguard sensitive personal child data, Arrival adheres to all required laws, regulation, and standards relating to security, compliance, and privacy. This is done through the use of robust security measures across multiple levels (network, data, and application).
All information is handled in accordance with the Department of Education’s Privacy Policy and relevant privacy legislation including the Privacy and Data Protection Act 2014 (Vic) and the Health Records Act 2001 (Vic).

Annual confirmation data collection

From 2026, service providers can enter enrolment information in Arrival using the following methods:
- the rollover function: When a child is ‘rolled over’, the current enrolment record is marked as inactive and a new record for the next funding year is created. All the child details are copied across and can be updated as required. Service providers will need to enter the service offering and program model for the child.
- manual creation: where service providers will be required to enter all Three-Year-Old and Four-Year-Old Kindergarten enrolment data into Arrival manually, or
- the bulk upload function: multiple child information can be uploaded at once using the spreadsheet available in Arrival Help – Multiple child upload for enrolment data.
Step-by-step guidance is available via the Help link in Arrival.

Attendance data collection

Why is the department collecting attendance data now?

Long day care services that already provide attendance data to the Australian Government via the Child Care Subsidy System (CCSS), are not required to provide attendance data through Arrival.

For long day care services that offer sessional programs, the department will work with long day care service providers to determine the best way to collect attendance data for children in sessional programs that do not have their attendance recorded in the CCSS.

Victorian attendance data collected via CCSS, together with the sessional attendance data from Arrival will form a statewide attendance data set for national reporting. All attendance data will be aggregated and de-identified for reporting purposes and will not be identifiable at a child, service or provider level.

More information

For technical support, please contact the Arrival Helpdesk:

Phone: 1800 614 810 between 9 am and 5 pm Monday to Friday
Email: Arrival.Helpdesk@education.vic.gov.au

If you have any other questions, please contact your local Early Childhood Improvement Branch.

Education & training

Updated 27 March 2026