Blue Card requirements for contractors at Queensland schools
The most common compliance question schools ask about trades, and the most commonly misunderstood. Here is the decision tree, in plain language.
The short answer: it depends on the work, not the job title
Queensland's Blue Card system regulates child-related work. For contractors at schools, the question is whether the work is directed at children or gives more than incidental contact with them, and whether the person is an employee or runs the business.
Employed tradespeople
Most employed tradespeople who enter schools to do maintenance do not need a Blue Card, because their work is not directed towards children and any contact is incidental. The main exceptions: teaching or supervising vocational or trade studies with students, and doing maintenance in early-childhood areas such as outside-school-hours care or a state kindergarten while children are present.
Business owners and operators
The rules are stricter for the person who owns or operates the business. From 20 September 2025, a Blue Card is generally required if you own or operate a business whose activities include carrying out work within a school, and the limited exemption below does not apply to business operators doing regulated work. Existing contractors were given until 20 March 2026 to apply; that window has closed.
The seven-day exemption
A person may work in a regulated environment without a Blue Card for no more than seven days in a calendar year. It is a narrow allowance for genuinely brief engagements, it does not apply to restricted persons, and it does not apply to business owners or operators carrying out regulated work. If a contractor is on site across multiple jobs through the year, the days add up.
What a Negative Notice means
A Negative Notice is a formal decision that a person must not work with children. It is not a lapsed card or an administrative gap; it is a prohibition. A school's system, whatever form it takes, must be able to stop that person at the gate every time, without relying on someone remembering.
What the school itself must do
The obligations do not sit only with the contractor. The school needs a record of who requires a card, current card numbers and expiry dates per person, a re-check cadence, and a sign-in process that actually consults that record. A register that lists companies but not the individuals who show up cannot answer the question that matters: is this person, today, entitled to be here? High-risk jobs add a second layer on top of card checks: see what a permit-to-work covers.
Keeping it current without the spreadsheet grind
Card expiries, personnel changes and the 2025 rule changes make this a moving target. Onsitr tracks Blue Card status and expiry per person, validates at QR sign-in, and blocks a Negative Notice automatically, as part of the broader school contractor compliance picture.
Authoritative sources: the Queensland Government's Blue Card pages for tradespeople and schools.
This article is general information, not legal advice. Requirements change; always confirm your obligations against current Queensland Government guidance and your own legal advice.