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The kids’ smartwatch is about to meet the law.

For most of a decade the children’s smartwatch has been the compromise device: calls to a short list of approved numbers, a GPS dot on a parent’s phone, an SOS button, and no browser or social media to worry about. It has also been a grey area at school. That ends in Victoria on 28 January 2027, when an Act that received Royal Assent on 4 August 2026 obliges every school in the state, government and non-government, to restrict wearables as well as phones. Here is what the Act actually requires, how NSW and Queensland handle the same device today, what the two dominant products cost to run, and what two researchers did to a sub-$30 one in front of a Black Hat audience last month.

Published 12 September 202613 min readSnapshot: 12 September 2026
This is a dated snapshot of Australian school policy, legislation and the children’s wearables market as they stood on 12 September 2026, not a hands-on test of any product, so there is no score. Every date, price and figure below comes from a cited source — principally the Victorian Parliament and Premier, the NSW and Queensland education departments, Spacetalk’s own listings and ASX filings, Telstra, Apple’s support documentation and published security research — listed at the end. Where we reason beyond the sources, we say so. Prices are the retailers’ listed prices on the capture date and change without notice.

The short version

  • Victoria has legislated. The Education and Training Reform Amendment Act 2026 (Act No. 25/2026) passed the Legislative Council on 28 July 2026 and received Royal Assent on 4 August. From 28 January 2027 a school must have a policy restricting student use of personal electronic devices during school hours to remain eligible for registration; existing schools have until 1 July 2027 to demonstrate compliance.
  • Wearables are named. The government’s stated standard is that mobile phones are switched off and stored away from first to final bell, that wearables such as smartwatches and wireless earbuds have notifications, cellular connection and recording functions disabled, and that personal audio devices are not usable during school hours. Students who need a device to monitor a health condition are the stated exception.
  • The other big states are looser, on paper. Queensland’s state-school procedure, in force since 12 February 2024, requires only that smartwatch notifications be switched off. NSW’s state-level policy documents do not mention smartwatches at all; individual NSW public schools set their own rule, and the ones we read require aeroplane mode or a school-time mode.
  • The market is two products and a plan. Spacetalk, the ASX-listed Australian brand, lists its Loop at $249 and Adventurer 2 at $259, each needing a mandatory plan from $13.75 to $17.99 a month. Telstra became the first major Australian carrier to support Apple Watch For Your Kids on 6 June 2026, at $20 a month on top of a parent’s plan.
  • The cheap end failed badly. On 7 August 2026 at Black Hat, researchers Vangelis Stykas and Felipe Solferini showed they could locate a WIRED reporter, photograph him and listen through his sub-$30 kids’ watch knowing only the email address it was registered to. They traced dozens of brands to three Chinese back-end platforms.

What Victoria actually passed

Victoria banned phones in government-school classrooms in 2020 and has spent six years telling everyone it worked. The Premier’s release of 1 April 2026 announcing the extension summarised an evaluation as finding students more focused in class, more social at breaks, and involved in fewer critical incidents involving phones. What is new is the reach. The Bill was introduced into the Legislative Assembly that same day by Education Minister Ben Carroll, passed the Assembly on 18 June, passed the Council on 28 July, and received Royal Assent on 4 August 2026 as Act No. 25 of 2026.

Three features matter for a parent holding a watch box. First, the mechanism is registration, not a fine. The amendment to the Education and Training Reform Act 2006 makes a compliant device-restriction policy a condition of a school being registered, which is why it reaches Catholic and independent schools that the 2020 ministerial policy never did. Russell Kennedy’s reading of the Bill, published 16 April 2026, is that the provisions commence on 28 January 2027 and that a school already registered on that date, or with an application pending, has until 1 July 2027 to demonstrate compliance.

Second, the standard the government has published for wearables is stricter than anything in force elsewhere in the country. The Premier’s release lists notifications, cellular connection and recording functions as the things to be disabled. Mr Carroll told Parliament the reason, as reported in the Parliament of Victoria’s own summary of the 14 July debate: not only can these devices distract, but many can covertly capture images and footage. A kids’ watch with a camera on the wrist is precisely the thing he is describing.

Third, the exception is narrow. The only carve-out the government has described is for students who require a device to monitor a health condition. The current Victorian government-school policy, last updated 19 February 2024, allows documented exceptions for learning activities, health and wellbeing, and risk management on offsite activities, and says wearables are excluded from the phone policy provided notifications are off. The new standard replaces that exclusion with a positive obligation.

Reasoning beyond the sources: the Act obliges each school to have a policy; it does not, on the material we have read, prescribe the exact settings a watch must be in. That is significant, because the products described below have a school mode that silences calls and messages while continuing to send the child’s location over the cellular network. Whether “cellular connection disabled” is satisfied by a watch that still talks to a tower to report where it is, is a question the government’s release does not answer and each school’s policy will. We would expect a good many Victorian schools to accept school mode and a good many to require the watch off or at home. If you are buying a watch for a Victorian child, the school’s 2027 policy is the document to read before the product page.

Queensland and NSW today

Queensland’s Department of Education procedure, Student use of mobile devices, version 1.1, took effect on 12 February 2024. It is unambiguous and short: wearable devices such as smartwatches must have notifications switched off so that calls, messages and other notifications cannot be sent or received during school hours. The list of exemptions is broad by comparison with Victoria’s, covering medical monitoring, disability and learning adjustments, communication devices, English-language support, students with carer or financial responsibilities, and senior assessment access arrangements. Students with an existing approval do not have to reapply. The procedure was due for review on 24 January 2026; the version we captured still showed 1.1.

NSW is the state where the answer depends on which school gate you walk through. The Department’s factsheet for parents, its 9 October 2023 announcement of the high-school ban, and its Student use of mobile phones in schools procedures, last updated 18 May 2026, do not mention smartwatches. What the state does is prescribe the phone ban, from Term 4 2023 in high schools on top of the existing primary ban, and hand principals a menu of implementation options: off and away, lockers, locked pouches, front-office collection, or collection at the start of each lesson.

Smartwatches are left to the school. The individual NSW public school policies we read do address them, and in similar terms. Willoughby Girls High School’s policy, version 1 of October 2023, says smartwatches need to be on aeroplane mode or not worn at school, and elsewhere in the same document accepts a “schooltime mode” for the duration of the day. Several primary schools publish a combined mobile phone and smartwatch policy on the same lines. The practical rule for a NSW parent is therefore whatever the school’s own document says, and the default across the ones we read is aeroplane mode.

Reasoning beyond the sources: aeroplane mode on a kids’ watch is a stronger restriction than Victoria’s published standard in one respect and weaker in another. It kills the cellular connection, so location reporting stops too, which parents who bought the watch for the GPS dot tend not to love. But it is a setting the child controls from the wrist, whereas the school modes described below are set by the parent and, in Apple’s case, report to the parent if the child turns them off.

What the device actually is

The Australian market is dominated by one local brand and one global one, and they are built on opposite philosophies.

Spacetalk is an Australian company listed on the ASX as SPA. It started life in 2001 as MGM Wireless, a school-to-home messaging business, launched the Spacetalk watch in 2017 and took the name for the whole company in 2020. Its watches are purpose-built for children: a short approved-contacts list, calls and texts over 4G, GPS location with alerts, an SOS button, a camera, and, by design, no internet browser and no social media. On 12 September 2026 the company’s own store listed the Loop at $249 (1.5-inch screen, 2 MP camera, a claimed 72 hours of battery, rated for ages four and up) and the Adventurer 2 at $259, marked down from $349 (HD video calling, 5 MP camera, a claimed 36 hours). Both are rated IP67 — a metre of water for 30 minutes — and the listing says plainly that swimming and bathing are not recommended.

The watch is the smaller purchase. Both ship with a preinstalled SIM and are, in the company’s words, soft-locked to Spacetalk SIMs in Australia, on Telstra’s 4G network. An active Spacetalk Watch Plan is mandatory: $17.99 for 30 days with 1 GB, $15.17 a month equivalent on a 180-day plan, or $13.75 a month equivalent on a 365-day plan with 30 GB. Over the two or three years a child typically wears one, the plan costs more than the hardware.

That is not an accident, and the company says so. Its half-year report for the six months to 31 December 2025, released 25 February 2026, described the business as having executed a pivot from a device-led model to a software-led, subscription model. Total income held at $10.1 million, annual recurring revenue rose 9 per cent to $12.0 million, recurring mobile subscription revenue rose 29 per cent to $3.9 million, and active Spacetalk Mobile subscribers grew from 45,600 to 57,400. Device revenue fell. The company’s guidance is for annual recurring revenue of $20 to $25 million for calendar 2026, which would be a substantial step up on a $12.0 million base, and we would note that guidance is a target, not a result. Its store also claims the title of Australia’s number-one kids’ smartwatch, attributed to GfK market research for the twelve months to January 2026; we have not seen the underlying GfK data.

Apple Watch For Your Kids, the feature previously called Family Setup, is the opposite approach: a full Apple Watch, paired to a parent’s iPhone rather than one of the child’s own, with the parent controlling contacts, location sharing through Find My, Emergency SOS, and a feature called Schooltime. Apple’s support documentation describes Schooltime as a parent-scheduled mode that restricts apps and turns on Do Not Disturb; the watch shows a yellow circle while it is active. If the child exits Schooltime, the parent gets a notification saying so and for how long, and during scheduled hours the mode re-engages when the child lowers their wrist.

What kept this niche in Australia for years was carriers. Vodafone supported Family Setup from around its 2020 launch; the big two did not. That changed on 6 June 2026 when Telstra launched the Telstra Watch Plan: $20 a month for unlimited standard calls and texts within Australia and 2 GB of data, with the child’s watch able to draw on data shared from other plans on the account. WhistleOut described Telstra as the first major local provider to support the feature. The catch is that the parent must be on an eligible Telstra Upfront mobile plan with a compatible iPhone, and the watch must be a cellular model; Telstra’s own August 2026 article names the Apple Watch SE 3 as its suggested option. Add the price of that watch to $240 a year in plan fees and the Apple route costs more than Spacetalk’s, in exchange for a device the child will not outgrow at twelve.

Telstra published a YouGov survey alongside that August article, conducted 17 to 23 June 2026 among 1,010 Australian parents of children aged five to twelve: 87 per cent said being able to contact their child when apart was important, and 82 per cent were interested in a device that keeps them in touch with a child who does not yet have a smartphone. That is a carrier’s survey in support of a carrier’s product, and we cite it as a measure of demand rather than of anything else. The ABC, in its 1 April 2026 report on the Victorian announcement, put smartwatch use among children aged seven to twelve at about 60 per cent; the report did not name the study in the passage we captured, so treat that as reported rather than verified.

Why the watch is suddenly the pitch

Reasoning beyond the sources: the under-16 social media minimum age, in force since 10 December 2025 and covered separately on this site, has changed what parents are shopping for. The kids’ watch has always been sold as the phone alternative; since December it has become the device that gives a child calls and a location without giving them anything the platforms can put an account on. Spacetalk’s “no social media, no internet browser” line was a feature in 2019; in 2026 it is the whole proposition. Telstra’s survey question about “a device that keeps them in touch with a child who does not yet have a smartphone” is the same idea put to a thousand parents. None of the sources draw this connection explicitly, and we flag it as our inference.

The school-ban politics cut the other way. The Victorian minister’s stated concern is the wrist-mounted camera and microphone, and the products above all have both. A device sold on the promise that it cannot be used for anything harmful is, from a classroom’s point of view, still a device that can photograph the classroom.

What happened at Black Hat

On 7 August 2026 at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, Vangelis Stykas and Felipe Solferini presented research that had begun with a children’s smartwatch bought for under US$30. As reported by WIRED’s Andy Greenberg, who had agreed to wear the watch, Stykas showed the audience where Greenberg was standing in New York in real time, remotely switched on the watch’s camera to photograph him stepping into a lift, and then switched on the microphone to listen to a conversation in the WIRED newsroom. The child, or in this case the reporter, sees nothing: no light, no indicator on the watch face. The only thing the researchers needed to take control was the email address the watch had been registered to.

The finding underneath the demonstration is the one that matters for anyone shopping the cheap end of a marketplace. Stykas and Solferini examined the supply chains of more than seventy GPS-enabled watches and vehicle trackers and found that dozens of apparently independent brands ran on three Chinese back-end platforms: YiQingTeng, also trading as Wonlex and known through its SETracker app; NewGPS2012; and SinoTrack. The flaws were of the elementary kind — missing authentication that let anyone command any device, and SQL injection exposing millions of records — and the researchers estimated tens of millions of trackers in circulation on the three platforms. SETracker told them the issues had been resolved long before; the researchers were still compromising a watch on its platform that week, and it stopped being exploitable only hours before the talk. NewGPS2012 and SinoTrack did not respond. Stykas had disclosed a closely related set of tracker vulnerabilities, known as Trackmageddon, in 2018.

Two things the research did not do, stated carefully. It did not name Spacetalk, Apple or any other established brand as affected; the products it examined were the unbranded and white-label watches that fill marketplace listings. And it does not prove that any branded product is secure, because it did not examine them. What it demonstrates is that the mechanism a kids’ watch depends on — a cloud service that knows where a child is and can turn on a camera and microphone on their wrist — is exactly as safe as the authentication on that service, and that at the bottom of the market there was, until August, effectively none.

Reasoning beyond the sources: Australia’s smart-device security standard, in force since 4 March 2026 and examined on this site in August, requires unique or user-set passwords, a published way to report vulnerabilities, and a published support end date. It is a standard for the device. What Black Hat exposed was the server. A watch can ship with a perfectly unique password and still be commandeered through a back end that never asks for one, so a compliance sticker under the March rules should not be read as an answer to this class of problem.

What to actually do about it

  1. Read the school policy first. In Victoria, ask what the school’s 2027 policy will say about school mode versus off; in NSW, find the school’s own mobile phone and smartwatch document; in Queensland, notifications off is the rule and exemptions are broad.
  2. Price the plan, not the watch. A Spacetalk Loop is $249 once and $165 to $216 a year forever. An Apple Watch on Telstra is the watch plus $240 a year, and needs a parent on a Telstra Upfront plan with an iPhone.
  3. Test the school mode before term. Spacetalk’s help centre says only Send Location is active by default in School Mode, that emergency calls can be allowed depending on configuration, and that two pencils appear on the clock face while it is on. Apple’s Schooltime notifies you if the child exits it. Know which of those your school will accept.
  4. Avoid the unbranded marketplace watch. If a listing does not tell you which company runs the app and the servers, assume it is one of the three platforms named above until you can show otherwise.
  5. Remember what you are carrying. A watch that cannot reach social media can still take a photograph in a change room. The minister’s concern is a fair one, and it applies to the well-made watches as much as the cheap ones.

The bottom line

The children’s smartwatch spent its first decade in Australia as a product schools tolerated and parents bought to avoid buying a phone. As at 12 September 2026 it is a product named in a state Act, sold by an ASX company that now earns its growth from the plan rather than the watch, carried by Telstra on Apple’s platform for the first time, and, at the cheap end, shown on stage to be a remote camera anyone with an email address could open. None of that makes it a bad idea. It makes it a device to buy with the school’s document in one hand and the back-end company’s name in the other.

Sources

Dates, figures and quotes above are drawn from these sources, captured 12 September 2026:

New Technology is an independent editorial publication. This article is an analysis of legislation, departmental policy, company filings, product listings and published research — we have tested no watch and enrolled no child for the purposes of writing it. School policies are set locally and the Victorian obligations do not commence until 28 January 2027; check your own school’s document before buying anything. Prices are as listed on the capture date. Nothing here is legal advice.
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