Today I had the pleasure of sitting down with Ann the Owner of The Owl and the Pussycat Brookvale and her right arm Emily and discuss how they have achieved an Exceeding Rating in the new Assessment and Rating using Kinderloop. Their wealth of information and lateral thinking makes it all look easy, here’s what they had to say….
How do you use Kinderloop on a daily basis to make your documentation more efficient?
We start with a planning cycle which starts with the educators working together to create and implement a plan. We base this off daily interactions we have with the children and their interests, what they have done on the weekend and what they enjoy doing. Then from that we create a plan and implement it, from there we see how the children are interacting and enjoying it and see how we can evolve it so the children can grow, learn and benefit from. {This cycle is posted live through to the parents each week.}
Other things we use it daily for are daily snapshots, routines, running low on nappies, communicating from staff to parents in general etc.
In what ways do you use Kinderloop to meet your ACEQA Quality areas for Assessment and Rating?
As you would know there are 7 Quality Areas, basically what we really enjoyed about Kinderloop is going through each quality area and section and gaining evidence. For Quality Area 1 for example Education we were able to tag our planning, documentation, reflective practice, everything to evolve our plan. That was in accordance with the EYLF, Philosophers and to the new standards. It backed up our conversation and if the Assessor asked, we were able to pull it up under the tag during Assessment as well as use that information to develop our Quality Improvement Plan.
Staff meetings are documented and shared through Kinderloop as well as community events such as Bike week. When the Assessor asked how you meet Quality Area 6 we were able to search the tag for Area 6 and all the evidence was there and we had pages of evidence and how we met it. There was no searching through paper work, it was already there ready to go.
How did you prepare for Assessment and Rating?
Well together we went through the National Quality Standards, all the laws and regulations step by step. Then with Kinderloop we searched each tag to ensure we had the evidence we needed in each area. Then we were able to evaluate whether we had evidence for each area, that also helped us identify which areas we were working towards, meeting or exceeding which was really helpful for creating our Quality Improvement Plan. We had a whole data bank of tags of evidence that we could prepare and search on the day.
The search tool was a saviour on the day! When we were looking for Community Involvement, we were able to search the tag and all the evidence of where staff had used the tag had come up for the Assessor to see.
I love using the Reporting feature on a weekly basis to see if a particular tag has been neglected for example ones that educators might find a bit more difficult to implement or they might not understand. So last week I bought up the dispositions and reflexivity and I explained scenarios about how they could use this in their program, so they were able to understand. They are then learning new words and new ideas to implement into the program. It can be hard for some staff to recognise that they are already doing a lot of the tags, so once you help them identify what they are doing they can tag it appropriately.
How do you use Kinderloop to interact with parents and staff?
Yes, we have children’s routines that can go between parents and staff. Another example is that we are having Bike week in a few weeks, so we will send out notification to the parents and staff. Then we can update the policy relating to having bikes at the centre, tag the NQS, EYLF and other areas that we would like to meet as well as what to expect and how long it will be and share that with parents and staff as well.
We also have a lot of parent feedback on Kinderloop this year as we have been using it for a few years now, everyone feels comfortable sharing. As well as being able to interact with their child about their day when they collect them as they have already seen what they have been up to on Kinderloop. They are also able to share their child’s Kinderloop with Grandparents and relative’s over sea’s and to see them comment on the posts in their home language is really great and then to meet them when they come to visit is amazing.
If you would like to see the full video version, it is now available on the Kinderloop website and will be a great training tool for those who are preparing for Assessment and Rating and need some pointers.
