Child Care Assessment and Rating is a national process whose objective is to maintain a set standard of care for Australian families and children in the early learning phase of their growth and development.
On the surface, childcare assessment and rating gives early childhood centres the opportunity to showcase what they do and what they want to do better and have the results officially recognised, making it a valuable motivational tool. Officially assessed and rated centres are encouraged to meet standards and given elements to work on. Importantly the assessment is marked off against a set standard of care with an opportunity to have results officially recognised and made available to children and their families.
Teresa Willet from Clovel Childcare & Early Learning Centre shares her experience with assessment and rating
Why is assessment important?
In an official capacity, it’s important to maintaining a standard of care and ensures that services are self-assessing and reflecting on their practice proactively. It shows where and how they can improve their rating. This process of childcare assessment is designed to have an impact.
It’s more than the day of assessment
Centres that achieve a best practice rating will tell you that it’s about the interpretation of the assessor. And to win that, you have to prove everything.
Everything you’re doing, you need support and evidence of. You cannot do that in a day or two of preparation before the assessment. Self-assessment needs to be a constant companion and reminder of what your aims are.
Ideally you should go into an assessment confident because you know you’re doing a good job and you’re doing everything you can. You can only achieve that with a prolonged year-round focus on achieving outcomes. You need to understand the national quality areas and elements of each and use them to ask what can be done better, where are the opportunities for quality improvement?
Can programs like Kindyhub™ accelerate best practice?
Centres that use Kindyhub can plan, program, capture, generate, create, communicate and organise each child’s growth and development, with everything recorded and historically filed for fast and accurate retrieval and referral. The ability to support and prove ratings assessments can be efficiently organised with the implementation of this compatible new way to work, embraced by administrators and educators alike.
Owning it and making it yours
A flexible program like Kindyhub can be adapted to individual philosophy and ethics, driving a sense of ownership and passion for future outcomes. It can be tailored to give everyone involved a complete understanding of direction. Educators can get involved in planning and developing, and centres are able to demonstrate their unique qualities.
Work on ways to complement the assessment and rating process
Programs like Kindyhub make everyday operations and results easier to plan for and implement, simpler to record and communicate and faster to retrieve and demonstrate – streamlining daily operations in important ways that complement the Child Care Assessment and Rating process.
Improved quality and efficiency paves the way to better growth and development in early childhood. It contributes to higher approval ratings and raises the national standard.
For information on how Kindyhub™ assists educators to document, share and engage families, please contact us or call 02 8916 7421. You can also get started with a 4 week free trial now.