Case Study: A Head Start Children’s Centres
A Head Start Children’s Centres is a network of boutique long day care centres in Queensland, Australia, known for providing outstanding quality education and care for children; in fact, its Currumbin centre was recently ranked as the best childcare centre in Queensland.
According to its educators and directors, A Head Start’s success is helped by their exceptional culture, amazing long-standing team, and, of course, their modern approach to compliance and centre management.
Here’s how A Head Start uses IndyForms to benefit the business, its team, and its families.
The challenge:
The Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) industry is heavily regulated to maintain safe environments and ensure quality health and education outcomes for children.
Due to the volume and ever-evolving nature of ECEC laws, regulations and frameworks, childcare professionals often find themselves overwhelmed with the ongoing need to manually complete, print, scan, and file physical documents.
Not only are these tasks costly and time-consuming, but they can also take away from carers’ interactions with children, and negatively affect their job satisfaction.
In 2022, A Head Start embraced IndyForms to eliminate paper processes while still ensuring impeccable compliance, allowing educators to remain ‘on the floor’ and interacting with the children.
My teams are happier, simply because they’re not bogged down in paperwork. They get to come to work every day and spend more time doing what they love to do. Our productivity is better than ever.”
The solution:
With IndyForms, A Head Start has completely digitised its Centres’ document workflows. All records, enrolments, daily checklists, forms, incident reports and more are securely stored, easily editable and quickly accessible from within the IndyForms platform.
Now, team members at A Head Start can manage their daily record-keeping obligations in minutes, not hours. They can fill out forms instantly, easily and on the go, with in-app and email notifications to alert them of outstanding tasks. Gone is the need to step away from the children to fetch a form or wait for a printer, and the immediacy of form completion ensures seamless compliance with ECEC regulations.
Favourite forms:
- Enrolment forms
- Waitlist forms
- Incident, injury, trauma, and Illness records
- Medication permission forms
- Opening and closing checklists
- Daily child information reports
- Nappy change registers
- Daily checklists
Our industry’s regulations are always evolving, and it’s vital that we keep up. That we can create and edit digital forms so simply in IndyForms saves us so much time and hassle.”
IndyForms’ simple drag-and-drop interface means that forms can be easily created and customised for specific needs and changing regulations. The ability to collect digital signatures from parents has meant that the team doesn’t have to chase parents to sign forms at busy pick-up or drop-off times.
A Head Start centres has further improved its services by allowing families to log in to their own IndyForms portal to complete forms such as medication administrator forms, request for change of day forms, sibling enrolment forms and more. Parents and carers can sign excursion forms from their own device at a time that suits them, and emergency contact update forms can be submitted without the need for paper or in-person visits.
We’ve received positive feedback from the staff on the simplicity of using IndyForms, and how much easier it is to complete daily registers and incident reports, and connect with our families.”
The result:
IndyForms has enabled A Head Start to streamline compliance and daily tasks, and significantly reduced their administration time, printing costs and storage costs.
The time IndyForms saves the team at A Head Start allows them to concentrate on providing the best possible education and care to children. With streamlined communication between educators and families, the Centres are better equipped to respond to suggestions, queries and feedback, which in turn helps to inform and refine their processes and improve their services.