Offering support to families during the prolonged absence of children or service closure means that children’s learning and development can continue. This is especially important for children preparing to transition to full time schooling as prolonged absences can disrupt the process of preparing children for school.

Communication and support strategies

Keeping in regular contact with families about their child’s learning and wellbeing ensures the best decisions can be made to support the learning, development and wellbeing of children in your service and support the continuity of learning at home. It can also enable services to help families needing additional learning support.

Some strategies that services can put in place during a child’s absence or service closure may include:

• Using the time to prepare for when families return and ensure programming accounts for new enrolments and support services for children.
• Considering the learning outcomes for each child before they leave and when they return to the service.
• Maintaining connections with families using other communication channels to provide service updates, enable group interactions, and share current information about children’s learning and development with families, using the most recent observations and learning records. Some examples of communication channels include:
  • social media
  • activity packs
  • email
  • video
  • video calls.
• Communicating with other local services to share ideas and collaborate on the design of online learning resources.
• Visiting the educational resources to use at home page for a list of online educational resources that can be shared with families to support home learning.
• Providing links to department websites and resources that help families prepare their children for school. Examples include the department’s transition to school webpage which includes the Getting Ready for Primary School checklist and the Let’s Go to School activity book.