The dedicated staff at Explore & Develop North Ryde have built a unique, comprehensive management platform that leverages technology to streamline processes at their service.

Libby Klingberg, the service’s owner, said she is proud of the success the team consistently achieve through the use of technology to support process management of all aspects of health and safety for children, visibility of compliance, and real time collaboration with parents.

“We have a team of highly knowledgeable and experienced leaders and building this platform from the ground up has allowed us to deliver that collective expertise into the hands of our staff,” Libby said.

Nominated Supervisor Jessica McKay said the online systems have empowered her team in a practical way, especially when it comes to ensuring the safety and wellbeing of children.

“Using logic, these custom checklists built on iAuditor, surface key information, removing guesswork from transitions and keeping our systems seamless,” Jessica said.

Innovation is a core value at Explore and Develop North Ryde, and Libby says that streamlined, transparent record keeping allows the team to extend their practice while ensuring that children’s health and safety are always maintained.

“Our excursion program called Beyond the Classroom requires a significant amount of training for staff, children and families, along with compliance checks and the ability to respond to whatever might happen when we’re out and about”.

Kim Christou, the service’s Systems Engineer, explains, “We have been able to collapse fifteen to twenty paper forms; and a massive, cumbersome folder, into a logic driven checklist that can be built by multiple people in real time. First aid checks, accident and illness responses and headcounts are transparent online”.

The team at Explore & Develop North Ryde have found this to be pertinent for children with additional healthcare needs.

“It’s important for us to have procedures in place that ensure each child’s needs are communicated clearly across the team,” Jessica said.

“We’ve built communication plans using Xplor that families can access, comment on and update with new information. Staff are alerted any time an edit is made, so parents always know what we know, and if changes occur there is total transparency”.

As Approved Provider, Libby ensures that the team are supported to develop, pilot and embed new systems in response to opportunities for quality improvement.

After recognising that diverse and conflicting cultural, experiential and personal paradigms were influencing infant feeding expectations, the team built a specific training package for all 0-2’s educators to streamline practice. The success of this initiative then led the service to create additional training for safe sleep and primary care giving.

Libby and Jessica felt a marked improvement was seen in the relationships between families and the service as they were invited to collaborate on, and review, this training package.

“Our platforms become a conduit for quality care in the home. We share our research and learning, recognising that parents also have a wealth of expertise”.

To ensure that this training is being transferred into practice, the service’s educational leader coaches staff, monitoring and offering live feedback on practice to ensure proper implementation.

“We have a push for training and learning 100% of the time,” Libby said.

“Everyone has training plans and KPI’s they’re working towards and specific KPI’s around Quality Area 2. If we identify a health and safety weakness, the educational leader will write up a training plan. Whether that is 1:1 support in the classroom or sending them to external training, it’s a plan that gets followed through.”

Jessica feels that streamlining practice in this way has a direct benefit to children’s health and safety.

“We’ve taken the paper forms and bought them to life. They’re not just compliance documents anymore, they’re live training tools that remove margins of error,” Jessica said.

“The children are engaged in high quality programs, the educators know what they’re doing, and there’s been a noticeable reduction in accidents”.