Case study: Network Child Care Services uses Storypark for AQI compliance

Susan Menchinton, Pedagogy Lead at Network Child Care Services shares her experience of using Storypark to support AQI compliance.

“Before using Storypark, we had a myriad of paper processes. Staff were required to keep paper records on the children for daily documentation and for evidence of various city compliance requirements. Educators were resistant and it was near impossible to get them to adequately document in books. We would have stacks of notebooks for each classroom, and the family engagement was minimal and difficult to achieve.”

Susan explains how she was first introduced to Storypark and why the service signed on.

“I was very interested in Storypark when I first heard about it at a sector conference. I attended a webinar and just loved how it could support our service in so many ways. I introduced it to the supervisor group, and we all agreed Storypark was exactly what we were looking for. We started a trial and worked with the director of the service to adopt it service-wide.”

Susan continues, explaining how they got buy-in from the city. “Luckily, when we consulted with the city about adopting Storypark, they were supportive. The AQI is new for us, and we are still learning, but we have been able to map all of the activities or documentation required in AQI to things that can be done in Storypark, and we are continuing to work through this with a city advisor and our supervisor group.

One of the things that really aided in getting that buy-in from the city was that I showed them the Storypark reporting function. This allowed them to see that I, as the Pedagogy Lead, could check at any time whether the compliance was occurring, and pull data for our conversations with the advisor.

Stories in Storypark satisfy the requirement in Learning Environments for photo evidence with written observations. We made our weekly 'standard' for Storypark interactions with families match what's required for AQI compliance. Staff now do stories for each child, to that standard, and have ditched the written log they had to produce for the city.

It's really a bang-for-a-buck situation where they do the family engagement requirement as well as the one for observation documentation, at the same time. Stories also satisfy the requirement to make records of any ways staff are supporting children with exceptionalities.

Storypark's community posts also satisfy AQI requirements for family outreach and engagement. Now that staff are doing these for each room, this is even more targeted to family needs.

The routines feature in Storypark directly supports AQI compliance - Food Records, Sleep Checks, Toileting Diapering Records, Daily Observation for Infants and Early Toddlers (under Other). Once staff get used to entering this information on a device instead of multiple pieces of paper, they absolutely love it, and supervisors, inspectors, love that it is recorded and archived for viewing at any time.

We also find it very helpful for oversight: Supervisors can quickly check that records are up-to-date and accurate, right from their office. We found this very useful when we were training the centre staff last year on routines and we got all supervisors to check the last day's records first thing in the morning across all children. This would show them immediately if something wasn't recorded (like a child listed as still sleeping, etc. Overall, this is one of our favorite Storypark features.”