OWNA offers a complete software solution to manage documentation struggles

Documentation is a vital part of the early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector and the obligations behind ensuring documentation is both valuable and compliant is no small task. Significant documentation regulations must be met by ECEC settings across Australia and these regulations are in place to ensure the highest standards of education and care.

Most ECEC settings are regulated under the National Quality Framework for Early Childhood Education and Care (NQF). Under the NQF, a number of records are required to ensure that a service is compliant. While at times some within the sector may complain about the burden placed on their role through the maintenance of these records, they are hugely important in a sector where practitioners have been historically undervalued.

The NQF not only ensures the health, safety and wellbeing of children, improving educational and developmental outcomes and ensuring that the role of parents and families in their child’s education is respected, but also elevates the standing of the sector, placing it into a more professional realm through the compliance obligations.

In order to promote high quality education and care, all services under the NQF are required to have an educational programme in place and this programme must be readily available to the families enrolled in the service. Communication between ECEC settings and the parents who use them can help to evaluate the progress a child is making as well as identify if any additional support is needed.

Documentation makes children’s play and learning visible and is vital for communicating progress to families and demonstrating the fantastic work educators are doing on a daily basis.

Alongside learning experiences and observations, ECEC settings are required to document child attendance, enrolment, accidents, medication and daily information such as sleeps, food and toileting, just to name a few. Some view the regulations as demanding and the volume of paperwork can at times be burdensome. A number of professionals struggle to complete the work in the allocated time and as a result have less time to spend in meaningful interactions with the children – the most important and rewarding part of the job.

Educators are spending valuable time documenting information for compliance as well as creating programmes to promote high quality education and care, but unfortunately lots of parents don’t have the time to absorb all this information when collecting their children. Paper based information charts can be accidentally neglected and learning stories forgotten. That’s exactly what happened to OWNA’s Founders Kheang Ly and Phong Trac, who found they’d constantly forget to seek out this information from their children’s childcare centre.

Understanding the importance of the communication between ECEC settings and parents, the idea for OWNA was born. Kheang and Phong worked to build a platform (starting with the OWNA App) that enabled parents to receive information from the centre in real time. As well as supporting parents, OWNA simplifies the compliance procedures for educators, allowing them to spend more time working directly with the children, and ultimately creates a better service for children and families.

Since the first platform was built in late 2016 OWNA has grown to where it is today and now provides a complete solution for ECEC settings to maximise efficiency and ensure they are compliant.

OWNA saves time for educators with features that allow for easy communication of daily information, programming, observations and everything in-between. OWNA are constantly releasing new features and are currently trialling their CCS offering, just another thing they are doing to help ECEC settings save time and money.

If you would like to find out how your childcare centre can save time and money whilst improving communication with families email support@owna.com.au or visit www.owna.com.au